Back in my youth while I watched my mother weigh out the heroin and cut it with powdered sugar (something I'm told would have gotten her killed) I was but a child. I played with Lincoln logs and I threw tantrums when my mom had me tear down my home so her guests could get through the door. I think I built it there so they would see it. Doing things like that always got me praise.

Let me explain - these heroin addicts were good people. The women treated me like a little prince. They praised me for the littlest things.

The guys treated me very good. I may have been around rapists, murderers and thieves but at there heart they were good people. They did what they did out of necessity. They were slaves to the drug.

I remember a time when my mom drove a scab van. I sat in my little whinny the pooh chair and when we got close to the factory the people all hid me under the van seats so I wouldn’t get hurt when the factory workers broke out the windows.

These people were good people they just needed work, sure they were scabs but they treated me like the little scab mascot. There was one bad man on the bus, he kicked me in the stomach. He was a bad man. My mom stopped the van and put him off the van. I know this sounds simple but this was truly a bad man, he hurt people. For my mom to risk her life to put him off in the middle of nowhere was asking to be killed. She did it anyway. The people on the van backed her up. It kept her alive and it got the scabs to the factory. I’m not proud of my past but things like that show that my mother wasn’t a monster. She put me first in many situations. I remember the van just rocking from the strikers outside and I remember the rocks hitting the metal but the people covered me and kept me safe.

I fear that I have misled you all. I really had a good life. My mother never let anyone shoot up in front of me. She always made them go in to the bathroom. All of those people may have done bad things but they treated me like a little prince.

The time we were robbed at gunpoint my, mom jumped on me immediately. I felt her weight before I realized what was going on. I remember watching the Mickey Mouse club. Imagine that, a room full of heroin addicts and the little child gets to watch the Mickey Mouse club.

I have misled you all. I had a caring mom, she was hurting because she was an addict but I am getting close to the end of my days and she is getting close to the end of hers. I can’t have you hating her because of her addiction. She was a good mom. Please forgive her.

She was born a heroin addict; her mom killed herself shortly after her birth.

I hated her for so long because she dated George Mullins. He was a seriously abusive man but now I understand that she had the have a psychotic boyfriend to protect her from Tony. I knew there was a hit man involved but when real people hear the word hit man they think of TV hit men. People like Toney kill for fun. There will e a book out soon titled something like “for pleasure and for profit” it is the story of the man that I have hidden from for so many years. He camped with us at Sunny’s campgrounds in Ohio and he ate dinner with us in our home.

My mom dated the crazy knife wielding redneck because he would have killed anybody that tried to hurt her. I didn’t realize then. I hated her for my nights alone, my cold nights trying to get the fireplace started, filling the house with smoke and fearing that he would kill her for trying to protect me for my stupidity. I was cold, I was young, I didn’t know how the air vent thing worked. I risked our lives by wanting to be warm. I learned my lesson. I can be cold now. It doesn’t bother me. I can stay in the cold without even feeling the pain of the cold. I’m stronger now, only because of the struggle of my mother. Her pain has caused me to become strong. I fear that I have misled you enough that you would hate her. She did her best.

I focused on Arleen’s torture and death as if it were my own. Truth be told, I was so young that most of the memories were probably fabricated. When I called the cold case detective back in Michigan I was terrified. Amber and Edward were in Texas and Adam and Ashli were at a safe place. I had bought some serious, serious firepower from a friend and I set up our defense. I called the cold case detective and lived in fear for a couple of months. I had our offense planned and our escape route into the woods planned. I expected everyone including the local sheriff to be on the bad guys [payroll.

Tony was in prison for rape, he couldn’t get us. The guy that helped him kill Arleen was named Mondo. He was free but all the data that I could get on him was that he had turned his life over to the lord.  We were safe. I didn’t need to spend what I did on protection and we didn’t need to send the kids away.

This is a a good example of 1 Corinthians 13:11 (New American Standard Bible)

 ¹¹When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

I don’t need to live in fear anymore. I can move on, but the first part of forgiveness is letting the anger toward my mother go. She was a child herself. She was young. The drugs owned her but she put my safety high in her heart.

I’m, sorry mom, I judged you too harshly. We are all just children. We make mistakes.  I want you to know that I love you and that I forgive you. I hope to see you again before either one of us passes into the next world but if I don’t I am sure that I will see you again.

I Love You

Doug