The road to Family Recovery and the SF Giants

I didn't always love the Giants but I was a fan of baseball. One summer it was the only comfort and diversion for me and my husband after our child became ill. I'm not sure when we began to connect the dots of alcohol abuse, self injury and finally drugs. But when we did, we felt we had no choice but to send her packing because drugs were never something that could be tolerated in our lives. She was very young - adolescence - and of course we had no idea what it all meant. It was so hard to figure out where normal puberty and adolescence became something else entirely. And we knew nothing about mental illness. As we watched her walk away from our lives that day, down the sidewalk to nowhere, I felt like my heart was being pulled out of my chest and the horror was that it was still beating. Even now the pain is almost unbearable and I try to avoid the memory. But she left, and for all of us it would be the beginning of her recovery and a very happy ending (more on that later). I guess people call it tough love - but tough doesn't begin to describe the pain of it. How we got through the toil of daily living I don't really know, except we're all pretty clear that Giant's Games became the defining diversion that allowed us to forget the loss of what we had known as our family. Remnants were left, shreds really of a life that once had been the foundation of our family. We watched daily and learned everything we could about individual players. We screamed when they missed a ball, we cracked up at Kruk and Kype and all their sayings, "Grab some pine meat" and YaHoo! We hated umpires, and mocked managers and for a couple of hours anyway, we were just another American Family, enjoying an American tradition. It's weird to think now, that in that summer we were beginning to build our new life, our new foundation. Giant's Games allowed us to begin again.