On parenting, drugs and suicide…

I never thought I would share all this online, but some things changed my mind.
Actually there are two reasons for writing this. The first reason is:
At some point in everybody’s life you are confronted with life’s nasty little tricks. We all get our share, and we all have to find a way to deal with it. Yet, I believe that reading about how others dealt with it makes things easier in two ways. First, just by knowing that you are not the only one makes you feel stronger already and second of course you could get new ideas about how to handle these things.
The second reason is:
I have been making fun of others in a couple of video’s, so it does not feel good to hide in anonymity… I should tell a bit more about myself. First I wanted to make a video in which I’d tell you all this, but that video would become too long for youtube… So now you’ll have to read… sorry…

So here is a story about drugs, parenting and suicide.

My parents divorced when I was 6 years old. I had two brothers, from the same mother, one older and one younger than me. The younger one, together with his girlfriend, got addicted to heroine when he was 19 years old. I recently saw a youtube video in which someone was down-talking the problems arising from such an addiction. I do not understand why anyone would make such a video. In my experience this addiction was horrendous and affected not only them, but also my direct family. Go and see the movie “Christiane F”, for that is indeed what it looks like. A drug addict enters into some sort of shadow world that is weaved into ours, but we don’t usually see much of it. It is like a world of zombies where everything evolves around getting your fix, and they look at us as we look at animals in the zoo.

For my father though, this addiction also had a happy side.
My brother would now need a lot of money to buy his drugs, and he had a very pretty girlfriend (I used to be a bit jealous….). So, this girlfriend would be ‘rented out’ at some point. And instead of having many dirty perverted customers, my father could offer them a single distinguished gentleman for customer, namely himself. Any father would surely do the same for his son, wouldn’t they?
This situation did not improve, as you probably can imagine. At one point my brother was asked to join in, which he did pressed by a cold turkey. But it only made him more aware of how bad and hopeless his situation had become.
He desperately tried to escape this life, but after 2 years of trying the only way out he saw was to OD himself. He left us a note saying that only this would give his girlfriend a chance to get out.
I believe she did, eventually. I think I found her on i-net, but she does not respond. I guess she doesn’t want to be reminded of any of this and I completely understand and respect that.

So now my father had got a taste of young meat. And he had many other children from within and outside of marriages. So he chose the son that appeared weakest and a daughter… But that did not work out for long. The boy started talking and then so did the girl.

This was my example, now I had to become a father. I wanted to have children when I was 20 already, but had a lot of trouble finding a suitable partner. I guess, … no, I am sure I am not the most easy person to be with. So many heartbreaks later I gave up on family life. There are things you can do, and there are things you can not. I was pretty good at making money playing the stock markets, but not at having a partner. I had a job in IT, but I made that yearly salary sometimes within a day trading. So… no family life,... easy money,... why stay with that boring job? Travelling the world seemed to be the more logical thing to do. So I quit and left to see the world.
But it wasn’t long before I met this amazing Thai woman and I had to change my plans again.

Back to family life.
She gave me two wonderful daughters, and I got myself a new car, bigger house and everything looked great. One time I took my family to visit hers and we flew first class. The price of those tickets could easily buy an average car. But when money comes that easy you also spend it easily.
As I said everything looked perfect until that horrible morning when I woke up, but she did not.
I looked at her, my mind went blank. What had happened here? Her breathing was slow and shallow until it stopped. I started CPR while calling the emergency number.
Before I knew it the house was swarmed with police and medical teams, but it would not help her. She was in a coma and died later in the hospital. Some swelling in her brain had caused an allergic reaction and that did so much damage that her brain simply could no longer support life.

Now I had a daughter who had just turned 1, and one that was about to turn 4 to take care of by myself.
It was winter when she died, and for me it remained winter for several years. The world turned into shades of grey. Like a black and white movie that was played around me. Music, art, good food, company, things that I enjoyed before could no longer bother me. Shades of grey in which only two coloured things stood out; my two daughters.
I thought about life, what it meant, what I should give my daughters… And, although my life was over, I could not stop here. I had to start a new life. The conclusion was that I should move to Thailand and raise my kids in the village where my wife was born. Her parents would surely love to help, I thought. So I moved to Thailand, only to find that her parents were more interested in my money than in their grand children. I had my house made and stayed away from them. They eventually sold my first house, in which they lived, for 1/10 of what I had paid and left the village.
Good riddance! Fortunately for me, my wife had a very close friend who helped me with everything that needed to get done. This was, and still is, a truly amazing woman and over the years she became my girlfriend/partner…

One day, I woke up, looked outside and thought, “my God, it is so green here!”. Colours slowly returned in my life.
Also, during the “grey years”, I had to stop trading as I constantly made mistakes and quickly lost money. But recently I re-entered this game and it all seems to go pretty well again.
My daughters are 15 and 18 now and are both stunningly beautiful. Not just their looks, but also their characters. They are both wonderful people, it amazes me how well they turned out.

(my eldest daughter promoting lip gloss)

Being a father has been somewhat of a challenge, I know what I want to give but I do not always know what would be the best way to give it. And most of all I do not want to pass on anything bad that I may have inherited from my father.
It is not just DNA that determines who you become, there are many very subtle influences that shape your character. Especially during your first years, I believe.
I know I have inherited some of his traits… All his children have.
Almost everyone of them got into drugs at some point. And for more than one this became a serious issue. Others had problems with relationships and some had both.
I experience it as a craving for extreme sensations. Yet I understand that there is no extreme. Once you have done that what you first believed to be pretty extreme, you can already imagine the next even more extreme step. It doesn’t end.
If at some point the idea would get into your head that younger partners will enhance your experience, you have entered on a very slippery path that will very quickly result in highly undesirable, amoral an illegal behaviour.
I think, I never got into serious problems because I always try to rationalize things and once the entire picture becomes clear it is easy to label certain impulses that would lead to undesirable effects, and thus deal with it.
For some reason it appears to be very difficult to see your own parents faults. But once you do, you need to take the next step and find what bits and pieces of it did you inherit.
That understanding will set you free.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they say.
Someone once said:

I have lived, and I have died, and yet I live. And now I hold the keys of death and Hades.

I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but that line describes exactly how I feel.