I Was Addicted To My Son

Introduction

I am waiting by the phone for your call. How could you not call me on New Years Eve? I’ve left two messages already. I can’t think straight. I can’t think of anything but you. I love you more than life itself, but love isn’t the point. Or maybe love is the point – have your feelings for me changed? Do you not feel for me the way I feel for you? I won’t leave another message. You should call me. But what if you’re hurt? Incapacitated? Angry with me? I love you so much.

And that is how this book began. At the time my son was twenty-five years old, living three thousand miles away and married. I was obsessed, paranoid, terrified, thinking of him the way a jilted lover regards a recent ex. Then it hit me: I’m a grown man. How could I have been feeling this way, so totally inappropriately, for so long? I knew I had a problem. What was this obsession, fixed attention, perverted infatuation that I just couldn’t shake and that I had been living with for the last two decades? I even seemed to have all the trappings of addiction: euphoria, cravings, single mindedness, mood alteration, denial, inappropriate behavior, and eventually, even a painful withdrawal. Continue reading the Introduction and first chapter.