Never Too Late (2 page)

That day I felt like it was more obvious than ever how much my father and I had in common, just in terms of the mistakes we’d made and the things we’d gotten into. His alcoholism destroyed his relationship with my brother and me, to the point where we hated him as teenagers. But when it seemed like nothing could ever repair the damage his behavior had done, he was able to apologize and turn his behavior around, and we were able to forgive him. Now here we were together as a family, able to look at each other with real love and fight together to move forward. Years ago, my father had taught me a lesson I took a long time to understand. It was that it’s never too late to turn things around. No matter how low you think you’ve sunk, no matter how many bad things you’ve done, or how much damage you think you’ve done to your life, it’s never too late to change.

That night I took a long bath and laid down in bed feeling like I was in heaven. From now on I’d be living with my grandmother, sticking to a quiet life, and focusing on getting on my feet and maintaining my sobriety. And whenever I could, I was going to see Leah. I couldn’t wait.

This was the way it was supposed to be. No pills, no rehab, no fights, no jail. It didn’t seem so hard, did it? So how was it, exactly, that I’d wound up way the hell off course? Where exactly had I gone wrong? What had I been thinking? And now that I was out, could I really turn it all around?

Like I said, it’s a complicated story, and there’s a whole lot more to it than what made it past the editors at MTV. The craziness of my life didn’t start when the cameras came. By that time, I had already experienced more danger, drama, and heartbreak than the producers had any way of knowing about. Being pregnant was a big deal, but it was only the latest drastic event in a life that had already taken many strange turns.

Addiction. Mental illness. Death. Divorce. Betrayal. Violence. Suicide attempts. Felony charges. Rehab. Drug overdoses. Jail. Oh yeah, and there’s some sex and rock ‘n’ roll in there, too. But I’m going to tell you how it all happened. Maybe when I’m done, you’ll understand some of the weirder parts of the story, like the reason I walked away from my daughter to voluntarily serve time in prison.

But I hope you’ll understand something else, too. Because as far as I’m concerned, this isn’t a story about how I fucked up and hit rock bottom. It’s about how I found myself when it seemed like I was completely lost. It’s about how I repaired what seemed completely destroyed. It’s the story of how I learned that it’s never too late to live a different way, no matter what you’ve done.

And it’s not just a story about me. It’s about all the people I’ve learned from in my life. People like my brother, who stood by me and never gave up no matter how far gone I was. People like the women I met in prison, who showed me how a loving community can help you find the strength to stay on your feet. People like my father, the first person to prove to me that it’s never too late to make a change, do the right thing, and be there for the people you love.

Everyone makes mistakes. Some of us make really, really big ones. But the biggest mistake of all is thinking nothing will ever get better. It is never too late to make things better.

How do I know that? You’re about to find out.

T
he best place to start a story is usually the beginning, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. It might sound crazy, but I don’t remember much about my life when I was really young. I’ve blocked a lot of it out. Now, I’m not saying I had the worst childhood. It wasn’t the best, but I remember some good times with my mom and dad and my big brother, Shawn, or as I still call him, Bubby. Definitely, there were good times. It’s just that those good times are overshadowed by other times that were truly terrible.

Things were never easy for my family. There wasn’t much money, and my mom and dad worked all the time to keep food on the table. It didn’t make it any easier that both my parents struggled with addiction. My dad’s par-tying and drinking was the main reason we moved from Florida to Indiana when I was just a baby. Down there he’d been kind of a wild child, and even after my brother and me were born there were a lot of clubs and bars and parties that made it hard for him to settle down and focus on his new family. It’s clear looking back that these kinds of issues were always an influence on our life. Addiction was always hanging over us, along with all the struggles and fighting that went with it.

But my parents tried their best to do things right. They thought things would be better in Indiana, where it was quieter, and for a while they were. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we did okay. My mom was a waitress, and my dad worked in construction. They were always working hard, long hours, for as far back as I can remember. Our parents took good care of us, the very best they could. A few years after the move, my mom even had another daughter, Candace.

The first thing I remember when I think about those days is what a total daddy’s girl I was. I loved my dad so much. Some of my best memories from when I was little are of hanging out with him, listening to his records, getting my first exposure to bands like Heart, ZZ Top, and Guns N’ Roses. I love thinking about how he used to braid my hair in the mornings. My dad was my hero. We had a special bond from the very beginning, and I bet if you asked anyone who was there at the time they’d tell you what a beautiful relationship we had. I was so young that I can’t remember much more than those kinds of dream-like memories of hanging out with him on sunny days, the little-kid snapshots I have in my mind of us spending time together, laughing and hugging. But now that I’m older I see even more clearly how much I take after him, and I wonder if it was obvious back then. I imagine when the two of us were sitting around rocking out together to those records, we looked like two peas in a pod.

Those memories are bittersweet, though. Because we didn’t have all that much time to be happy together, me and my brother and sister and parents, before it all fell apart.

I was only four at the time, but I remember that night so clearly it’s like it’s a movie in my head. We were living in these apartments in Anderson, Indiana, and I was lying on the bottom of the bunk bed I shared with Bubby. Candace was sleeping in her crib down the hall, and our dad was watching TV in the living room. It was really late when my mom came home, said hello to my dad, and went in to check on her youngest daughter.

She must have known almost right away that something was wrong.

All of a sudden my brother and I heard this horrible screaming. It scared us so bad we jumped up out of bed and ran to find Mom and Dad. We could hear them in the other room with Candace, and my mom was yelling, “She’s not breathing!”

When we got to the door of that room, we saw our parents living out their worst nightmare. Candace was in my father’s arms, and he was trying to give her mouth to mouth. The details of that scene are so clear in my mind, and so horrifying, it turns my stomach to think about it. I try not to. But I can remember exactly what she looked like in their arms. I can remember people from the building rushing into the room and someone bringing in a stretcher.

Candace Ann Portwood had only been my little sister for two weeks.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is what they call it when a healthy baby just passes away without any apparent reason. I don’t even think there are words to explain what SIDS does to a family. Bubby and I were so young—he was only seven or eight at the time—there was no way we could fully understand what happened. But the really awful thing was nobody understood. People still don’t know what causes SIDS or how to prevent it, and back then it was an even bigger mystery. Everybody wanted to blame someone, and pretty soon they decided to blame my dad. Maybe it was because he was the one who was with us just before my mom came home and found Candace lying there, not breathing. Or maybe his alcoholism made him an easy target, made people think he wasn’t a responsible father. Either way, it wasn’t right to lay that kind of blame on someone for the death of their own child, and in the end I think it made it basically impossible for our family to recover.

I can’t even imagine how horrible it must have been for my parents, but they tried their best to help us kids through it. My mom tried to explain it to me. I remember her sitting on my bottom bunk while I walked around the room by the closet and the rocking horse. I asked her why my little sister had to die. What could she have said? I don’t even remember, but I hate to think about how hard that conversation must have been for her.

I remember the funeral for Candace, the little coffin and the headband she wore.

Years later, when I had Leah, my memories of that night came back stronger than ever and haunted me in the worst way. I used to sleep with my daughter’s crib right beside my bed, just so I could wake up and make sure she was still breathing. Sometimes she’d be sleeping so deep and breathing so lightly that I’d get scared and put my fingertips under her nose to check. If that still didn’t make me feel better, I’d have to pick her up just to hold her in my arms and make sure she was still alive. Leah’s way too old to be at risk now for what happened to Candace, but that feeling still makes me cold with fear inside.

I was so young when we lost my sister, and I remember I was so stunned that I couldn’t even cry at the time. I didn’t even understand death. But the whole horrible thing has just stayed with me, and now that fear I felt with Leah makes me cry when I remember. It breaks my heart now that I’m old enough to understand what my parents went through. What could be worse than losing your child? As a mother I can’t wrap my mind around it, and I don’t want to. It doesn’t shock me as much now, looking back with that adult-level understanding, that my family fell apart the way it did. If my parents had struggled before, they didn’t stand a chance against something like that.

After Candace died, my family started to deteriorate. That was the start of the bad times that turned into a blur in my memory. Still, I don’t have to remember everything perfectly to reach some kind of understanding of what happened. Most of all, it’s obvious that being blamed for Candace’s death was more than my father could bear. Can you imagine a heavier burden than that?

It’s still so odd to me that people could be so cruel that they’d lay that on his head. I wish I could have been older then, and maybe I could have stopped it from happening like that. But pretty soon he was blaming himself, and his alcoholism went out of control. What do you expect? How could anyone cope with the guilt and shame of being blamed for the death of their own child, let alone someone who already struggled with addiction?

Of course my mom had her problems, too. She drank. He drank. They were both devastated by what had happened and completely miserable with each other. It was a perfect recipe for an unhappy home. There were no happy years of marriage in the cards for them from that point. For the rest of their time together, they were fighting and screaming all the time.

And I mean
all
the time. When I was growing up there wasn’t one single day in our house where my parents weren’t fighting and screaming and cussing at each other. I can remember my brother and me running out of our room at night and yelling at them to please stop, please stop, telling them we had school in the morning. But they never would. They fought every single night about anything and everything. I mean, stupid things!

It was in that environment that I first experienced the power of addiction to damage even the strongest relationships. Remember how I said I loved my dad when I was little? How I was a total daddy’s girl? I was barely in grade school when that stopped being true. My father was absolutely horrible back then. The combination of all that pain with his drinking problem just turned him into a different, horrible person. When he and my mom were fighting he’d scream the most awful things at her, calling her names and acting vicious. Before long, he was doing it to me, too. The things I grew up listening to in that house were just terrible. Day after day, year after year, I had to learn to live with all that violent screaming, anger, and meanness. It was always happening around me, for no reason, with no point and no end.