By Maria Thompson, Milwaukee
I stood in the doorway of what had been my son’s bedroom for 38 years, minus the years he was away at college, the brief apartment he had before the pills took over, and the two stints in rehab. The room was finally empty. Ben had moved out that morning to a sober living Milwaukee based. In the Third Ward it’s a trendy area, but I was still crying into my coffee, convinced I’d made a terrible mistake.
My husband found me there around noon. “He’s 38, Maria. He needs this.”
I knew he was right. I’d known for years. But knowing something and feeling it are two very different things when addiction has lived in your home for 15 years.
Ben’s pill addiction started innocently enough, a prescription after a construction site injury when he was 23. By 25, he was doctor shopping. By 30, he’d lost his job, his girlfriend and his savings. By 35, he was living back in our Shorewood house, promising this time would be different while I found pills hidden in the bathroom, empty bottles in his car, and excuses that broke my heart every single time.
The relapses followed a pattern I could predict like Milwaukee weather. He’d get clean for three weeks, maybe a month. He’d seem like my Ben again, helping with yard work, joking with his father, talking about getting back into construction. Then something would trigger him. A bad day. An old friend calling. Sometimes nothing at all. He’d disappear to his room, and I’d know. I always knew.
Looking back, I can see how I enabled him while telling myself I was just being his mother. I made excuses to family members about why he couldn’t make Thanksgiving. I paid his phone bill “just this once” that turned into 47 times. I let him stay rent-free because how could I charge my own son when he was struggling? I cooked his favorite meals hoping food would somehow fill whatever hole the pills were filling. I never called the police when I should have. I cleaned up messes, literal and metaphorical, that he needed to clean up himself.
The line between loving your child and enabling their destruction is so thin it’s nearly invisible when you’re standing on it. Every parenting instinct screams to protect them, help them, keep them close where you can monitor them. It took me years to understand that sometimes the most loving thing you can do is step back and let them fall, trusting they’ll find their own way to stand back up.
The wake-up call came six months ago. Ben overdosed in our bathroom. If my husband hadn’t come home early from work and found him, our son would be dead. Standing in that hospital room, watching him breathe with the help of naloxone, I finally understood: my love was killing him. Not the pills. My love. My inability to let him face consequences. My need to keep him safe was the very thing keeping him sick.
When he got out of the hospital, we gave him an ultimatum for the first time in 15 years. Rehab, then structured sober living, or he couldn’t live with us anymore. No more chances. No more “just until you get on your feet.” Real change or nothing.
I thought it would destroy our relationship. Instead, it saved it.
Ben chose a 30-day program, and when he completed it, his counselor recommended a fairly innovative independent sober living home in Wisconsin, Sober Apartments of America’s Milwaukee location. I’ll admit, when I first toured the Third Ward building with him, I was skeptical. The neighborhood is all converted warehouses, art galleries, farm-to-table restaurants, and young professionals on those rental scooters. It felt too hip, too cool, too far from what I pictured “recovery housing” should look like.
The apartment itself was beautiful, exposed brick, high ceilings, hardwood floors, a kitchen nicer than mine. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river. I kept thinking, “This is sober living?” It looked like apartments his younger colleagues lived in, not what I’d imagined for addiction treatment.
But his counselor explained that was exactly the point. Ben wasn’t going to prison. He was building a life worth staying sober for. The apartment gave him dignity, privacy, independence, all the things living in his childhood bedroom had stripped away. The building had other residents his age, all in recovery, all trying to figure out how to live like functional adults again. Built-in community without the institutional feel.
The neighborhood mattered too. Ben could walk to Lake Michigan for sunrise runs. He could grab coffee at Colectivo without driving. He could explore the Public Market on Saturdays. He could attend recovery meetings within blocks and still feel like he was living in one of Milwaukee’s coolest areas. Recovery didn’t have to mean exile to somewhere boring or clinical. It could happen right in the middle of real life.
The first month was hard for me. I wanted to call every day. I wanted to drive by and check on him. I wanted to bring him groceries, do his laundry, make sure he was eating. My husband physically stopped me from getting in the car twice. “He needs to do this himself, Maria. That’s the entire point.”
So I waited. I let him call me. I let him invite me to visit. I let him tell me about his week instead of interrogating him about meetings and drug tests. I practiced treating my 38-year-old son like the adult I kept claiming I wanted him to be.
And something miraculous happened: he started becoming that adult.
Ben got a job at a construction company willing to hire people in recovery. He started managing his own money, rent, utilities, groceries, phone bill. He made friends with other guys in his building and they’d organize weekend hikes or Brewers games. He called when he needed support but he wasn’t calling from crisis anymore. He was calling to tell me about his day, about something funny that happened at work, about the cheesecake he tried at the Public Market.
Last week, Ben celebrated six months sober. Six months. The longest he’d managed before was 47 days.
We met for lunch at Tupelo Honey in the Third Ward, right near his apartment. He looked healthy. Not just “not actively using” healthy, but actually healthy. Clear eyes, good weight, steady hands, real smile. We talked about normal things, the Bucks, his work project, whether he should get a dog. Halfway through lunch, I started crying, and he reached across the table.
“Mom, I know this was hard for you. Letting me move out. Stopping the helping. I was so mad at you at first. But I get it now. You didn’t stop loving me. You just loved me better.”
That’s what I want other parents to know. If your adult child is struggling with addiction and you’re terrified of making them leave, of cutting them off, of enforcing consequences that feel cruel, I understand. I spent 15 years in that exact terror. But that fear isn’t love. It’s not protection. It’s a cage you’re building that keeps both of you trapped.
Real love sometimes looks like closing the door. Like saying “I love you too much to watch you die slowly in my house.” Like trusting that your child has strength you haven’t seen in years because you haven’t given them space to show it.
Ben’s apartment in the Third Ward gave him back something I couldn’t give him while he was living in our house: the chance to respect himself. To wake up in a space that’s his, that he’s responsible for, that reflects the life he’s building rather than the life he’s lost. To have friends who are going through the same thing instead of parents who are heartbroken witnesses. To prove to himself, not to us, that he can do this.
I drive by his building sometimes when I’m in the Third Ward for the farmers market. I don’t drop in unannounced. I don’t check on him. I just look at those big windows on the fourth floor and think, “My son lives there. He’s okay. He’s more than okay.”
For parents watching addiction destroy someone you’d die for, please hear this: there’s a difference between giving up on your child and giving them room to save themselves. I spent 15 years not knowing that difference. The day I learned it, everything changed.
Ben texted me this morning. “Coming to Shorewood for dinner Sunday? I’m bringing someone I want you to meet.”
He’s bringing someone. To our house. For Sunday dinner. Like a normal 38-year-old son might do.
I’m making his favorite, Polish comfort food, pierogies, chicken cutlets, latkas and sour kraut just like his grandmother used to make. But this time, I’m not cooking out of desperation or guilt or hope that food will fix what’s broken. I’m cooking because my son is coming to dinner. Because he has six months sober. Because he has someone he wants us to meet. Because he’s building a life.
That beautiful, artsy, hip apartment in Milwaukee’s Third Ward didn’t just give Ben a place to live. It gave him a chance to become someone worth being again. And it gave me my son back, not by keeping him close, but by finally, mercifully, letting him go.
If you’re a parent struggling with whether to make your adult child leave, whether to stop the financial support, whether to enforce real consequences, I can’t tell you what’s right for your situation. But I can tell you this: my son is alive, sober, and thriving because I finally loved him enough to stop saving him.
Sometimes the kindest thing a mother can do is close the door and trust her child to find their own key.
Maria Thompson is a retired elementary school teacher living in Shorewood, Wisconsin with her husband of 42 years. This is her first published piece.
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