The Rage, Secrecy and Pain of a Family Torn Apart by Addiction

When Kim was released from prison in 2014, the family drove to Wilmington, Del., to meet her at the bus station. Parrack recalls embracing her and weeping, and Hannah remembers being startled at the sight of her mother, “a six-foot redhead” in gray sweats, whom she had not seen in five years, running toward her.

But Roberta stayed in the car. “She was cold,” Parrack said of her sister. “I think it had taken a really bad, emotional, mental toll on her. She was left to pick up the pieces.”

A Bicycle for Kim

What happens to a family in the aftermath? After addiction, prison, a total rupture of trust? Even after Kim’s stay in a halfway house, even with drug testing, therapy and a parole officer, Curt wasn’t about to buy Kim another car. Instead, he fixed up a green Huffy bicycle. He rigged it with lights so she would be safe when she rode to her new job at a bagel store, which started before dawn.

Kim had imagined that coming home would be like “a utopia,” she said, but she was a stranger, and everyone was furious. “I realized I didn’t know my kids anymore,” she said. There was tension in the house over who was the mother figure. She heeded the advice of a counselor at an outpatient clinic. Let them be angry. Let them say what they need to say. In her childhood home, there had not been enough talking — about sex, alcohol, failure, fear, stress, anything. “It’s the secrets that keep you sick,” Kim said on the porch, using the language of the 12-step rooms.

She tried talking to her mother about the feelings that led her to her addiction. But Roberta didn’t understand how her daughter could choose drugs over her kids. When Kim was in prison, Roberta would say this over and over on the phone to her sister. “I encouraged my sister to get some therapy, but she never did,” Parrack said. “She thought she could manage it on her own.”