My mother had started by taking opioids for pain after her C-section, and then she progressed to taking them to sleep. She had turned forty in February 2008; my sisters were born in October that same year (I would turn twenty the following May). After her brief stint with drugs as a teenager she had never touched them again. She drank, but, like she said, as an adult she wouldn’t even take Advil or Tylenol. Throughout my life she would often say, “If I tried drugs, it would be over for me.”
