Normal--the Seventh Sense

I was thinking last night about something one of the people at Al-Anon said to the group last week.  She was talking about her experiences and commented that addicts are expert at lying, manipulating, they'll tell you anything you want to hear.  Observations like that.  She said you just can't trust them.  So, with what has happened the past two days (My daughter is still reviewing Sunday and saying how she doesn't want to drink anymore. She also called a rehab place in our area for out patient treatment and an assessment that she will go to, today.) can I trust her?  I want to.  I think I have forgiven and 'retrusted' almost immediately during the past three years.  Is this time different or just a variation of a repeated behavior?

That thought lead me to, "Why does enabling start in the first place?"  I definitely didn't want to help get her deeper into this nightmare.  So, why?  Then I started thinking about what enabling has done to me.  It has heightened my five senses, amazingly.  I can smell alcohol on someone from across the room.  I can detect the slightest change in speech, movement, thinking.  And then I realized what I felt like.  I felt (and still feel) like a person who has lost a sense.  Sight, for instance.  I have heard and read that when people lose their vision, their other senses become more refined.  Well, I have lost my sense of 'normalcy.'   My enabling has been developing because I want Normal back so badly, I have done everything, and believed everything I can to get my 'normal' back.  My super sensing of a change of routine, smell, sound, is all due to that.  So, back to trust.  Trust is so essential to maintaining normal.  I want to trust her current resolve to change.  I want normal, back.   Regardless of how addiction can launch the person you love into a soul floating on the river Styx, today she is my normal child, back from the dead.  I will trust with clearer eyes, and a more loving, less desperate, heart.  I will try to heal my normalcy, to some extent. That's what I'll do for, today.