Hi, my name is Nicolas I am 14 years old and my dad was a drug addict and an alcoholic. He was on it for two years. When he was on it he used to run away from home to sleep at his friend’s house at the beach. He would go to this friend’s house because his friend would lend him money to do drugs. He used to pawn the car and all our things, like our TV, our laptop, our computer. He used to get the drugs from the Nigerians, the Nigerians would then bring it to the house and he would spend lots of time in the spare room and the bathroom. He would be doing the drugs in the bathroom and the spare room – even when my mom and I were home. He stopped sleeping in my mom’s room.
When he was on the drugs he acted different, he would just stay in the spare room and watch TV and do drugs. But more often than not he would just stay away when he was doing the drugs. Whenever he was doing the drugs I would feel really angry because I knew he was doing them. I used to just take it all out on my mom and my friends.
I tried to speak to my Dad about it once and he just ignored me, didn’t even bother to answer me so I knew I couldn’t talk to him about it.
Every time the bell went, he would go out to the gate and then he would come back with a packet. And I would know that he had drugs, but no one really said anything to him about it and he never spoke to me about it – he would just do it! My mom wouldn’t always know because he would hide it from her but I would see. He didn’t hide it from me because he knew I wouldn’t tell. I was too scared to tell my mom, because I didn’t know what he would do to me if he found out, especially when he was drinking. When he drank he would get really angry, he would start threatening myself and my mom. One night we were all coming home from my friend’s house and he had been drinking and he wanted to take the car to get more drinks. Mom didn’t want him to take the car because he might not come back for ages and then we’d be stuck so she threw the car keys over the wall. She went inside and my dad went to the kitchen and got a knife. He ran to my mom and started threatening her with the knife and demanding the car keys and money. I was inside my room and when I heard him shouting I came out and shouted at him and pushed him outside and we locked the door. He jumped over the wall to get the car keys and he took the car and broke the side of the bumper. The security guard tried to stop him but he said to the security guard that he was going to stab him if he tried to stop him. He drove off, me and my mom left with the security guards and they dropped us off at our friend’s house. We went to my friends because we were worried what would happen if he came back and we didn’t have the keys to lock the whole house to keep him out. I was terrified after the whole thing happened and couldn’t even sleep. I never thought my dad would do that, he seemed like a total stranger.
My mom tried to put him into rehab but he would always just run away. Last year October he wanted money to pay the drug dealers back because he had got into a lot of debt using drugs. He said to my mom ‘If I don’t get the money from the bank, I’m going to kill myself.’ The bank told him they wouldn’t lend him the money so the one day he woke up and he wasn’t himself. So, me and my mom were taking my dog for a walk. My mom saw that he had something in the bed and they started fighting over who would keep it, he kicked my mom out the room and slammed the door behind her. As my mom was waling down the passage we heard a loud bang. We went into the room and we couldn’t see we phoned the ambulance and they came to pick him up. They took him into ICU, he was losing a lot of blood. The next day we came to see him; his bed was covered in blood. I went to my friend’s house and at 1pm on Saturday afternoon my dad died. I came home to the whole family there everyone was crying. They told me that my dad had died; they said that he had lost too much blood and they couldn’t save him.
I felt very sad and angry and mixed up…so I have come onto this website to see if other people have had a similar experience as me or just to meet other people who have had to deal with some of the stuff I have had to deal with.
