[Part 1 of this series, “The big reveal,” printed in our April 21 issue, described the incident in which author Vera Moret first confronted and admitted to herself and others that she had developed an addiction to the prescription drug tramadol. The series, printed on an ad hoc basis, will continue to relate her first-person experiences of becoming an addict and eventually entering recovery.]

Every destroyed marriage takes two. Don’t kid yourself. I stand here guilty as can be for my own. I am defensive and secretive, extremely self contained. I will avoid confrontation until it’s until too late for the problem to be fixed. I am overly sensitive. I lie. I tell people what they want to hear instead of the truth. I retreat into my own head for hours or days. I’m often emotionally unavailable. I did not marry in good faith. I knew it was a mistake. It is not easy to be married to me. It is not easy being me. And I believe that if you allow me to enter your life, I will become a complication. And I am too hard on myself.

Up through college, addiction wasn’t something I ever considered. That happened to other people. And my experiences during that time period only served to encourage my sense of invincibility. I drank. I smoked pot, dropped tabs of LSD. And then college ended and the pace slowed out of necessity. I had a job. I drank on the weekends. I lived with this low level of depression for years without knowing what it was.

At 24, I took a pregnancy test. It was positive. The father and I had only dated for four months. He had been ready to break up with me. He questioned if he was the father. Yes, I will vouch that he is. And the fact the he would continue to question this for years made me very resentful. And resentments build up until they topple over on the keeper of them, or are torched to ashes. Having a child out of wedlock in 1992 was not accepted as it is now. I was in my college town, and my friends were still living as if they were in college. Abortion was the norm. My daughter’s father agreed on carrying through with the pregnancy, and I certainly don’t regret that. But life was complicated.

The month prior to her birth, my parents moved to Alabama. My only sibling lived 500 miles away. But I read all the books and experienced a lovely birth and thought I was fully prepared. Right. I was woefully unprepared for motherhood. I felt like I was on the outside of life, looking in. And it was too much for me. I may have had post postpartum depression or simply sleep deprivation, but I could not cope. I had no help from her father.

She was a perfectly healthy infant, but very difficult. I had never felt this inadequate in my life. Other women handled multiple children with ease. I had been working in publishing in Princeton prior to her birth. I had to resign. This signified one of the identity changes that was brought upon me throughout life. Did I bring them onto myself? Of course. But I never saw them coming until they were looming over me.

I don’t believe depression comes out of nowhere. It’s a process of slowly being beaten down by life. It was one of the first times I felt a failure. I could not work. The childcare would eat up my earnings. I could no longer live in a college town when I couldn’t enjoy it. I had two options—move to Alabama to my parents, which would have been a disaster. Or move to Columbus, OH.

I chose to move to Columbus. I only knew my brother there, but it had to be done. For many of us, it’s these experiences of unresolved grief, resentment, helplessness and perceived failure that layer up throughout adulthood. I believe these issues—moving, lack of support from the child’s father and the complete lack of competence at caring for my own child—contributed to my eventual unraveling. I was only 25. The foundations of my later depression were already laid out genetically. Nature had provided its part. The rest was up to me. A stroke of irony I only came to realize yesterday: my mother missed the birth of her first grandchild because she was supporting my father during a DUI arrest in Georgia. I missed the birth of my first grandchild because I was in jail.