Recently it came up again.

Twenty men and women were seated in the church kindergarten basement awaiting the evening’s topic.  Then a mother sitting across from me – whose 38-year-old son still lives in her home – threw out a word.

Detachment.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard it.  In a room like this one, some 15 years ago, it made my head spin and still does today.

Detachment.  The noun.

But it was the verb that rocked me.

Detach.  It was practically a command – “you” understood.  Thou shalt detach from thy son.

Were these adults whom I’d met so long ago saying you could, should, detach from your loved one? The son or husband or daughter who was suffering from an addiction, and the one causing all the havoc and pain around them?

Let him go?  Live apart?  Not worry about him every hour of every day and every night.

But how?

That took many more meetings in basements like these. It also meant face-to-face meetings with another woman – a sponsor – someone far wiser than I who had been through addiction with her son, let alone herself.

Of course, it helped that Jacob was a thousand miles away, starting his own recovery in South Florida.  But the obsession and drive to control his life knew no distance.

Maybe my children would disagree, but I was never a “helicopter” parent.  That only started with Jacob’s addiction.  Then I hovered over his every move.

Until I had to learn NOT to – for his survival and mine.

I had to learn that I couldn’t control or cure him.  I had to let him go – to find his own way.

Even today, years later, I have to resist that urge to climb into the cockpit again.

And that means landing that helo, permanently.