In this heartfelt video, fashion icon Amber Valletta opens up about her addiction struggles for the first time. It’s moving and inspiring.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

From the day you are born, your family, to some degree, defines who you are.

How you interpret that connection may change in stages as you get older, but you will always be linked to the over-achieving mother, the annoying sister who gets better grades than you, the father who never shows up for his kid’s awards, the comedian brother who doesn’t know when to quit.

And while this might not be something you want to accept, it’s the truth. Many a friend has emptied the contents of their lives to me and ended sentences with, “I wish I had a normal upbringing. That people could’ve seen me different. I was never anything like my family.”

Really?

I was thinking about this yesterday after my son came home upset about an incident at school where he got into some trouble. My immediate reaction was that the kid needed a hug, so I held him and waited to hear about the source of the sadness. After the story was told, I had to be quiet and let my thoughts simmer. It was hard not to go back to being the same age and identifying, yet the back story was different…

Dad, who was going through a heavy drinking stage, was either at work for the electric company or home yelling at everyone (even in his sleep). Mom, always maxed, was either scooping ice cream at Friendly’s, cleaning Cape Cod mansions, managing a supermarket, or trying to make sure she wasn’t losing her mind having four kids who demanded to be taken to track, hockey and Boy Scouts. And because my parents were not always available emotionally during my teenage years, and my hormones were raging, and I was dealing with teenage girl social issues, I got lost. From the ages of 12 to 16, I began cutting myself, was nearly successful at committing suicide, and eventually became an alcoholic. An addict. I lied to teachers and my parents, skipped school, got into trouble, got stoned, listened to Janis Joplin – I dropped out of “normal” society.

Looking into my son’s big blue eyes pouring over with tears, I didn’t want to yell. I wanted to be there for him, but there was a piece of me I couldn’t shake and was horrified by: What are people going to say about us as a family? We need to look better. Aren’t we cooler than this? Better than this? We’re not that family with the messed up kid, right? Why can’t he – we – just be normal?

The baggage we all carry is so heavy.

As my son disappeared into his room I sat still to think parent thoughts about punishment and how to make things right. Later, standing in the doorway to his room telling him I’d be back, the defeated 14 year-old sat on his bed with a guitar and tear-stained face to look up and nod “okay.”

The ache.

Would he now try to go kill himself? Would he try to find drugs? Will this be the tipping point?

“It’s never the end of the world, you know,”  I blurted out, talking to my 14 year-old self.

He nodded.

“This is just one of those times you mess up and you move on and you grow.”

“Right.”

“Come on,” I said.

“No thanks.”

“Come on,” I said, “Now,” and watched him put down the over-sized guitar.

Punishment consisted of hot chocolates at the coffee shop. My mother would’ve done the same, but added donuts.

If we are to identify ourselves with family as the foundation of who we are, we need to forgive them and ourselves for the wrong turns and bad choices. We need to own the fact that we are imperfect.

My son is not me but he is everything to me. Thanks to my genes, he will say stupid things and put his foot in his mouth. He will get in trouble and possibly not be the school valedictorian. He will be stubborn. But he will not be exactly like me. He will be better than me as my mother was better than the mother before her. I say this as the woman who learned and grew from her mistakes.

Does our family define who we are? You bet.

Celebrate it.

Between the Lines, is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country.

Image: Pink Sherbert Photography

The post Between the Lines: The Ties That Bind Us appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnWhere celebrity becomes conscious.

“Amy Winehouse’s musical legacy will live on” one headline trumpeted in the days after her death at age 27. Winehouse was a true talent and a masterful artist. She was also a known user who most likely passed away as a result of her drug addiction. Her death has brought on a myriad of diverse reactions from people, from pity to despair to cynicism to cruelty. When we react en masse to a celebrity death, what are we really saying about ourselves?

In recent years, drug addiction as portrayed by the media usually follows this line. First, we watch the paparazzi document a fall outside of a night club. Or maybe there’s a stumble in a bar. This brings on blog postings and online rants about bad behavior or domestic abuse or criminal intentions. Concerts or television shows are cancelled. Someone gets fired. And when we ultimately wake up to a headline sharing the death of said celebrity, most of us sigh. We knew it was coming. We were just powerless to stop it.

When anyone young dies, it’s terribly tragic. When anyone young and talented dies, it’s just as terribly tragic. Winehouse made no secret of her struggle with addiction. As the lyrics to perhaps her most famous song “Back to Black” read, “I love you much, it’s not enough/You love blow and I love puff/And life is like a pipe/And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside.” So when for all intents and purposes it looks like “they killed themselves” from a drug overdose, we have an opinion. Boy, do we ever.

Some of us react like proper grandmothers who can’t admit the darker aspects of life. At least, People Magazine did when they trumpeted that no drugs were found at the scene of Winehouse’s death. Maybe there weren’t. But why the pearl-clutching insistence of telling us so?

Others were cynical. As greenwhichavenue17 wrote on Gawker, “Are we supposed to be sad about Amy Whinehouse? She had the life expectancy of a peach.”

Some insisted on keeping the humor wagon rolling. On Twitter, @ Lord_Voldemort7 shared “#amywinehouse has died. The cause of death is unknown but there are rumors Mrs. Weasley mistook her for Bellatrix Lestrange…”

Others were angry: @HCapers tweeted, “These folks are so ignorant speaking of#amywinehouse death. Yes she was a crack head but she was also a human being! Show some respect!!”

Others were celebratory about her music: @KatieinTO on Twitter shared, “Back on Black on repeat today, such an awesome album.”

Perhaps AnnV6 on Gawker summed it up best: “After what happened to Amy, the stories about Lindsay [Lohan, partying in a bar] and reaction to them just gives me the chills. This is why addiction is such a powerful and difficult disease, it’s the only disease people are allowed to be mad at you for having.”

After all, addiction by our own government’s definition is a mental illness. As the National Institute for Drug Abuse writes, “Addiction changes the brain in fundamental ways, disturbing a person’s normal hierarchy of needs and desires and substituting new priorities connected with procuring and using the drug.”

What do all these comments have in common? Likely, it is that they routed in personal experience, subconscious or otherwise. Some statistics show that “one of every eight Americans has a significant problem with alcohol or drugs” while “by age eighteen, almost 12 percent of all young people are illicit drug users.” You would be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t struggled with addiction on some level, be it through their own experience or that of a loved one.

In the end, our collective response reflects our own frustrations that we couldn’t do more. That we saw it coming. As if we are, in fact, part of Winehouse’s collective family. So then, let’s leave the final word on her death with her father. As Mitch Winehouse shared, his daughter had recently told him “Dad, I’ve had enough, I can’t stand the look on you and the family’s faces anymore.” Sadly, it’s a look the reacting public perhaps knows too well.

This is the latest installment in Katherine Butler’s column, Shade Grown Hollywood, where celebrity becomes conscious. “Shade grown” refers literally to shade grown coffee, a farming method that “incorporates principles of natural ecology to promote natural ecological relationships.” Shade Grown is our sustainable twist on Hollywood.

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