One single choice. Her addiction was one single choice. Handfuls at a time became a daily occurrence and pain became a lie. What once started as a choice eventually became a priority. I remember the late night emergency room visits and pain delusions. Before long, those pain delusions became a disease that never left the doctor's mouth.

My biological mother struggled with an addiction to prescription drugs. The word "pills" takes me back to a time in my life full of anger and resentment. Not resentment of my mother, but resentment of her choices and how those choices impacted my family. Those handfuls of pills turned into seizures, and the thought of witnessing yet another became a nightmare. One evening, my mother was driving me to basketball practice, and this was one of the better days we had. Upon driving, my mother began to have a seizure. As the car started swerving across the other lane and approaching a street light, I had to grab the steering wheel and force the car into the other direction and onto a curb where we had a head-on collision with a tree. At only fourteen years old, my only reaction was to panic. When the paramedics arrived at the scene, he pulled her bottle of pills from her purse to observe how much she had taken, and it was then I knew what really mattered to her.

You see, I do not really resent my mother, but I resent the choices she has made. I resent the days that my younger siblings had to watch her withdrawal and struggle. I resent the sight of empty orange containers laying everywhere that read her first name and an assortment of three different last names on the label. I resented the days where she forgot to pick me up from school, but also the days I had to play mom. Years passed with this still happening, and years in which we had to move every three months because rent money disappeared. For us however, this was normal because it was the only lifestyle we had known.

I will never be able to know who my mother "really is" or what kind of person she was like before addiction. I am aware that addiction happens for different reasons to different people, but my mother's addiction started with a choice. What I do know though, is that through all of this, my mother happened to teach me a lot about life. She taught me responsibility, resilience and independence. She showed me that I can soar through difficult days and pick myself up. I have learned that your situation does not have to define you, and that you can create the life you want.

I don't ever think that I will have a relationship with my mother, nor the woman she once was, but I'm grateful for the lessons I have learned. Most of all, she taught me that one single choice can change your life completely.