Sunday night, Leah and I watched a show about the methamphetamine catastrophe in Iowa. When I was writing that first sentence, I hesitated for a bit in consideration of the best way to describe meth’s impact in this state. Epidemic is the word you hear thrown around most often. But after watching the soul-dampening profiles of these addicts and their families, it’s clear that this is more than “just” an epidemic. More, even, than a catastrophic epidemic.
One thread in the show’s narrative was a young man and woman who were preparing to have a child. She’d kicked meth (presumably for the sake of her unborn child, although she was still smoking a cigarette every time she was on camera), but he was still using regularly. They talked about what was going to happen when the baby came. She said he was going to have to go if he was still using. He suggested that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if he only smoked the drug outside, not in the house with the baby. She was noncommittal.
To the guy’s credit, he did seem aware that his behavior was going to have to change somehow after the baby arrived. But you knew, watching him, that he probably wasn’t going to get it done. Sure enough, the white-text-over-black denouement revealed that — after we sat through the guy’s tearful delivery room admission that he’d never be able to use again after seeing his son — he made it a whole 36 hours before using meth “one last time.”
Before we had Ava, I tended to be much more outraged by stories like this. I think it was because I related more directly to these single people, and I romanticized the perfection of my own future fatherhood. But watching Sunday night, I teetered between disgust and indifference. Post-Ava, I know exactly the nature of the change my life underwent the first time I saw my daughter. The only similarity I see between these addicts and myself (aside from our innate human weakness) is our ability to procreate. That’s where it ends. Because there’s nothing else about them I can understand.