A Thousand Tiny Surrenders

I came across a term recently that stopped me cold. Not because it was new or complicated, but because it named something I had been living for years without having words for it.

Grudging toleration.

The phrase comes from drug policy, a scholar's way of describing the space between banning something outright and fully accepting it. That middle ground where you say, "I don't love this, but I'll manage it." It was never meant to describe family life. But the moment I heard it, I thought: That is exactly what so many of us do with addiction, and not just in the beginning. Not just in the crisis. All the way through.

Think about those early days. For some of us, it starts slowly. Your child is using, and you know it, or you suspect it, or you're pretending you don't see it. For others, it hits all at once. One conversation, one phone call, one discovery, and the ground disappears beneath you. That was me. I didn't see it coming. I felt foolish for missing it, this person whose whole career was spent watching over other people's children. But addiction doesn't send a warning. It just arrives.

And then, no matter how you got there, you're in it. You're terrified and paralyzed at the same time. You leave the bedroom door cracked so you can hear them breathing at night. You hold your breath when the front door opens at 2 a.m. You stop asking where they were because the lies hurt more than the silence. You bargain with yourself: At least they came home. At least they're eating. At least it's not as bad as last week.

I lived there for a long time. I think most of us do.

And we do things in that space that we never imagined we were capable of. When my loved one was fifteen, we had a two-week window where he was detoxing at home while we waited for a bed to open at a treatment program, the one I was certain would fix everything. Not long before, nicotine was the thing he got in trouble for. That was the battle. That was the version of parenting I understood. And then, suddenly, we were living in a completely different reality, one where he was addicted to drugs, and the nicotine wasn't the problem anymore. Only days after learning the truth of his addiction, I was buying vapes. I drove to a 7-Eleven outside of my town so no one I knew would see me. I stood at that counter and bought nicotine for my child. I can still feel what it was like to stand there. It went against everything I believed. Everything I had taught my kids and other people's kids. It was morally wrong.

But he was detoxing. And he was fifteen. And I was trying to ease his pain and keep him alive long enough to get him to the next step.

That is what grudging toleration looks like when you're inside of it. It doesn't feel like a choice. It feels like the only door in the room.

A mother I talked to recently was in a different version of the same place. Her son was in treatment, and the team was recommending long-term residential care. But he didn't want to go. He wanted to come home. And he made her a deal: he would only use on weekends. Only marijuana. Nothing hard. If she would just let him come home instead.

She and her family didn't like it. It didn't align with their values. They knew, somewhere deep down, that you can't negotiate terms with addiction. But they wanted him home. The idea of sending him to residential, for months, maybe longer, felt like its own kind of loss. So they took the deal. And I am sure you know how the story goes.

Love trying to find a loophole. Every family has their version.

Grudging toleration is not a failure. It's what we do when our world is falling apart and we have no roadmap. But it was never meant to be a permanent address.

It moves so slowly, that's the thing. You don't wake up one morning and decide to let everything go. It's more like water wearing down stone. You let one thing slide because you're exhausted. Then another because it doesn't seem worth the fight. Then another because you've forgotten it used to bother you at all. One day you catch a glimpse of yourself in an old photograph or an old conversation, and you barely recognize the person you were before all of this. The distance didn't happen in one moment. It happened in a thousand tiny surrenders you didn't even know you were making.

Here is the part no one tells you: grudging toleration doesn't disappear when recovery begins.

I think a lot of us expect it to. We imagine that once our loved one is sober, once they're doing the work, everything will snap back to what it was before. But it doesn't work like that. Recovery is real and it is beautiful and I am more grateful for it than I can put into words. But it is not a return to the life we had before addiction. It is a new life, with its own shape. And inside that new life, there are still things we grudgingly tolerate. Language we don't love. Tattoos and piercings we didn't expect. Behaviors that don't match our values. Habits and attitudes that rub against who we are and what we believe.

We don't always name them. Because we're so grateful for the recovery itself that it feels ungrateful to notice the rest. We think, My child is alive. My child is sober. Who am I to complain about anything?

And so we tolerate. Again. Differently than before, but still.

Here is what I know about where that changes. It changes in the rooms. In family groups. In the spaces where other parents have made the same impossible calculations. When I sit with parents who understand this life, I can say things out loud that I would never say at a dinner party or at work. I can talk about the vapes. I can talk about the deals. I can talk about the things I tolerated that went against every value I hold. And nobody flinches. Nobody judges. Because they've stood at their own version of that 7-Eleven counter.

The shame doesn't live in those rooms. It lives outside of them. It lives in the places where people don't understand the math we do every day, the constant calculation of what to fight and what to let go, the choices that look incomprehensible from the outside but feel like survival from the inside. Out there, grudging toleration is something we carry alone. In the rooms, it is something we can finally set down and look at honestly.

And that's where the power is. Not in having the answer. Not in arriving at some peaceful place where nothing bothers us anymore. Just in being able to look at the thing clearly, with people who understand, and say, I see what I'm doing. I see what this is costing me. I see what I've gotten used to.

Grudging toleration. Maybe it's where we have to stand for a while, buying vapes at 7-Eleven and telling ourselves it's temporary, taking deals we know won't hold and praying we're wrong. I respect the honesty of the term. It doesn't pretend. It doesn't dress things up.

But we don't have to carry it alone. And we don't have to carry it with our eyes closed.

And I want to say this, because it matters: I wouldn't change it for the world. Recovery has shaped my loved one and so many others that I care about into the most compassionate and self-aware people I know. That is real. That is true alongside everything else I've written here.

Grudging toleration is not the whole story. But it is part of the story. And I would accept every bit of it again for the young man in recovery who I respect and love.