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    Found: A Daughter's Journey Home
    Found: A Daughter's Journey Home
    Found: A Daughter's Journey Home
    Ebook228 pages2 hours

    Found: A Daughter's Journey Home

    By Tatum O'Neal

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    About this ebook

    From the Academy award–winning actress who chronicled her abusive relationship with father Ryan O’Nealin Paper Life, a memoir of her emotional healing.

    Academy Award®–winning actress Tatum O’Neal returns with an extraordinary chronicle of family, forgiveness, redemption, and commitment—a remarkable story told with honesty, humility, determination, and, above all, love

    In A Paper Life, Tatum O’Neal shared her poignant, painful experiences of growing up in—and away from—a dysfunctional show-business family. Now, in Found, she digs even deeper and explores the tough issues that resonate in most women’s lives.

    Found is a story about learning to understand what forgiveness really means—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—and how to live it every day. With candor and grace, Tatum chronicles the challenges and joys of being a single mother, an ex-wife, a working actress who has lived her life in the public eye. She speaks frankly about the persistence it took to beat her addictions to drugs and alcohol, and the hard work of staying clean and sober. Found is also a father-daughter love story; a portrait of a fragile, tentative reconciliation between a parent and a child who try to heal the hurt and pain of a lifetime.

    Tatum O’Neal has done the hard work necessary to get her life on track. Her moving and inspirational saga reminds us all that no matter what, we must keep moving forward to the light and the future, step by step, day by day. Only then may we find the true path home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 14, 2011
    ISBN9780062066589
    Found: A Daughter's Journey Home

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      Book preview

      Found - Tatum O'Neal

      Part I

      Fractures

      Chapter One

      Outside and In

      I SPENT THE

      night of the arrest in a jail on the Lower East Side. I talked on the pay phone as long as I could, with my lawyer and with my boyfriend, Ron, who promised to talk to Emily. Then I lay on a bare foam pad, spooning with a pregnant prostitute, pretending to sleep while reliving the nightmare I had brought on myself. How had this happened? How had I gone wrong again?

      The next morning I was released from jail, and there were a thousand press people waiting for me. I soon found out that the cover of that day’s New York Post announced that I’d been arrested. Great. My oldest child, Kevin, had finished college and was working at a restaurant while he applied to grad schools. My middle child, Sean, was in Paris on a summer trip. Emily was in high school in New York. All I could think about was what this news would do to them. How horribly embarrassing for everybody. Why did I have to keep embarrassing them?

      I hurried into my lawyer Jodi’s Prius, and she told me I couldn’t return to my apartment—the press was there, too. I tried to contact my best friend, Kyle, on the phone, but it was Monday. Kyle, a colorist at a top hair salon, was unreachable. So I asked Jodi to drive me across town to my friends Hunter and Perry’s apartment.

      Hunter and Perry were among my closest friends while I was in New York, but because of my inability to bond with people, I kept even them at arm’s length, like everyone else. When I got to their house, I went into a bedroom and closed the door. Alone, I tried to process what was happening in my life. Alone—the only way I knew to endure the grief and anguish I was suffering. Again, I asked myself: How had this happened?

      The answer wasn’t black-and-white—it never is. I had been dedicated to sobriety for more than a decade, since 1994. I went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I had a sponsor to guide me through the twelve steps: Sandy. Sandy is a gentle, loving person. She has long hair parted down the middle, which, combined with her softness, makes her look like the Virgin Mary. She had helped me with my sense of self, and was teaching me to forgive myself. After the conflicted relationships I had had with my mother and other women through the years, Sandy was a very positive force in my life. I had a true friend in Kyle, who knew me better than anyone. I was complying with my divorce judge’s orders to drug-test biweekly, with a monitor in the room with me to prove I wasn’t cheating. I had a reliable and fulfilling routine, including being with my children on the weekends. With Emily, because she was the youngest, I had immediately seen the positive impact of our time together.

      Life wasn’t perfect, but by June 2008, I felt I was really becoming the woman I had always wanted to be.

      But the scary truth about addiction is that it doesn’t need a precipitating event. There is a switch in my head that, for seemingly arbitrary and insignificant reasons, can flip, and when it does, all the joy I’ve found in being sober slips out of reach. The switch flips and the voice starts playing: Why don’t I just use today? Why not?

      The longer I maintained my sobriety, the healthier I would be. Time, I would discover, was one of the great rewards of staying sober. Experiencing the richness of life without substances was a reward in itself. The obsession to use faded. Nothing can compare to how great things are when I am sober. It was so great to be accountable, to achieve my goals, to have my kids trust me and not worry if I didn’t answer my phone every time they called. But at the time of the arrest, my sobriety was still relatively young and immature. I wasn’t aware of how easily I could slip. I hadn’t developed the instinct to call my sponsor before making the dumb choice to get loaded. I hadn’t instituted enough safeguards—friends, meetings, obligations—to protect me from my weakest self.

      Where did that weakness come from? Someone once told me that I am always just a little bit sad. There is truth to that. From the time I was little, I have carried a sadness for how things ended with my family—with both my mother and my father, though in different ways.

      That recurring sadness wasn’t the only trigger. I had been suffering from debilitating nerve damage in my neck caused by a terrible car accident in 1976, after which my body was never the same. I had a chronic degenerative disk disease. I’d undergone one surgery and would end up having two more. The pain radiated from my neck to the tips of my fingers. It seemed unfair, because who deserves to be in that kind of pain? Despite the risks, which I knew as well as anybody else, I was prescribed pain meds by the doctor. I’d periodically taken them without abusing them. But this time, for some reason, taking a pill for my neck pain flipped a switch. That’s the cunning and baffling thing about addiction: it gets you when you least expect it.

      That said, it was not surprising that the arrest happened on a Sunday. Sundays were always my saddest, loneliest days. At the end of the weekends, my three kids had always gone back to John. Now it was just Emily, the last one still in high school, who returned to her father on Sunday nights. That fateful Sunday, one moment, I was sitting on my couch, missing all three of my kids. The next minute, I was out the door, trying to score some drugs. If it was crack I found, then it was crack I would use. Sure, this time, why not throw my life away? It’s Sunday. I have no kids, no friends, no life! I did, of course, have all of these things.

      BEING IN JAIL

      was the most horrible moment I’d had as a woman and a mother. The whole world now knew that I had drug problems. I was embarrassed for my children. What were the parents of their friends saying to them? How was my ex-husband going to handle it with them? I can’t stress enough how horrible I felt realizing what this would do to my teenage daughter and to my sons, who were young adults. What I was doing was illegal. And I was not just breaking laws, being irresponsible, damaging myself. The arrest shone a light on my real problem—the biggest and most powerful problem of all, always and only—the consequences of my addiction in the lives of my children. My children. I’m a mother. This was not what I wanted for them.

      All this is what I should have been thinking when I was walking down that street, on the verge of breaking my sobriety. Obviously.

      I know this sounds strange, but being arrested was scarier for me than when I used to cop heroin on the street. As a child I fell out of trees; I was thrown from a car; I broke my arm and my foot; I had been paddled, switched, and sexually abused. After all that, the idea of taking a drug was just not that big a deal. In fact, it made perfect sense. What better way to bear the mess of my life? But the arrest, more than anything I’d ever experienced, forced me to feel the effect on my beautiful children.

      This had been a problem all along, of course, but everyone has a line they won’t cross, and the arrest was the wake-up call I needed: using drugs was no longer an option for me. It had devastating, long-term effects on my children—their sense of self, of safety, of who their mother is, of how comfortable they are with me. For all the misery and self-flagellation of being arrested, something good happened in that jail cell. Something that changed me forever. I was scared

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