Hoover mother and son discuss path out of addiction

Tinamarie Smith believes parents need to trust themselves and listen to their instincts if they feel their child is struggling with addiction.

The Hoover woman discussed her son Dalton Smith’s battle with heroin addiction at the Feb. 23 Wake Up luncheon at Shades Crest Baptist Church.

People struggling with addiction have the ability to manipulate and make you doubt yourself, and trusting your instincts is extremely important, Tinamarie Smith said at the luncheon, hosted by the Addiction Prevention Coalition.

“If you actually see the signs of marks on their arms or you actually see paraphernalia in your house … believe yourself, believe yourself, believe yourself,” she said. “They do a great job of saying that what you’re seeing or you’re hearing, they make you believe that’s not actually happening.”

Smith first saw signs of her son’s addiction when he was a freshman in high school, she said. He had always played sports, but suddenly he was stepping away from them. The next change she saw was a difference in friends, she said.

Dalton started hanging out with people with longer hair and tattoos and who did not have jobs, she said.

“It’s kind of where if it looks like a skunk and it acts like a skunk, it probably is a skunk,” she said.

Dalton said he decided to drop out of sports and change his friends because he wanted to drink more and smoke more weed.

“The guys on the football team, they were smoking weed and drinking on the weekends, but I didn’t want to just do it on the weekend,” he said. “I wanted to change the way I felt every single day.”

His battle with addiction went on to involve pills and heroin, and throughout that struggle with addiction, Dalton said he felt his beliefs go out the window. As his mother watched the changes in him, she struggled to comprehend what he was going through, she said.

“It was difficult to believe someone with such good character was using,” she said.

Dalton’s choices had a negative affect on the whole family, she said. She has two daughters as well, and she said it felt like they were in a lifeboat that was close to sinking.

Her son would steal money, damage cars and sneak around, she said, and they could not get away, no matter what steps they took. She would change computer passwords, hide keys and check her bank accounts, but Dalton would still take what he wanted or needed.

“Every time you had tried to outsmart him, he had outsmarted you three times,” she said.

The turning point came when she stopped offering to help Dalton, she said. One night she locked her car, locked her bedroom door and hid her keys, but the next morning she found Dalton had gone to the ATM and taken money out of her account.

“I said today at 5 o’clock, you no longer have a home or a bed,” she said. “And then he was homeless at the age of 19. Hardest decision of my whole life. I cried all day. I cried all night. I prayed all day. I prayed all night, but it was the best decision.”

Tinamarie Smith said she realized helping aiding her son was no longer helping him, and Dalton said her decision to cut him off was one of best things she could have done.

“I believe my mom had to face the reality that her son might be a homeless junkie for the rest of her life,” he said. “That was a real, realistic assumption on that day.”

After he was kicked out of the house, Dalton said he still managed to sneak back in, but when all of his bridges were burnt, he was forced to face reality. He eventually went through rehab at Bradford, and he has now been clean for almost three years.

Tinamarie said one of the biggest changes is instead of getting phone calls with bad news, people are reaching out to Dalton to make a change. He is asked to do speaking engagements to share his story, and she said it means a lot to see him making a difference.

“There is actual hope once you can get them refocused on the right path,” she said.

Dalton Smith formerly shared his story with Hoover Sun. The story, Coming Clean, is available here.