Superhero in Recovery — Dr. Linda’s Journey

I am a healer, not a broom, and therefore not obligated to clean up a mess, especially one that I did not create.

Healers beware. We attract unsolicited wounded people, many of who appear normal but are not, and perhaps this attraction has a genetic component.

Sometime in the 1940s, my late mother, a single woman, was minding her own business on a Sunday, frying chicken. Her future husband, a total stranger with a Jamaican accent, boldly knocked on her door, begging to sample a piece of her cuisine. She had a kind heart, said yes, and subsequently inherited an imperfect human being who sent her on a roller coaster ride of emotions until his untimely death thirty years later.

This curse found its way to her daughter thirty years later. On a Sunday morning, I opened my door to find a man I met on a blind date, asking if he could come in to “visit.” I was not aware at the time that his father had summarily evicted him because two kings could not occupy the same throne, and at age 39, his father deemed him quite capable of living on his own. My instincts warned me not to open the door, but against my better judgment, I did and experienced a mistake in judgment of Biblical proportions.

The deeds of a superhero are endless: cleaning up alcoholism and cocaine addiction; bailing other people’s…