A mother details the hope and uncomfortable truths of her son's addiction

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They met for lunch, at Bryan’s request. The youngest of Linda Mestel’s three children was working in a bank at the time and he looked so handsome to her in his navy suit, his pink tie.

Fidgeting uncomfortably, he said he had something to tell her.

“I’ve been using cocaine and I wanted you to know.”

He told her he used only once a month, promised he was stopping and asked her not to tell anyone.

Mestel was unaware on that Wednesday several years ago that Bryan was downplaying his drug use and doing a good job of convincing her that he was in control.

“I was indulging in the luxury of denial, deep in rationalization, and I couldn’t see the uncomfortable truth,” Mestel, 68, writes in her gripping, if at times harrowing, new memoir of her journey through her son’s addiction.

“I needed and wanted to believe him.”

A nurse by training, she had worked in surgical trauma and in psychiatry; later, she worked in community mental health as a manager and clinical supervisor at a Montreal social service agency, a position from which she recently retired.

“The truth was that Bryan was lying to himself and lying to me — and I was vulnerable to the very deception that I was so good at spotting in others,” she writes in The Luxury of Denial: A Moving Memoir. A mother’s journey of challenge and hope through her son’s addiction (Smiling Eyes Press, 2025, 194 pp).

Mestel kept her son’s addiction secret for a long time.

“In my years of helping others, it never crossed my mind, even in my wildest thoughts, that I would ever be confronting my own child’s addiction,” she said.

“Even working in the field, I saw addiction as a disease that could only exist in unhealthy homes without security or connection. But the truth is that addiction doesn’t respect boundaries or social norms,” Mestel writes.

“It finds its way into any life, any home, no matter how fortified we think we are.”

One goal of telling her story “is to bring some compassion to the illness,” she said.

Addiction “is often looked upon as a moral failing — sometimes even within the professional world. What I felt I had to offer is that I could tell the story through the lens of a mum — and also with my professional hat.”

Bryan, 36, has wrestled with addiction for most of his adult life. He is doing well now, “but I can speak only for today,” Mestel said.

After 2½ years in British Columbia, he is back in Montreal, living on his own, working in a café and taking classes online to become an addiction counsellor. “That is his passion: to give back and help others through the struggle,” she said.

“I have faith in him. I never stopped believing in him. He’s my boy — and he has so much to offer.”

Her memoir, which grew out of her journalling, took about two years to write. If she was initially ambivalent about having it published, ultimately “I recognized how important it is to have this conversation, to get people talking.”

Speaking with her son and others in treatment programs he has been through “has opened up a whole world,” she said. “You realize how hard the struggle is — and how much they don’t want to be in it. Nobody would choose this.”

Her purpose “is to help break down the stigma surrounding addiction, which can affect anyone — yes, even those in well-functioning, loving, healthy families, in strong supportive communities.”

In the year or so since she began to speak openly about Bryan, “I have discovered how many of my contemporaries are struggling with their adult children,” she said.

“You start hearing the stories and you realize that everyone is struggling with something.”

Linda and Johnny Mestel were childhood sweethearts. They have eight grandchildren as well as their three children, and a strong and loving marriage. Yet both struggled deeply through “the roller-coaster years” of Bryan’s relapses. She is grateful, she says, that they survived as a couple.

When her husband arrived home from a golf game two hours later than usual one recent evening, he told her: “’The guys I play with had read your book — and they wanted to know how I felt.’ And so now he is speaking about it as well.”

Drug addiction is also known as substance use disorder — a term Mestel said she prefers because it carries less stigma.

She recalled that a recovering addict running the family sessions at a Montreal rehab centre explained that addiction is not a matter of willpower but a brain disease. It changes how the brain works. He explained that our brains are wired with a reward and pleasure system that makes us feel good during such activities as exercising or connecting with others. Drugs and alcohol hijack that system by flooding the brain with these feel-good chemicals and create an intense high. In addiction, it gets harder to feel good without the substances, he said, and recovery takes time, family support and often professional help to retrain the brain.

Mestel has learned other hard-won lessons — that sobriety is not recovery, for one, and that relapses are part of the process. She has learned, too, that healing is a journey of self-discovery for the person with the addiction and that responsibility for recovery rests with the person who is in the addiction.

She learned that the person’s loved ones are on their own journey. If she wrote the book to help others, it was also to help herself. “It was therapeutic for me to put it out there, beneficial to my own journey.”

While she is not grateful for her son’s addiction, “I am grateful that he has allowed us to be a part of it.”

Hardest for her has been “learning how to let go when all you really want to do is hold on more tightly,” Mestel said.

“Everything is this precarious dance between fear and hope. You are fearful that a loved one will use and overdose and die if you don’t do something — but you almost have to be able to tolerate that so that you don’t lose hope.”

AT A GLANCE

The Luxury of Denial: A Moving Memoir. A mother’s journey of challenge and hope through her son’s addiction (Smiling Eyes Press, 2025) is available on amazon.ca.