On any ordinary day, he would have grabbed his coat, walked off, and gotten high at such an earful, but on this particular evening for Shawn Lott, 45, it would not be the same old story. Today he was going to break the vicious cycle.
When Jackie Polk, 35, called him from the busy restaurant where she works as a server, he answered and—as she spoke through tears—something clicked in him. He got the message that night.
“Look dude, this is not what I want, but I don’t have time for all this childish [expletive],” she told him. “I don’t have time for it. I’m trying to get my kids back. … If this is what you want, then we’re going to have to end it.”
Instead of breaking up, this time Mr. Lott returned to his Bartlesville, Oklahoma, home and sat in the dark thinking, until she walked in the door not having bothered to call him for a ride home.
He finally figured out how things were going to be on his road to recovery. “That’s just how we do this,” he thought. “We just grow up and do grown-up things and don’t ever run and get high over every little misunderstanding.”
“We just talk things out now, everything, we talk everything out,” he told The Epoch Times. “Normally, I would have been, ‘Okay, fine, sure!‘ take off and, ’See you later!' and went out and got high.”
For nearly his whole adult life, getting high had been his cure-all—ever since age 15 when he and his brother sought acceptance from their father. “All my childhood, my brother and I were second best to his new girlfriend and their kids,” he told the newspaper. As a high school senior, he fell out with his dad after he’d used his social security number to buy a car and ruined his credit rating by not even making the first payment.
All throughout high school, Mr. Lott had been heavily into drugs like methamphetamine. But that was kids’ play compared to when he arrived in Florida. In 2000, Mr. Lott went to build power lines—like his dad, making good coin—in the Sunshine State. Yet there he also found an endless supply of drugs, including crack cocaine, fueling his addiction. He smoked as much as he could possibly grab.
His was a habit that switched on or off. After moving back to Oklahoma to stay in his grandma’s trailer, drugs were banned wholesale; the Oklahoma crack “didn’t impress me much” anyway, he said. But he relapsed. His moving out and meeting the woman who would mother his son, Hayden, saw his habit creep back in secret. Mr. Lott said, “I’d sneak off and do it, or I would do it when I was at work.”
Thus began the vicious cycle that has long haunted Mr. Lott. His constant lying and leading a double life threw their relationship on the rocks. Turning to drugs only fueled more fighting, perpetuating an endless cycle. Meanwhile, Mr. Lott’s firstborn son, Hayden, arrived in 2009.
Unable to save their relationship, the parents split, but not for want of trying. More than once, they tried to mend things, particularly after their daughter, Morgan, was born in 2010. But it was “too much water under the bridge,” he said. Fatherhood was put on hold for Mr. Lott as he lost custody of his kids.
Ultimately, his path to sobriety lay in drug rehab—of all things—though he needed a few well-meant nudges along the way. It took more than being charged for possession, which didn’t slow him one bit. He was in and out of court from 2009 to 2013, until, one day in a trial someone unexpectedly stood up for him.
“Mr. Lott, can you pass the UA [urine alcohol] test today,” the judge had asked him.
He replied, “No sir, I can’t.”
“Well, mister, we’re putting you in drug court.”
“You might as well put me in prison,” Mr. Lott replied. “Because I’m not ever going to be able to do drug court.”
But the judge refused.
Suddenly, a woman in the back of the courtroom stood up and voiced that he should be in community sentencing. Okay, Mr. Lott?
Okay, though it meant he would have to enter rehab.
Accepting was one thing; taking rehab seriously? That was something else completely.
“Just so you know,” the woman, Jan Williford, a community sentencing officer, told him. “You’re not going for a 30-day rehab, it’s going to be a six-month program for you.”
Her words were a tough slug to swallow, nudging his mind toward taking rehab seriously. He had been merely going along with it to get everyone off his back at this point.
His next nudge came from a counselor in rehab, Wayne, who told his class:
“I can pretty much pick the ones that are going to make it, and the ones that aren’t going to make it,” he said. “But if you buy what I’m selling to you, which is a better life, I guarantee it, you'll find happiness on the other side.” His heart spurred Mr. Lott to try earnestly, as he was here for six months either way. His first 30 days sober were jubilating.
The third nudge came from Robin Steel, head of the rehab work program in which Mr. Lott had done roofing. “Shawn, I really do believe that you’re just scared to go back out into the world,” he said. “Unless you just are dead set on [working here], I think you’re ready to go back and join the real world.” Taking these words to heart, Mr. Lott did so.
Yet to think it was so simple or easy would be naïve. Mr. Lott relapsed, particularly after he met his then girlfriend, Tony, who wasn’t solidly on the wagon herself.
Ultimately, though, he met Jackie. She was the real game changer for Mr. Lott. Escaping addiction and an abusive relationship herself—forcing her to leave her twin boys—she had a powerful motive. She wanted her kids back. “We held each other in check,” Mr. Lott said. They both saw light at the end of the tunnel.
They met at a trap house; she had just fled an abusive man; he a vicious altercation with Tony a few blocks down. It was like a preordained connection, he told the newspaper. Soon they were inseparable. Ms. Polk got a job working at Chili’s, and as they pushed seven months sober together, she was able to see her sons for half the week. Until, one day he got another, happier call from Ms. Polk.
“Guess what?” she said. “The boys get to come home.” The mom was on cloud nine.
Mr. Lott was elated, yet the victory was bittersweet, for he still cannot contact his kids.
Yet they called it a blessing when their firstborn son, Lawson, arrived in April, after trying in vain for many months. “There’s no being a father if I wasn’t sober,” Mr. Lott said. “Being sober gives me the clarity and the mindset to be the best that I can be.”
Today, the father thanks a higher force for carrying them through to sobriety and joyous family life. “There was somebody there helping us the whole way,” he told us, adding that he doesn’t buy the adage, “Once an addict, always an addict.” That someone was God. “He totally took the desire to do drugs away from me, seriously, I feel that.”
Mr. Lott’s message to others suffering addiction? When you are sick and tired of being sick and tired, turn to faith—whatever yours may be—and that will give you strength to weather any storm.
