Letting Go

How would you like to give up your son for someone else to raise for 26 months? Especially during his teen years?

“I would not,” said the educational consultant. “Your son is spiraling out of control. It is like water going down a bathtub drain. At first you cannot see the water going down until the very end. He is out to destroy everything in his path including himself. His anger is a blast furnace.”

I was at my wits end. For two years my son was on a path of destruction. At fourteen years old, he had stopped going to school. He would be gone for days and nights while I desperately searched for him. His drug and alcohol use were escalating.

In the early stages of my divorce from his mother he was approachable and would open up. 

“What do you expect of me?  My world has been turned upside down.”      

 I will never forget how insightful that statement was coming from my young son. But after that one time, he closed himself off and  was never again willing to bare his soul.  I tried everything to save him. The courts, counselors, treatment centers, all of which failed. There was no way to save him from himself. I had never before experienced this much pain, sadness or grief. It was a living hell, but like everything else in life, if anything was going to change, I would have to be my own advocate as well as his.  I stumbled upon a book titled TEENS IN TURMOIL that introduced me to cases like my son’s, as well as to therapeutic boarding schools.  The rub would be that boarding school required a commitment of twenty-six months.The cost was $3,600.00 per month.

“How am I going to get him to embrace this let alone get him there?” I asked. 

“You won’t be able to. We will need to enlist two people from our staff to escort him to the school.  It will not be a lockdown facility. He can walk away at any time.”

“So what will keep him there?” 

“Your son’s willingness to be helped!”

“All this seems so extreme and desperate.”

“ Let me ask you this: if your son had cancer, would you not go to great lengths to save him? So it goes with addiction.”

So the ball was in play. I was to find and bait Jake into coming home in the middle of the night. I was to wake him and introduce him to the two people who would be escorting him to the school. The escorts did not want him to think he was being shanghaied. I was then instructed to leave the house and come home after thirty minutes.

I could not visit my son for the first forty days. I could not receive letters or send letters to him for the same period. 

His first allowable home visit would be after eighty months. I was desperate and in my soul I felt he was in a safe place with others like him who could share their stories.

  I cannot describe how it felt to come back to my home and go to my son’s room.  I flung myself onto his bed and sobbed. Did I do the right thing?