Imagine me, Taught by Tragedy...

I know it has been a while since I have posted, but I am still around reading others blogs each day. I have so much to share and just cant find my voice, perhaps because what is left of my heart is being broken again from my youngest son.

I guess you could say I am the mother of an addict redux. Part 2? Again? My youngest son, La Petite, starting doing really poorly in school last year after the death of his brother. He was never a great student, but we figured he was just really falling apart from his loss. We all were. Late in June, he came home after being out with friends and he was obviously drunk and high. Knowing full well not to engage or argue with an inebriated person, I put him to bed, and kept a close eye on him all night.

I went through his phone and made some calls and was told by some of his friends that he had been smoking a lot of pot. They were concerned. I was shocked that I didn't pick up on it. I'm usually pretty good. We put him on lock down until he was to leave from sleep away camp a few weeks later.

He did well all summer while away at camp and shortly after starting his sophomore year, he started cutting classes and we found out he was again smoking pot. We cut him off financially, making him brown bag his lunch. I found a large Ziploc bag hidden in the bathroom filled with pot. Money was going missing. At this point I realized, I simply can not live with another addict in my house. He went to live with his dad. A week or so into that, he found some sleeping pills and pain pills that had been prescribed to my ex husband and took a nice handful of them. He was a mess. I would almost say it was an overdose. We got him into an outpatient program that meets twice a week and also requires attendance at AA or NA meetings.

Fast forward to February and the present, he has been dropped from his Spanish class, for cutting it so often. A class he has taken for the third time that is a requirement for graduation. He is failing 9th grade math for the second time, also a graduation requirement, and Biology the second time around isn't looking so good either. He is one cut away from being dropped from his Global Studies class as well. Opiates show up in his urine screen.

I am assuming he must be involved in dealing on some level because he has no access to cash, and he is still managing to be high all the time. Through out all of this I have been working with the Special Ed department to get him classified and placed into an alternative learning program outside of the district. I pull him out of the public high school because all he does is get high there, we decide its time for residential treatment. I am working on that right now, its not easy, insurance companies do not want to pay and I don't have $10,000 cash laying around at the moment. Beds for adolescent males are scarce.

We have him under 24 hour supervision. He stays with his grandparents during the day while we are at work. In the evenings he is either with me or his dad. Last night he asked his dad if he could sleep at his grandmothers house. We both kind of saw that as a red flag as he had asked to sleep at my house last night as well. But my ex is exhausted from sleeping with one eye open watching over him every night so we figured what could happen, he has been on total lock down.

Sure enough, my in laws call my husband at 10 o'clock last night saying that the Little Prince is high as a kite, totally out of it. Turns out he stole some DXM based meds from the supermarket during the day. Never say never.

We are hoping for a bed any day now. Its just so outside of my realm of thought that he would mess around with this stuff considering we buried his 20 year old brother just 14 short months ago. Cunning, Baffling, Powerful, Indeed...