Lessons

Our boy is back in the hospital.  Not the kind where heartbreakingly bald children suffer through chemo, or where broken arms are set in a cast, or where football players come to sign autographs.

This is the kind with the doors that lock from the outside.  Where they won't let you have shoelaces or strings in your pajama pants, and nobody bats an eye at the sound of a scream.

This is his third inpatient stay;  the first one was a few weeks before Thanksgiving.  He'd had something of a breakdown at school, telling the counselor he wanted to die and crying incessantly.  I agreed with the school that he needed professional assessment, so I took him to Peachford Hospital in Atlanta.

Peachford is situated in a lovely wooded area in northeast Atlanta;  it is well-known and it accepts my health insurance.  It seemed like the perfect place for our boy to get better, to get back on his emotional feet.

Turns out that Peachford's primary objective is to remove and insulate someone from their circumstances for a handful of days.  It wasn't a bad place, but he received limited therapeutic care and mostly spent a week with a couple dozen broken children addicted to drugs, alcohol and self-mutilation.  It bears mentioning that the adolescent ward was overflowing, so perhaps that's why it seemed like crowd control was the first order of business.

After five days, he came home and we slowly returned to our version of normal.  Babble and CaringBridge readers will remember that my husband is quite ill himself and had just recently begun dialysis when our boy was hospitalized.  

And I shook my fist at heaven and demanded answers that still haven't come.

The boy spent the Thanksgiving holiday with family in America's heartland, enjoying picturesque scenery and time with cousins, aunts and uncles who care deeply for him.  He came back to us with a spring in his step and a smile on his face, and I felt hopeful.

In early December, he showed me the cuts on his arms and legs - apparently he has also been a "cutter" for a while and I just wasn't observant enough to notice.  Why didn't I see blood in his laundry, or wonder why he always wore jeans and long sleeves?  I don't know why not.  I don't know.  Maybe I didn't want to look.  I don't know.

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There is a trigger to all this drama that helps make at least a little sense of it all, but I do believe it's a trigger and not a root cause.  As anyone who's ever had their heart broken might guess, it has to do with a girl.

Before I say more about the girl, though, let me take you back to 1997.  I had my first AOL account, and I was delighted to meet a Scotsman online who lived in rural Kansas and who subsequently became the father of my children and is the best thing that ever happened to me.  This was before the days of eHarmony or Match.com;  we were pioneers.

So when our son announced that he had a girlfriend in Maine whom he'd met online, I felt a bit hypocritical when my maternal warning bells started quietly ringing.  I got involved just enough to verify that she really was a 15-year-old female and not some creepy pedophile trying to hook up with our teenage son.

And she made him so happy!  When things were good with this girl, he bubbled over.  They had all sorts of plans for their college years and married life one day, with a cottage near the shore and a little boy between them.  And these were mutual plans - at least at first. 

Like his mother and grandmother, the boy feels things with great intensity, so much so that happiness turns into euphoria, affection degrades into obsession, and sadness can become life-threatening depression.  I can see my 15-year-old self in him, when everything hurtful felt like the end of the world.  Yet he seems more raw, more amplified in some way.

So, when the sparkle faded and the young girl decided he was a bit too much, she began pulling away.  His hurt and his anger over rejection is like a force of nature - I don't think I have ever seen anyone in this much pain. 

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And so began his direct expression and overt efforts to end his life.  At first, I thought it might be the proverbial cry for attention (and some days I still wonder).  Yet he remains on this side of heaven, and for that I'm unspeakably grateful.  We have managed to find help for him each time he teeters on the cliff's edge, and we pull him back into our arms.

I try my best to put myself in his shoes, to try and see things from his perspective, but honestly I can't, not completely.  Whereas I was always a gregarious asshole, demanding attention from the world, he is mostly a loner who stays in his room and refuses solace from friends or family.  Then there's the gender thing, and while I may recognize the intensity from my own adolescence, his is on steroids and completely irrational.  My heart has been broken many times in my life, but his is in shards that he turns on himself and I can barely stand to watch.

It's certainly not the little girl's fault, although I wish she hadn't gone that far into the woods with him.  Yet, through the miracles of modern technology, he keeps finding ways to circumvent my embargoes and beg her to forgive him, to come back and have things be the way they were. 

And we all learn, one way or another - things can never be the way they were.

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So, last night when he told me for the umpteenth time that he just wants to die, I took him back to the hospital.  He'd had a noisy meltdown at school, so I picked him up and was returning home when he opened the passenger door and tried to jump out of our moving car onto the highway.  Terrifying is an understatement.

We were greeted by a state trooper at the hospital, and he was subsequently sedated and stabilized for transport to Lakeview Behavioral Health.  Of note is the fact that he was discharged from Lakeview just three days ago, after a week's stay that stemmed from ingesting rat poison mixed with sweet tea.

My dear, wonderful, exhausted husband came to spell me in the emergency room so I could take our daughter home (yes, she had a front-row seat on the ride home from school), and he stayed with our boy until psych transfer plans were confirmed and he finally settled down into a deep sleep. 

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I've just spoken to the boy on the telephone.  He is remorseful and eager to come home.  What do I say?  I love him more than my own life and I desperately want him here, under our roof and supervision and protection and care.

Yet.

If there is one thing I've learned, as an adult with depression and as the daughter of a diagnosed schizophrenic mother, you cannot protect someone from mental illness.  You can't love them out of it, any more than you can love someone out of cancer or a broken limb.

But what you can do is love them anyway.