It was not good.
I don’t know how or why, but it all just blew up into the worst night in our history, so far.
I didn’t know what my son’s expectations were, but I just wanted happy feelings all around now that he was home.
It sure didn’t turn out that way..
We met with the nurse and signed all of the paperwork to have him released. Then, we had a short family therapy session. The mood between us seemed pretty good even when the therapist prompted him to confess some other things to us. He told us that he forgot to add the use of Spice and mushrooms to his Drug History.
Also, during a truthfulness exercise in group therapy that day, one of the kids told everyone that the sore on his leg was from cutting, not from running into the basketball rack in the gym. He confessed that he hadn’t really been cutting, but while stoned at some time, prior to his admission to the facility, he carved the word BUD into his leg with a PENCIL! (Bud is a slang name for marijuana). It became infected and took a long time to even begin to heal. I had seen a bandage on his leg once when he was wearing shorts and asked him how he got hurt. He told me that he kept running into a sharp corner on the rack that holds the basketballs in the gym. He wouldn’t let me look at it and told me that the nurse checked it every day when she gave him a new bandage. So, he had lied about it and now the truth was out. He had done one more stupid thing and was going to have a visibly permanent scar from it. As opposed to the scars from all of the other stupid things that he has done that we can’t see from the outside.
When we left after packing up the rest of his belongings, he seemed happier than I had seen him in months. The therapist thought that we were all going to be just fine.
While we were driving home, I asked him how he had been sleeping lately. I did not know that asking him that one question would start the whole mood of the night spiraling out of control, but it did.
He said he had not been sleeping at all. I asked him if he had tried meditation before trying to go to sleep. Then, he started to complain about how meditation was stupid and asked us if we meditated. We started to explain that we were actually reading a book about it, but hadn’t meditated, yet.
He interrupted us and said that we could have just answered the question with a yes or no. We didn’t need to go on and on about it. He told us to stop talking about it. We tried to change the subject, but were again told to just stop talking. We felt like we weren’t allowed to talk about anything. So, we drove in total silence from that point until my husband dropped me off at the pharmacy to get the new prescriptions. They went to get a pizza. They came back to pick me up and after I got into the truck, he apologized for “whatever just happened”.
Okay, so we had one glitch, but it was still going to be great! We would go home and eat the pizza and cheesecake that he requested for his first meal and have a fun night together.
But, I guess I was just kidding myself because his mood didn’t change.
We were in the beginning stages of getting exactly what we had been dreading. Every ounce of anger that he had felt against us in the last two months was in the process of being unleashed.
After dinner, he tried to play the X-box. But, the LIVE account was not working so he couldn’t play his game online. I didn’t know why. He had last played the X-box on January 1st during a home visit and it was working then. No matter what I did to fix it, nothing helped. I tried going online and providing updated credit card information and I tried unblocking some parental controls. I even told him that I could go to Target and buy an X-box LIVE activation card, but he said that wouldn’t work either. He shot down every effort and every idea since nothing had worked so far.
I told him that we would just have to try to fix it the next day. I was getting frazzled and we had used up all the time that he could have played it anyway that night. He was so angry about that.
I suggested that he could probably just be happy that he was home for tonight even though he didn’t get to play the X-box. I said that at least he had been able to eat the food that he likes and would be able to sleep in his own house. His response to that was that the whole reason he was excited to come home was so that he could play the X-box and nothing else.
He informed me in a not-so-nice way, full of not-so-nice words that life was going to be as boring as hell since the X-box was NEVER going to work again. He said that he would not have anything to do until he was 18 years old and could move out.
As the night went on, he just got more unreasonable and rude about everything. It seemed like, the minute that we drove away from the facility, he changed from the kid that the therapist thought was ready to go home, to the kid that had finally been released from prison and wanted to let us know how mad he was that he had been held against his will for so long.
Around 10:00, when it was time to go to bed, he refused to take his sleeping pill and insisted that the pills don’t work anyway. The doctor at the facility had been trying different strategies to help him be able to sleep and had just written a prescription for the medication that he had been taking in the facility. So he must have thought it was helping. Now, all of a sudden, the pills didn’t work?
Now, next in his escalating state of unreasonableness was his plan was to stay awake all night since it was impossible to sleep anyway. He refused to even lie down on his bed, turn off the light, or try to go to sleep. We suggested everything that we have ever tried ourselves to be able to go to sleep, but he wouldn’t accept any of our advice.
Whenever we would try to just walk away from the argument, he would start in on us from a different angle on the same subject. He refused to even go upstairs to the bedroom until I could come up with some miraculously entertaining thing for him to do to pass the night away.
He told me that the attitude that he had that night is just the way that he is now. He said, “When you have seen me on the weekends lately, you haven’t seen me the way that I really am now.”
He complained about how he would never have anything to do, that there was no reason for anything, and that he had no friends.
He said that we were going to regret sticking him in rehab because it didn’t help anything.
He let us know that he thought it would suck coming home and that WE made it suck when we freaked out about meditation on the way home. Really? We freaked out about it by asking him if he had tried it and by telling him that we were reading a book about it. That was it. And, that was freaking out?
He just kept on arguing, and swearing at us in language that we have never heard him use before in our lives. He blamed us for everything that had happened, because we wouldn’t let him do anything fun that night. We were just making him go to sleep right when he got home from rehab.
That wasn’t the situation at all, but he was in such an emotional state that everything he said was becoming more and more absurd.
As parents often do when they don't know what else to say, we told him how much we loved him and how much we wanted this all to work out.
Of course, his answer to that was that he didn’t want to work it out with us.
The tirade got so bad that we actually called the facility and told them that all hell was breaking loose here and that he was totally out of control.
We seriously asked if we could bring him back.
I could not believe that we were at that point, but that is how bad it was right then.
He said he would gladly go back because it was better than being here with us.
They said no.
He had only been home 3 hours and was already in a relapse cycle. I was afraid to even go to sleep myself, when and if he did decide to calm down, because I didn’t know what he was going to do. Eventually, I just let him watch movies in the family room while I sat on the couch. I think he might have gone to sleep around 3:00 a.m. It was a long, emotional night.
I don’t know what in the world happened. It was like we did everything wrong while trying to do everything right.
It felt like 2 months of any kind of progress toward a drug free life and a better family relationship was just flushed down the drain.
Three things contributing to the most awful night we had ever had with him up to that point.
I asked him one question on the way home.
He wasn’t able to play the X-box.
We expected him to go to sleep, like normal people do at night.
Or was it four things?
Because now he was living with the evil parents who put him in rehab.
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