Monday, April 18, 2011

Sleepless Night

We came home after hearing him tell us his drug history thinking that if we had any doubts about his need for rehab, we didn’t anymore.  He used so many different drugs!  It was unbelievable.  It was surprising to us that with that kind of drug use, that he hadn’t had any obvious consequences.  He hadn’t had any trouble with the law.  But, how many close calls did he have?

How could we come to terms with all of that in less than 24 hours?

He was coming home the next night.

All night we brainstormed on ways to prevent him from being as sneaky as he obviously had been for the last 2 1/2 years or so.

We thought could reactivate our alarm system.  We could install a motion sensor light in his room and in the hallway so that if he tried to sneak out in the middle of the night, or got up for any reason, the light would turn on.  We could put a new screen in his window, so that he wouldn’t be able to stick his head out of a hole and smoke.  We could take the lock off the bathroom door so that he couldn’t smoke marijuana in the shower, as easily as he had before. 

We could be suspicious wardens who watch him like a hawk, who never let him out of our sight, and who don’t trust him in any way.

Not only were we thinking in terms of trying to keep him safe, but we were trying to figure out how we were going to get along with him.  To say that we were very nervous about bringing him home would be an understatement.  Our family communication skills had not improved very much over the last 8 weeks.  In some ways, they got even worse.  We didn’t even know how to act around him.

We were also afraid that he would refuse to cooperate when it came time to wake him up every day to take him back to the facility for school and Day Treatment.  This has been an issue in the past, but also, he wasn’t currently having a very good interaction with his teacher at the facility.  He said that when we bring him home for Day Treatment, he would not go back there to school if things didn’t change with her.  The therapist assured us that she had talked with both of them together and that everything would be okay.  But, my son was still concerned and I was worried.

So, what if he came home, and we couldn’t get him up to go to school?  We would argue, he would defy, and the whole cycle that rehab and counseling was supposed to help him get out of would start again. 

I wanted everything to be better, not worse, after all that we had gone through in the last 2 months.


Looking back, we were thinking rather negatively about how he was going to act when he came home.  But, we didn’t know what his frame of mind was really going to be.  Would he come home, follow the rules, and continue to move forward positively towards continued sobriety, or would he come home and immediately try to revert to his previous behaviors?  Would he come home and really show us how he felt about us for putting him in rehab?  Gratefulness or hatefulness?

We were going to find out very soon.

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