Faith

The year was 1990 and in the middle of a long hot summer I found myself so unsettled. I was about to leave my husband and my son and venture into the unknown. My family situation had become intolerable. Jim told me that I didn’t understand boys and I told him he was never home to see and hear everything. My son’s anger was getting worse. He was to be a senior in high school and just decided to quit school. He wouldn’t work, slept most of the time, argued with me when he was awake and was becoming his own worst enemy. It seemed we had tried everything. Countless therapists, with and without my son. We had even been to marital counseling. Things just kept getting worse. I didn’t know what to do, but remember a therapist telling me how triangles are very unhealthy. So, I decided to remove myself from this one. I wanted a trial separation and I had to find an attorney to help me.

She was a very polite and kind person, one who gave me good advise and cautious warnings of all of the things that could happen, should I leave. She would type a letter to my husband and I could pick it up in a day or two and then go on with my plans. I had a girlfriend in another state that I could live with for a while and she had a business that I could work for. I explained to the attorney, this very nice polite woman, that I refused to be treated in the manner that my son was treating me. I gave her a couple of examples and just told her that I grew up with an alcoholic father and now my son was acting in the same like manner as my Dad. No more! I tried so many times and nothing worked with any effectiveness. I had to leave for a “cooling” off period of several months. I didn’t know if this kind, polite woman really could understand my dilemma. I knew that she had children, but they were young. Teenagers are different, especially this one. She did a good job for me and the letter was typed and I picked it up a couple of days later. She never saw me again.

I left and after time and much talk, with ground rules, I came back to my home and family. My son didn’t stay with us for much longer. His journey was quite a long bitter one. I won’t go into all of the details, as there are too many and they still are painful.

Now it is 2004, fourteen years later. Jim and I are still together and glad we stayed with each other. My son, we now understand, suffers from mental illness. He has a lot of medical labels. Last year was his worst year andit wasn’t until he became psychotic, did we realize that not only did he need help again, but we needed help also. We needed to learn all we could about mental illness and become his advocate. My son has been declared by the state disabled. He and his wife are divorcing. In this dark cloud, in this big pile of “awful” a miracle has happened. My son got himself to a treatment center, now sees several doctors, is staying on his medicine and is slowly coming out of this hell of illness. He will never be “cured” but he is managing his life so much better now. He even sees his children 3 days and nights a week. I am so proud of him and his ability to help himself and realize that he needed more help than we could give him. We are becoming a family again.

Now back to the nice polite attorney from 1990. I will never forget her. She was in the news this last week. Her son, who was just a tiny one then, is a teenage now and he was in the news too. It seems as though her son, is very sick also. It’s the kind of sickness that most people can’t or won’t understand. It’s the kind that is swept under the rug. It’s the kind where we blame parents for not raising them right. It’s the kind where we think, maybe if we had been home more, or loved more, or prayed more, maybe then everything would have been OK. But you see, mental illness doesn’t work that way. We can’t pray our way out of it, but prayer helps. We love them, although, it’s difficult to understand them.Sometimes, we see their illness instead of seeing them. This polite nice attorney was home and her son was hearing voices when his knife found it’s way into his social workers body. She didn’t make it. He then went after his mother, this nice polite woman, who I knew in 1990. She survived. She called the police and now her son is in jail. He stopped taking his meds. I am so sorry for the social worker and her family. She had only been married a short time. I am also sorry for my attorney, the mother of a deeply ill young man.

In closing I will recall a quote from Edward Teller………When you come to the end of all the light you know and it’s time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen. Either you will be given something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly. Signing off, Anne