The Ugly Truth Behind My Hiatus
So how to begin this post?

Sigh.... OK, here goes...

My son has gone back to live with his mother. The reason why would most likely depend on who you ask and how much time you have. But fortunately for V, I've again given her an easy out and a cloud of cover behind which she can maintain her denial that she is a life-sucking, self-centered, self-righteous bitch. That being said, the official reason for the move is that I got high with the boy. No, wait, the real reason is because I TOLD her. This is what I get for having a conscience.

confused? Join the club! I'm still trying to sort it out, and I was there!

OK, here's the gruesome details.

A couple of weeks after the boy moved in with me, V calls me to tell me that my next-to-youngest had told her that some of his brother's friends (that would be the boy living with me) were smoking pot when he and the boy were hanging out with them and skateboarding. Earlier in the weekend, the boy had let slip the comment (on purpose, I'm certain) that it was difficult to find any new friends in the high school that didn't smoke pot.

At the time, I was content to just keep my eyes open, as I was still adjusting to this new role as single dad of the teenaged boy whose mother was at the end of her rope. When this all first came about, I was still dealing with the divorce from D -- in my usual manner. Getting myself on the straight and narrow was a top priority.

However, my thinking took a strange turn when V called me with her concerns. I had no real insight into the high school culture in the town where I live. The community is widely stratified along racial and socio-economic lines, but people like me (i.e. - white, educated, fairly well-employed) are definitely in the minority. So I became concerned that my son was getting in over his head, and I decided to talk to him about the whole 'doing drugs' thing.

What I told him was that he should stay away from it altogether, but that if he was going to do it anyway, I wanted him to be in the safe confines of our home with me. I was very concerned about his safety and the intentions of the kids he was hanging out with, but I also opened the Pandora's box on my own powerlessness against the lure of the ganja.

Within two weeks, I was asking him to find me dime bags. As an interesting aside, the best deals in pot are among the school-aged dealers. I was getting more product for half the price, usually at the same quality, as I had been getting from my 'adult' contacts for the past decade. Anyway, I began to see a real slide in his behavior and a growing obsession on his part for getting high. It's all the evidence I need to buy into a genetic argument for addictive tendencies. Then I went to a parent-teacher conference and discovered that his grades were in the toilet, mostly from not handing in assignments and making up tests in the most recent couple of weeks. That's when I faced up to my need to do whatever I needed to do to put a stop to the whole experiment. I needed to be the adult, to set the right example, to rid our home of this insidious evil.

Unfortunately, events were already set in motion that came to a head three weeks ago, on President's Day. My son spent his first weekend visiting his mother since coming to live with me during the holidays. Prior to his leaving, he had made it clear that he really wanted to go back to his mother's house, primarily because he was missing his old friends. A big part of this seemed to also be related to him having difficulty establishing solid friendships in his new situation. I believe he made some major miscalculations in his approach to kids whose parents were not providing the kind of upper-middle class lifestyle that is so prevalent in the district where his mother lives.

To complicate matters, he appears to have taken to making up stories to impress or ingratiate himself to a class of kids he believed would provide him with some protection. He was afraid of getting ganged up on, so he tried to get in with some of the toughest, street-wise kids in the school. That meant the dealers. Not having the same kind of cut-throat mentality, he ended up earning their distrust and was accused of being the person responsible for a rash of police searches in school that week.

A couple of these kids were going to come over to house that Monday night of President's Day, or so they pretended. One of them came to the house and took my son around the corner, supposedly to get a couple of the other kids. There were a half-dozen kids waiting, and they attempted to jump him. He was punched in the face, knocked to the ground, and kicked at least once before jumping up and running away. When he got to the house, he was in a panic. I was just going to take a baseball bat outside and take care of business, but he was petrified.

Then I became concerned because, as I said, I didn't have a real good feel for what was going on in the high school. I didn't know if there were gangs or guns or the type of violence that could have seen my son hurt very badly or killed.

So I called his mother, with the full intention of letting him go home. She wasn't willing to do this, which in hindsight was probably a good thing, as it let me do some digging into the landscape of the high school. After a couple of days of making sure he wasn't vulnerable to another attack and keeping close tabs with him on what was being said and who was emerging as potential allies, I became convinced that these kids might try to jump him again, but that the possibility of real serious violence was remote. Plus, new friends emerged that I found to be credible and sincere, and who were willing to stand up with him against the kind of underhanded cowardice that the dealer crowd seemed to prefer.

At the same time, I became very concerned that my son was not really getting the message about accepting responsibility for his actions and choices, even as I was feeling very uncomfortable about my own role in the way things had unfolded for him in his new situation. His mother was concerned enough to drive 45 minutes two days in a row to take him to school, so that he would have to walk alone in the morning. She also took the opportunity to talk to the guidance counselor, who informed her that word on the street was that our son was getting involved with drugs and violating social taboos about sharing his stash. When she asked him if he was using drugs, he said no, then bragged to me later that he technically didn't lie, because he was only using ONE drug.

That's when I decided that I needed to tell her the whole truth and accept whatever consequences came. It was suddenly more important to show my son that the truth was not a matter of convenience or semantics, and that owning up to one's mistakes was a sign of manhood and integrity.

What I didn't count on was his willingness to use this as an opportunity to go back to where he wanted to be, in spite of the conditions that he would face from a woman whose capacity for denial is amazing to me. At first, he balked at her conditions (going to counseling was really the only one). He even tried to get her to admit that this was all her fault for making him come to live with me in the first place! When she declined to do so, he got stubborn and said he wasn't moving back with her.

But after a day, he realized that he had a better shot of getting what he wanted out of the situation by going back to her than staying here with me and lying in the bed we'd made.

As for V, suffice it to say that her reaction to my confession was to take him immediately, as opposed to her reluctance to take him when I wasn't sure if he was going to get shot or not. Let's just say that it's much more justifiable to her way of thinking to just conclude that I am more of a danger to my son than a gang of juvenile drug dealers.

Me? I really fucked up by not accounting for my own powerlessness over my addiction when deciding how to deal with what I perceived to be immiment involvement by my son with drugs and untrustworthy people. I started out trying to protect him and ended up using him for my own purposes. I have never been more ashamed in my entire life.

However, I think that the decision to take him back to his mother's is an even bigger mistake, and I am powerless to do anything about it. My son has now been validated in his manipulations and has been denied the benefit of working through a tough situation with real consequences. Instead, he can now go through the motions of buying into his mother's faith in the psychological cure, while he perpetuates his lack of responsibility, integrity, and accountability for his choices and their consequences.

And me? At first I was so mad that the self-righteous bitch V didn't even take the time to try and evaluate what really happened, that I was ready to just go right back to the addictions, confirmed in my belief that it doesn't matter what I do, what I try, how hard I fight -- the curse of life will always win out. But D has been very supportive -- without condoning or excusing my choices -- and has caused me to step back from the abyss of my own bitterness. The Lord also intervened by allowing me to be sick enough for the past week and a half to not want any cigarettes, weed, or coke. Now I am feeling better, and am finding a reason not to give in.

Ironically, what I am discovering is the way that I've continuously set myself up for failure by acting out of guilt or buying into other people's idiotic definition of character. By increasing the pressure on myself to be more than is reasonable to my children in order to make up for the consequences of a choice that I didn't even make, but was all too willing to take the blame for, I was guaranteeing that I would screw up in a major way at some point along the line.

So now I've determined that, although I love my children and want to be a significant part of their lives, I need to stop overcompensating for the fact that their mother is unwilling to accept her own responsibility for the situation we are all in. Sure, I smoked pot and cigarettes. Yes, I called her a cunt and a bitch. And certainly, I have anger issues that resulted in more than one piece of broken furniture in the course of the ten years that we were married. But the last time I looked, none of that was a justification for divorce by anyone calling themselves a Christian.

I believe in grace, but I also believe that grace can only take root where there is truth. V made her choice, and now she has a new husband, a new job, a new home, a new life. Yet she is ready to latch onto any reason to make me the reason why the children who have lived under her care for the past decade don't live up to her expectations.

Looking back on this whole episode, I am convinced that I should never have agreed to take my son in the first place. I wasn't in the right place to take care of his needs, although I still managed to get movement in the right direction. But more importantly, this whole situation was not my problem. It was hers. She failed to establish her authority and credibility with him. But all I saw was a chance to make up for what I had lost -- to give him all that had been denied by not having me there for him.

Overcompensation fueled by guilt.

Now I have a chance to rebuild a life with D, or to reclaim my own life. Guilt free.

I did what I did, and I make no excuses.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to let it drag me down for another ten years.

It just makes no sense.
- posted by The Drake @ 1:42 PM