Obsessive Behaviour, is it a Curse or a Blessing? (PART III)

We all know that kids are kids and that sooner or later they will probably do some pretty daring and dumb things that will make absolutely no sense to us as parents. We can probably remember our own childhood and at least one or two if not many more stunts that cost us a good spanking or grounding. Funny thing is that I remember more infractions coming from my two sisters than I do my own. Not that I was a saint, but compared to those two, I could probably write an encyclopedia to account for their mischief, while my whole daring life would only be written in a single chapter...OK, maybe two. In fact, my older sister was such an adorable child that my mom tells stories of her locking the caregivers in the closet, hitting them with brooms, and hanging out of the third story window of our apartment when we lived in England, spitting down at passing by children and yelling out "stupid...stupid." It was more than once that these poor souls that would come to take care of her while my mom was at work, at the end of the day would tell my mother how much they loved her, but that there was absolutely no chance they were coming back the next day to do the same job of taking care of my sister again.

I have a theory. My oldest sister has never had any kids. I was the third out of four, but the first one to have kids, and my oldest is the main character of 99% of my stories. My theory is that God with his amazing sense of humor decided to send me her child up front, and that the second one I have was really meant to be mine. Really, I am convinced that my son is really supposed to by my sister's son, not mine. I have offered so many times to bless her with a child, but up to this date the offer has never been accepted.

You also need to know that even though my oldest sister was the family terror as a very young child, now days she is the most loving, caring, and devoted to all of us brothers and other sister in the world. She is an amazing woman with no trace of her childhood terrorist behaviour. I love you babe, if you ever read this blog...without you I probably would have never known what is hope.

Back to my childhood and the question of what in the heck was God thinking about when he sent me my oldest son...I was nothing like him when it came to conduct and behaviour. This is going to sound so terribly boring and unreal. I never did any kind of drug, at all, ever. I never even smoked a damn cigarette in my life. In fact, the first thing I ever smoked was a cigar to celebrate the birth of my oldest son. Even though I have acquired a taste for a good cigar, I still to this day can barely breath when someone is smoking a cigarette close by. The first time I was drunk was at my own bachelor party, I was 26 years old. The next time was in Guadalajara Mexico celebrating with my family during my brother's Medical School graduation, I was then 40 years old. I can count with one hand how many times I have ever been drunk enough to feel the room spinning, and I am now 47 years old. I told you it would sound boring and unreal. Especially considering that I had a blast in college and a lot of my friends were wild. While in engineering school I spent many nights sitting on the bottom bunk bed in the dorm room of two good friends watching M.A.S.H. while they both smoked weed sitting in the bunk above. Amazingly, I was not even tempted at the time to do it...it didn't even cross my mind. Now days I just can't wait to finally retire to be able to light one up and find out what it feels like to get high. I even asked my mom if she would do it with me when I retired and surprisingly she said yes...hahaha!!!

I am not a prude and in no way shape or form do I really think that smoking marijuana is a crime that should be punishable by law. In fact, I truly believe that getting drunk is much more harmful and dangerous. But still, this does not mean that I go about telling my children that this is how I think. We all fear that by allowing them to see who we really are that they will use this against us and turn to much more dangerous things.

Less than six months ago I suddenly saw a significant positive change in my oldest son's attitude towards school. After having failed three semesters in a row, he suddenly started to do well in school and improve on all but one subject, P.E. He went from all but one grade with an "F" during the previous semester, to all "A's" and one "D" during the current semester. Suddenly, intermingled with his music passion, he was back to reading books from my library and asking question after question about very complicated subjects in the areas of Quantum Mechanics and Particle Physics. I asked him why the sudden interest again and he replied that he had a conversation with one of his friend's mom that works at the University of California Riverside and that he had decided to go to college and study physics. Now that to me was like having the Virgin Mary show up at my door and ask me for supper. I went bonkers finding more books for him to read, sharing with him again about my favorite subjects in science, and soaking his mind with every bit of wonderful and intriguing piece of trivia I knew on his new subject of interest. In fact, I got so carried away that I even gave him one of my first edition hard copies of John Gribbin, Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality which he devoured in about a week and then came looking for more.

Then, out of the blue came the incident of my previous post in which he was picked up by the California Highway Patrol for trying to walk to school on the freeway. Even though this one time incident might of then seemed as the portal to our current situation, in reality it was just a mere side effect of what really has been going on for most of my son's life. As soon as I placed him into another 10 week program to make sure that the alcohol incident would not get worse, things then really did get worse. A few weeks into the program and he tested positive for marijuana, and the week after that for amphetamines, marijuana, and Ecstasy. I was totally confused. I had seen absolutely none of the signs of my child getting high before any of these tests revealed it to me. So I did what I always do, I asked him to tell me the truth, and the truth he told as usual and without hesitation. First he told me that he had tested positive because he had done these things to celebrate 4-20 with his friends. Then I asked him how long he had been doing any kind of drug and he said that he had been doing marijuana since he was getting good grades! WHAT???

The moment was tense, I was having such a hard time trying to understand him, his reasoning, and most of all, his behaviour. The whole incident with the school suspension, the disciplinary board, and juvenile court started to take a toll on all of us. For me it was just too much to assimilate all at once and in less than three weeks the whole matter was doing flip flops in my head. For his mom, she was more anxious than I had ever noticed her, even worse than when we were proceeding with our divorce four years earlier. But in all honesty, as much as we both were feeling that we had been caught completely off guard and freaked out as to what to do, now I can look back to those days and tell you that he was really having a hard time too. It is really hard for parents to feel sympathy for their child when they are caught doing drugs and alcohol, and in fact we didn't bend in our demeanor as parents. However, just now, months later it is when I am starting to understand more clearly what he was going through too.

My son has a medical condition. In fact according to therapy, a neurological assessment, and several other sources, this boy has more than one thing not working correctly in his body. So the reality is that he needs medication. Unfortunately, when you or your child are ill but a diagnosis cannot be narrowed down to a single problem, finding the correct medication is not that simple. I can safely say, without a doubt, that the reason he was doing so well for a while in school was because he was self medicating himself with marijuana and I think it was working. Unfortunately I cannot tell him this without sounding as if I am sponsoring his drug taking behaviour. Once he tested positive in the 10 week program, then things got worse because he started to experiment with other things in hopes to find the same effect without having to test positive. The obsession was horrible. He would ramble for as long as you would argue with him requesting that we understand him and allow him to do all of this experimenting without interfering in the process. Quotes, statistics, all kinds of impeccable logic came out of his speeches for which I honestly did not have good rebuttals. I was fighting a war with drugs and losing it.

We all know that at some point in time we will probably discover that our kids have done alcohol and maybe drugs. What we don't expect is to find ourselves woken up at 1:30 a.m. by the sound of a blender grinding dried out San Pedro cactus in an effort to create mescaline and the look of amazement in your child's face when you ask him what the hell he is doing? It has become a sure nightmare to try to keep him from harming himself in his efforts to try out anything that might have the effect he is seeking. I can see the train coming and the railroad is vibrating vigorously in anticipation of the steel locomotive wheels rushing over whatever is in its way, yet I have zero ability to stop it from happening. All I can do is jump up and down and wave my hands in warning because even my screams are muffled by the noise in his mind. Oh God please do not let him hurt himself, not while I am alive!

Just today I received an email from one of you, and intermingled in the kind words I read the expression that we have all heard before, "God does not give us anything we cannot handle." I want God to know now that He has my permission to stop anytime He wants, I am so ready for things to be OK again. I constantly feel like I am failing in this test of wills. I really need to know that things are eventually going to be alright, even if for just a little while so that I am able to recharge my soul and make myself able to handle more. I am so NOT the right person for all of this craziness and sorrow, but of course I understand that I have absolutely no choice in the matter at all. He is my son. I am his father. That will never change.

I am so ready for this war to end. In fact, I am pretty sure I cannot win. I would like to win, but I am being a realist. I will not admit defeat in his eyes for obvious reasons that any parent would know without words, but really, I lost the moment when he took marijuana the first time. First of all because I have absolutely no power over his obsessive behaviour, and second of all because I am pretty sure it worked on him better than any other prescribed medication that had been given to him in the past. I have researched all possible arguments against it, but to this day, if I start a conversation on this subject with him, I can guarantee you that I will lose it again. Instead I have chosen to ignore the matter because to be candid with you, I have lost the will to go on fighting against something that deep inside I know has really helped him. I will not sponsor him taking any illegal drug, but to be frank, I cannot be home 24/7 to keep an eye and make sure that he does not do it.

What I have painfully learned is that if I try to control what I have almost no control over, I will make things worse. Every time I have blocked his actions towards doing something he should not do, I then find myself a few days later dealing with him doing something even worse. I am not giving up as a parent, far from it, I guarantee you that much. But I am picking my battles because if I go to full out war, I will lose.


Dad