Day 2...

Imagine my surprise to discover that my oldest son was already up on Monday getting ready to go to school when I got out of bed. The surprise grew dimmer in my heart when I realized that he had not ever gone to bed and had pull an all nighter in order to go. This behaviour has become more and more prevalent. Anxiety and other emotions run high inside him so he finds it extremely difficult to be able to fall asleep using a regular 16 hours awake and 8 to sleep routine. Instead he simply stays up until he literally crashes after a minimum of 48 hours of non-stop action.

When I arrived home from work in the afternoon there he was sitting on the ground with his back resting against the garage door having a smoke. The cigarette is common, but him being outside of the house in 105 degrees Fahrenheit heat in full view for me to not be able to miss him, that is much less typical of him. Usually when I get home in the afternoons I have to do a quick door knob check of his room. Door locked means that he is home, door unlocked means he is out with his friends hanging out. Rarely will I ever find him in plain view outside in the sunlight, this would be like finding Lestat the vampire sunbathing in a lounge chair in my backyard. I could not call myself a parent if I did not recognize that this sudden change in behaviour meant something significant was going on.

He raised himself from the driveway entrance allowing my car to pull into the shaded yet hotter than Death Valley garage. We greeted each other with our usual afternoon hug and proceeded to get go into the air conditioned house. Ahhhh! It is so much easier to process any thoughts when your brain is not being fried in such infernal heat. I had not taken more than four steps into the dining room area when my younger son came out to give dad his afternoon hug too. The gesture was followed by a "I need help with my algebra homework" declaration with notebook in hand. Five seconds later I was already parked at the table wondering how long before I would be able to finally relax from an extremely long day I had at work. However, dad duty comes first so I grabbed some scratch paper and a pencil and got ready to tackle Real Numbers and their properties.

A few minutes after I had started to help my youngest with his homework, the older guy comes to the table and sits. This too is extremely unusual unless a matter of money transaction is being played at the time. I really didn't need to be hit over the head with the proverbial pan to know that tutoring skills where about to be traded for counseling skills at that moment. Wearing dark sunglasses inside the house can only mean one of three things; he's too cool to take them off, his eyes are bloodshot from self medicating, or he's hiding emotional distress. Believe it or not the first two alternatives are easier to tackle than the third one. Being too cool is just a kid thing, and I am not about to mess with nature. Self medicating is an extremely sensitive subject and there are at least a hundred books that provide advice on the subject. However, understanding teenage emotional distress is actually more complicated than it appears to be at first sight

I have discovered that in my son's mind there are several basic assumptions that play themselves out of which I have very little influence. For one, even though I was completely uninformed as to the reason he was in this emotional state, the presumption on his side was, and always is, that I should be able to tell. For this I use my reading body language skills. Too much talking, fidgeting, and overall excitement on his end reveals a completely different mood than the contrary. The state of mind is easier to detect than the reason behind it because at this stage he is past verbal communication and retreated into himself. If I inquire bluntly as to why he is depressed a more common than not response is the shoulder shrug meaning "I don't want to talk about it" which in reality means "Use your godly parenting skills to find out." A more effective method I have discovered is to inquire subliminally. This requires a bit more skill because if he smells me digging, he'll feed me junk information to cover the hole faster than I can get to what I need to know. I've discovered that a good way to start this process is to ask him about other people instead of him. For example, if I know that one of the other kids in his posse is having a rough time because of some story he told me during the week, I'll start with him first. "How is [enter other kids name here] doing?" Empathy, showing genuine interest in his world allows him to answer without being aware that what I am doing is knocking at his door. "Are any of your friends in your classes, who?" If he starts to say something instead of grunt answers back, progress is being achieved. Asking about the classes themselves or the teachers will only turn the mood negatively, so instead I steer my concern around what he really cares about, his social life. Once I've got him saying more than "yes" and "no" by introducing open ended questions, then the air in the room seems more breathable and a flow of communication might be possible.

By the time we had established a positive link between us, it was then obvious to me that whatever was dragging him down could not be extracted on a single sitting down session. Behind the dark shades I could feel his more uncommon than usual pain. He opened a little to tell me that he felt that going to school at this juncture felt hopeless because of how backed up he had become in the last two years. His inability to establish regular sleep hours only increased his doubts as to being able to hack it, or stay focused. I could tell from his short sentences that his self image was degraded, wounded to say the least. I am after all just a mere mortal and not a god, so my heart was torn again into shredded little pieces of anguished emotional paper knowing that he was at that moment hitting the proverbial bottom of his emotional well. I held back what deep inside me wanted to evolve into tears hoping that I could find the right words to say without choking in the process. I was successful at not allowing my emotional bucket to overflow, but I failed miserably in being able to impart wisdom in that exact moment. For a little while the silence between us found itself a comfortable chair and sat. In that time his mom arrived to pick up his brother since Mondays are our custodial switching days. Then he walked away and left the room in silence.

I eventually made my way to his room and asked him if he could sit so that I could tell him a few words. I tried to the best of my abilities to make sure he knew that he was not alone and that I would support him in getting his life back together in whatever way we could find to do it. I offered to get him professional help and he said yes, but not just yet. I tried to discover what it was that had bruised him enough to be in such a depressed state, but other than saying that he had a really bad day, not much else was revealed. I am not one to beat around the bushes when it comes to thoughts of suicide, so without hesitation I told him that nothing that might be going on in his life right now would matter in later years, so if he had any thoughts about hurting himself to please allow me to help him. He immediately replied that the thought had never entered his mind, and for me not to worry about such a thing. He said he was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep so we hugged, I told him I loved him, and he returned the gesture with a longer than usual hug and said "I love you too dad."

Last night I slept with my door completely open to be able to hear if he woke up during the night. Other than the usual sounds of wood contracting back to normal because of the evening's lower temperature, silence ruled the darkness around me. I was not able to fall asleep until way past midnight, hence all of the pictures that I added to some of the posts. By wake up time my concern for my son's well being overpowered my tired body and I was ready to leave to go to work before six in the morning. I knocked on his door and found no answer. I knocked a second time with the same results. I fumbled through a stack of house keys and found the one with the letter "A" on it and unlocked his door. As he lifted his sleepy head from his pillow I asked if he was going to school, the answer was "no." Sometimes in the past I would start nagging and threatening which I have discovered to be less than ten percent effective. This time I just closed the door behind me and went off to work with a mixture of feeling a bit guilty, defeated, and concerned. Concern overruled the rest of my emotions and I sit here today pondering what I should do next.

They say that when we hit rock bottom there is nowhere else to go but back up. What they don't tell you is that while you are squirming down at the bottom of your emotional well, the people that truly love you are typically there suffering one way or another with you, and waiting to see you do better again to be part of your life. It might seem lonely down there, but I am living proof that you are not alone. I will not give up on this extension of my soul that I call my son. As much as it aggravates me to have to deal with all of his complicated behaviour, I am not able to let go because doing so would be accepting defeat and I am not ready to lose this war. There is something you, my reader can do to help me. More than anything I need your prayers, positive and loving thoughts to see us thorough it all. I feel blessed that you have taken the time to share with me by reading my blog.

Before I go I want to leave you with the message my son wrote at the bottom of the picture that he took of the rose that is attached to this post. At the time, over a year and a half ago, he posted some of his pictures to share with strangers on a site called Deviant Art. I asked him if he did not mind if I could use them and he gladly obliged. He wrote...

"I kept a little rose in a glass because for some reason it's life and death visually inspired me while I was writing."

Thank you for reading, Dad.