Season of Change

There is a quiet miracle going on in my house. The quiet part is amazing in itself, because the miracle involves my son and he has never been quiet. Not about anything. Since the moment he was plucked from my C-sectioned belly as a small, sinewy creature, my boy has stormed through life. Big smiles, loud cries, deep questions, he lives big. For a time, as recently as last spring, I could not help imagining how big his death would be, too. As a severe drug addict, his disease did what the disease does when left unmanaged: it got worse. Then it got much worse. He came home for the holidays and never went back to the Bay Area, where he'd been leading a secret life, barely hanging onto to socially acceptable activities like work and school. In January, I kicked him out of his childhood room into the freezing snow. He spiraled down steep and fast. He became homeless. 

Even when he had food, he didn't eat it. One day, I drove my son to an appointment. A pint of blueberries, grown in summertime on the other side of the world, sat between us. They were perfectly sweet and juicy. As my son got out of the car, I offered him the rest of the basket. He looked at them as though remembering what it felt like to enjoy food, but sadly shook his head. I watched him walk toward the office building, stopping to light a cigarette.   
 

He made it to his sister's high school graduation in June. He was rail thin. He looked dead, like a vampire who has mistakenly wandered out into the light. It didn't suit him. He was miserable. But he was alive. He was there. My daughter burst into tears when she saw him, flooded with relief that he made it and sad, too, for the shell of the young man he'd become. He made it to his sister's graduation party after a night of hallucinations. The morning of the party we called 911 in desperate hope of getting him admitted. The attempt failed when the EMT told him that he couldn't make him go and left. But the party went on.

And it was an amazing party, mostly for what occurred beneath the surface. Our 'broken' family caused by divorce, had become a larger, more cohesive family. There we were: mother, mother's husband, father, father's girlfriend, son and daughter all celebrating our daughter's completion of high school. That was a miracle in itself. But there was something else: as broken and battered as our son was, he was there, facing the pitying and worried stares of neighbors who'd known him since he was a child. His arms were marked, his face sunken and pale. He flitted from room to room, trying to carry on polite conversations, but mostly avoiding them. His friend chaperoned him, guided him, provided him a sane reference point and all the while tried to coax him to get help. This was the very friend who, years earlier, we were sure would be the death of our son. Now he was his sober savior.

 

In the kitchen, my son and daughter stood for a moment, their backs to the chatting neighbors and friends. As he looked out the window, he said: "This is the last place in the world I want to be right now. But because it's for you, it is the only place I want to be." They both cried.

I, meanwhile, had the strangest feeling of absolute acceptance for things exactly as they were. For the first time, I marveled at what we'd gained, the miracle that he was there, that we were all there, gathering in honor of daughter and sister. Rather than the sense of embarrassment that had dogged me for so many years during his high school years, as I hid from neighbors in the grocery store, unable to face one more question about whether my boy was still playing soccer, I felt immense freedom. If there was judgment, I was impervious to it. Yes, I thought, this is my daughter who not only made it through high school despite her ongoing worry that her brother would not live to see her graduate; and yes, this is our son, diminished by addiction, broken and battered. But he is our son. There he was. He sat beside me in the garden at one point as I chatted with neighbors. I could feel him shaking, he body tense. It was like holding my toddler again. Then he went out front to smoke a cigarette.

Over the next few months, he prematurely bounced in and out of two different treatments, tried to replace old drugs with new, guaranteeing he would be part of every new drug trend that hit the papers. He grew hopeless. But sometimes recovery and the depths of addiction are exactly the same moment.

I cannot tell you exactly how it happened. Neither can he, though he contends it is a deeply spiritual process. But I can tell you what recovery looks like today on this glorious fall day: my son is eating blueberries by the handfuls. He is eating everything. He has gained weight and muscle. He rides his beloved fixed gear bike everywhere. He is in school, addicted to learning and getting A's. His skin is clear. He walks around shirtless, no longer hiding marks on his arms. He is even-tempered, more so than I can ever remember. He has his bad moods -- and so do I -- but he says he would never trade his worst mood sober, for his best day using. Sometimes he feels lonely, as climbing out of a cave can be.

He is struck by the emotions he must have caused in others, particularly his sister. Sober, he was able to be fully present for her leaving the nest for college. "I can't imagine what she must have gone through seeing me leave under such unhealthy and scary circumstances -- it's hard seeing someone go, even when it's for something good like college." Indeed, he feels everything again. As a deeply intuitive person, this can be a burden. He feels sadness in us all -- and he is never wrong about that. But healing begets healing. He is living with me and my husband full time. Our family, brand new and old, is real and does what a family should do: gives us the strength and encouragement to be the best we can be in the world -- as we are right now, this moment.

I am enjoying my son as I never did before. I am doing what I wish I had the loving detachment to do when he was a toddler: I sit back and just watch him go. I have no ownership of his progress, just as I'd finally let go of the idea that I could cure his disease. I can no more cure this than I can cure diabetes. I can only bask in the joy of being around a young man who feels good in his own skin, perhaps for the first time since he was taken from my womb. He is 21 years old. Life begins over and over, each moment, if we awake for it.

Where We Are Now: Home

Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul -- but so have we...You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth...we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.

--Thomas Wolfe (You Can't Go Home Again)

When my son ran away from home for the first time nearly six years ago, he was 15. It was sparked by an argument that I could barely remember even then. I learned later that he slept on various couches and in leaking tents in backyards for two weeks. Miraculously showed up in uniform for his first day of school, but that was the first of many abrupt and premature departures from what was, by all measures, a safe, secure and loving home. It was the beginning of a convoluted pilgrimage that he was compelled to take. Now, at the age of 21, that pilgrimage has brought him back home again, to a house that looks the same but is nothing like the one he left so many years ago.

We are all different now. He is sober, six years older -- both ancient and newborn -- back in the place of his childhood, the place of our hopes, illusions and truth about family, then and now. He has come back to an entirely new family, to be sure. In the intervening years, his father and I separated, divorced, found new partners; his sister grew, wrestled with nightmares, found love, got her heart broken, discovered her strength again and is off to college in a couple of weeks.  Meanwhile, my son has been a soldier in a war against addiction that is inseparable, I now know, from his spiritual journey that began for him at his birth -- or maybe even lifetimes before that. And now, just when I was preparing to be both sad and free as an empty-nester, my first-born son is home again -- or maybe for the first time ever.

This was what Thomas Wolfe was talking about when he said you can never go home again. The structure my son left and visited for short stretches of calm sobriety looks the same, but the players are all entirely different. His dad no longer lives in the house and a new man, my husband, is there instead. I am changed, a different person than the insane woman who was trying to mother him by trying to lock him into the house, then when that failed, locking him out of it. I was at my wits end trying to save him from a disease that cannot be stopped, even by a superhero.

Even at five, my son had his eye on life beyond his home. He was in kindergarten, wearing a dinosaur shirt, waiting for the school bus, when he asked me how old he'd be when he had to move out. Some kids moved out when they go to college, I told him, but that wouldn't be for a long, long time. There's no hurry, I said, trying to assure him with a smile. But he had that faraway look in his eye, as though he were already obeying another timetable. Ten years later, during his first run of homelessness at the age of 16, I asked him if he felt he had no choice. "No," he said. "I know I have a choice and I have no idea why I keep choosing this hard road."

Though I am forever his mother, I have changed deeply. It is parenting itself that brought to my knees, helped me discover who I was beyond my firstborn's savior. I have become so many things since he left. I have learned most of all to open my heart and proceed with hope, despite not knowing if my son would make it to see another day. In short, I have been restored to sanity and health. That, in itself, is a miracle and gives me faith that healing is available to everyone.

"I haven't really had a home in six years," my son said recently, his clear gaze back. "I'm trying to figure out how to have that." And I am trying to figure out how to help him find it, without losing myself. My son is back. I can see it in his eyes. He has returned home. We are all trying to figure out what that really means. Trust is slow coming, but I have given my son a key to the house. He has put his clothes in his dresser drawer, devised a nightstand, where he keeps The Fabric of the Universe, agreed to regular drug tests, administered by a clinic. Today, he takes out the trash, respects my things; he is gentle and thoughtful; he is enrolled in community college and looking for work. Today, like yesterday and the day before, he is sober.

Last weekend, my son was in a bad mood. So we went to the park with a ball, mitt and a Little League bat.  I love to play catch. It's one of many activities I miss about having young children. I have no idea where the bat came from, because my kids never played baseball. But there it was, waiting for us to reclaim something that was never ours, or perhaps I just don't remember the normal times. As we pitched to each other and played catch, my son's face began to soften. We were happy, mother and son, remembering what we once had or just what we hoped for. I do not know what will happen tomorrow. But today we are home, at once brand new and very old.