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Little boy lost….

The boy is now ten. He is grown in so many ways some good and some not so much. He has so many things going against him. He has inherited bipolar disorder from my family, and right now it is spiraling out of control. He has several other co-existing disorders that stem from or exasperate his condition. At one moment he is the most loving child you could meet, and the next he wants to kill you.

He has been getting considerably worse for two years. This year he is completely uncontrollable. He refuses to do his class work for his teachers. He will not do homework. He swears at us, and calls me names that I would never call my worse enemy, much less my mother. He steals and lies. When he wants to go some where and we tell him no, he goes any way. He gets up in the middle of the night and eats and drinks whatever he wants. If we didn’t give him his medication and stand over him and watch him swallow it, he wouldn't take it. He stole from home, he stole from daycare, and he stole from school. He took whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it, no matter who it belonged to. It was a normal week for me to get three or four calls from his teacher about "what he did today."

In the evening when we would be getting dinner and doing the normal evening routine, he would get agitated about normal things, like doing his chores, or taking a bath. He would strike out at the dogs in anger, just because they were there. He would hit me because I was the one making him do whatever it was he didn’t think he should have to do. There were times that living with him, was like living in hell. Except, I knew that what he was doing was his bipolar disorder, not him personally. Living with a child with mixed mania bipolar that is not medication regulated for one reason or another is like being on a roller coaster going out of control where your safety harness is about to snap. Just when you begin to visualize that, imagine being inside the brain of the child who has the disorder. It has been compared to having a storm in their brain.

Our son was at his end. He was quickly wearing out his welcome everywhere, school, daycare, and unfortunately home. Not that he wasn’t welcome at home, but we no longer knew how to control him. His phychiatrist wanted to send him to a residential treatment facility, which we were considering for a while. However, there are way too many bad things that happen to little boys at places like that.

So, our son, my flesh and blood, is no longer living in our home. He has been sent to live with the people that tried to raise me. I am content in the knowledge they are slightly different people then they were back then. I am terrified that they are still the same, at least somewhat. But they are the lesser of two evils.

I knew it would be hard to send him away, even to some place familiar, even with family. What I didn’t count on was that my heart was going to break in two when he hugged me goodbye. What I didn’t count on was that my heart was going to break in to when he said, "I love you Mom" when he walk away and step onto the plane. What I didn’t count on was my heart breaking in two each and every time I hang up the phone after talking to him every week.

I miss my little boy lost….

(Out of order sign firmly tucked into the side pocket of briefcase)

……So February 14, 1997 we got married. I know, I know what a cliché. Well, among many many other reasons, the biggest being I know I was gay, I should have know this marriage was doomed right from the beginning. On the way to my Aunt’s house, which is where we were holding the blessed event, my brand new, only owned it for two weeks, car breaks down for the second time. It was like the car was saying, "I am not having any part of this and if you are going to go through with it, then you are going to do it with out me!" So, after I go get a tow truck and a rental car, I get over to my Aunt’s and find out that my two year old is being taken to the emergency room to get stitches in his face! Apparently he was sitting on my sister’s lap and was squirming to get down and lurched forward and cracked his face on the desk in front of them. Right next to his eye!! Did this stop me? Noooo of course not. I paid big bucks for that dress damn it and I was going to wear it!!

Well, he made it back from the hospital in time to put on his suit and look all cute running back and forth with the rings on the pillow. The rest of the day was pretty unremarkable. I got pretty tipsy, which was my way of dealing with all the anxiety of the day, and Alex was ticked that he could not drive the rental car our entire vacation, I mean honeymoon. The good part of the honeymoon, for me anyway, is with all the stress I was going through, Mother Nature came for a visit a week early, so that meant no marriage consummation. Darn.

After the blissful honeymoon, she says tongue in cheek; it was back to the "normal life." We both went back to work, and the little one went back to daycare. Things were fairly good for a little while. After about a month the phone rings and it is this woman demanding to speak to Alex. I give him the phone, and I wait to see what it is going to be about, or at least what his story is going to be. Well, it seems, my husband, that supposedly has never been married before, has two children that he has not been supporting. They are five and six, boy and girl respectively, and he has not been supporting them for a couple of years. Well our wedding was in the paper and she is going to court to get his support started again. Not a problem for me, but it would have been nice to know I was marrying a family, not just a guy. Guess what? Turns out he actually has three total kids, from two different women, one that he was married to. The other kid (boy) is seventeen. By the time we had been married for five months, I had both of his boys living with us and the girl was with us every weekend. Still, not a problem, except he didn’t want anything to do with the kids. I took care of them all. He was never around on the weekends. When he was around he was violent to everyone. Everyone except my son. I went on a vacation in July of 1997 and took the five-year-old and my son with me. Alex had to stay home and work supposedly. I went to Ohio and Alex decided to bring over a girlfriend to keep my side of the bed warm for me while I was gone. I guess he needed to get sex from someone, because I was not giving it to him near as much as he was screaming for it. His seventeen year old was nice enough to tell me all about it when I got back.

By the end, which was September of the same year, 1997, he was drinking a lot and being extremely violent. He would take out his anger on me, by screaming and threatening to hit me. He would tell me about all the violent, nasty things he had done to other people, people that had crossed him. He would take his anger out on his kids by knocking them around, and berating everything they did. Nothing they did was good enough for him. I would try to get home from work early enough to get the two younger kids fed and in bed before he would get home from work because I never knew what kind of mood he was going to come home in. The seventeen-year-old could pretty much handle himself, and if things got too bad would just tell his dad where to go and take off for a while.

One night I could not stop his insanity. The five-year-old got into the TV stand and tore up something of his Dad’s. He knew it was a big no no to be in there but he did it anyway. Before I had a chance to clean it up, Alex came home. He saw what had happened and just exploded. He grabbed the kid by the hair and slapped him a couple of times. Then he dragged him upstairs by his hair, both of them screaming the whole time-one with fury the other with pain and fear. By the time I made it up the stairs behind him, he had the kid’s pants down and a sock in his mouth and had the belt cocked back ready to fire away. I stepped in between the two of them and said, "NO!" You are not going to hit him." He screamed a warning for me to get out of the way, but I did not budge. I got his pants back up and took the sock out of his mouth and edged him out of the room. The seventeen-year-old took him out in the hallway where he was holding my two-year old trying to keep him out of the room. Alex was screaming at me things like how the kids get away with murder and now I had crossed him and didn’t I know what happened to people who "cross" him? All I could say to him was, "I want a divorce, and I want you out of my house." He lunged at me and hit me one time as hard as he could. I put my hand to my face and looked at the blood and I said as firmly as I could "NOW!" When he realized I wasn’t going to back down or cry or I don’t know exactly what reaction he was looking for, he turned and went through the hall and stormed down the stairs. I followed him down; the kids stayed upstairs-I thought it would be best. In the kitchen he opened a beer from the six pack he brought home and practically threw the rest of it in the fridge. I told him I was not kidding about wanting him out, and I would call the cops if I had to. That enraged him even more. He hated the thought of having his privacy invaded by the police. He was opening and closing the kitchen cabinets and drawers with so much force I had to summons all my strength to keep from jumping every time. I did not want him to think I was afraid of him, but in truth I was scared to death he was going to kill me. I knew he was capable of it, I had stood by and watched a man do it to my mother when I was seven years old and I was not going to put my son or these other children through that. With him it was not so much about not wanting to lose me because he loved me too much, but more about control. He was losing control of a situation that he thought he was in control of, when in reality he was never really ever in control of anything including his own mind. He took his beer and went to the bathroom. While he was in there I went into the living room and I called my dad. I told him what was going on and that I needed him to come over and help me get him to leave. He said he was on his way, but in the mean time to keep the phone in my hand, and if he started anything else, to call the police immediately. When he came out of the bathroom, he was very suspicious of my room change and kept asking me why I had the phone in my hand. I told him it was because I wanted him to leave and if he didn’t do it I was going to call the police. My dad made the trip to my house in about ten minutes and beeped his horn to let me know he was outside. I told Alex that I had called him, because I was worried about the kids and myself and I wanted him to leave and my dad was going to help make sure he did. He was getting more and more angry by the minute. My day came in and said, "what’s going on?" I answered that Alex still wouldn’t leave and Alex just stared my dad down like my dad was a matador and he a raging bull. My dad suggested to Alex that he just go spend the night with his mother and let every one cool down, and by the next day maybe we could all sit and talk about what was going on more calmly. Alex said he wasn’t leaving in my truck because he was afraid that as soon as he did I would call the cops and say he stole it. Now I am asking him to leave, why would I do that? I am not like that. Then he says he is not leaving with his son’s. The oldest one hollers down the stairs that he isn’t going anywhere with him and I tell him I am not letting him take the little one anywhere. After going back and forth for about a half an hour my dad tells me to go ahead and call the police because that is the only way things are going to be resolved.