Christmas letter would give a jolt
We will call her the “sad-eyed mother.” She would like to use her name, but her son will return to this community and she doesn’t want this story to trail him as he enters adult life. We rarely use anonymous sources, but this story is so compelling, especially in light of the Lakeside High School student suicide last week, that we’re making an exception today.
My city editor met the sad-eyed mother. She is real, and her story is more real than parents might wish to believe. The sad-eyed mother is 50. I don’t know her all that well. When I ran into her at a bookstore last week, she told me she won’t be sending out her usual wry Christmas letter.
If she did, she would tell the truth about her son, because some of our teens are suffering – from depression, from mental illness, from drug and alcohol addiction. We need to speak this reality to one another, she believes, in order to save the lives of these teens.
On July 26, the sad-eyed mother and her husband picked up their son at a friend’s house intending to drive him to Spring Creek Lodge Academy near Thompson Falls, Mont. It’s a boarding school for teens in trouble.
There were trouble signs everywhere in the son’s life – lethargic grades, sketchy school attendance, a minor-in-possession charge. And when the parents found evidence of cocaine use, they set in motion a plan for Spring Creek.
When the son realized their destination, he screamed and thrashed about in the car, accidentally kicking on the emergency notification switch to OnStar, an in-vehicle security service.
The operator asked, “Is this is an emergency?” Yes, it was. The police arrived. The sad-eyed mother watched her son led away in handcuffs. Between sobs, she wondered: “How did we get to this point?”
Two men sent by Spring Creek showed up at the juvenile detention center and drove away with her son. The school reins in troubled teens through strict rules and intense counseling. Its tactics are controversial; Time magazine featured the academy in its Nov. 22 issue. The academy costs $3,000 a month. The average stay is one year.
Though the sad-eyed mother and family have exchanged letters with the son, they were allowed to speak with him by phone for the first time Tuesday. They hope to visit him in person soon.
Parents who wish to visit must first attend seminars. At the first seminar, the facilitators told parents they weren’t there to discover what factors in popular culture or which video games seduced their teens into drugs. They said: “Your child went outside of your home to find what wasn’t there in your home.”
The sad-eyed mother realizes now that some of the problem stems from blinders worn by baby-boomer parents who behave more like buddies than adults. Parents so busy with their own lives, and so in need of their own needs being met, that they put their teens on auto-pilot.
“Adults have become way too good at justification and self-indulgence, and kids wonder why they can’t do the same,” the sad-eyed mother says.
Once upon a time in our culture, when teen girls got “in trouble,” they were sent away to homes for unwed mothers. Shame tracked some of these women the rest of their lives. The sad-eyed mother believes that drug treatment for teens – whether in boarding schools or community-based programs – constitutes our era’s taboo.
She has called the parents of her son’s friends. She often gets the let’s-not-talk- about-it-because-if-we-don’t-maybe- it’s-not-happening response. Yet teens who do drugs often hang out with teens who do the same.
The sad-eyed mother’s story unites all parents of teens, rich or poor. Our teens need the same things – parents who act like parents, attention and vigilance, hugs and kisses, no matter how much the teens say they hate them.
They are children still. And if they don’t find these things at home, they will find them out there. Dragons live out there.
This is what the sad-eyed mother would say in her holiday letter. If she had the energy to write it.