"Hello, is this the Piper residence? Will you take a call from your son?"
It's the psychiatric hospital calling on my adult child's behalf. The caller ID displays only the hospital's prefix in a distant zip code. Three digits tell me two things: he's safe...and he's sick.
How is it possible that my heart can both leap and sink at the same time?When I see "510," I think: "Thank God!" and "Oh no!"
Since it's the third hospital in a year, I have learned a few things about talking to my inpatient. I don't ask how or why he got there, because his account will be unreliable. Anything he says in the first few days is likely to be incoherent, belligerent, or maudlin. His mood will be unstable for up to fourteen days. When his conversation turns to ranting and blaming, I disengage. "Why don't we talk when we're both less out of sorts?" Click.
I don't promise anything, If he needs something, his social worker will tell me. I don't negotiate with the disease. It's not my job to find benefits, a bed or a flight.
It's my job to keep myself from drowning.
I read somewhere that congruence exists when one's talk, actions and feelings match up. I am a long way from congruence. As far as what my son HEARS, my walk and my talk are consistent: when you're ready to consider a long-term treatment situation, we will help. Until then, it's yours to figure out.
As for what I FEEL, I FEEL like getting on a plane and flying to his bedside. I FEEL like putting him in a taxicab from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi River just to set eyes on him. I FEEL like sending money.
But those actions constitute a rescue. Rescue occurs when you do something for a competent adult that they can do for themselves. And if he's competent enough to find the dope man, he's competent to find the Drop-In Center. Ditto for the medication: if he can find money for booze and weed, he can find $10 for the prescription that would keep him stable all month.
"Act your way into right thinking" was just one of those yellowed 12-step phrases that hung on the wall at my home group...until I had to do it. And I do mean acting: I deserve an Emmy for some of the performances I have given in the last year while my son plays Relapse Roulette.
But maybe the congruence is starting to happen. Consider: when a hospital begins discharge planning, their first attempt is usually to reunite the patient with family, especially for youth. My son's doctor asked me to consider bringing him home. I did.
I got very still and pretended he was arriving at the airport at 8:45 that night - with no agreement about rehab, no ownership of his illness, no movement forward - and I did a gut-check. (It's an old therapy trick: you make your mind shut up a minute, and listen to your gut, because it will tell you the truth.)
And it felt...sickening. The prospect of living the last four years over again filled me with a palpable dread that made me all but swoon.
I was polite but resolute when I emailed the social worker to decline being part of any homecoming plan.
Poet Charles Bukowski once said he'd rather drive from New York to LA in reverse than live certain parts of his life over again. That goes for me, too, brother. As of a few months now, the thought of hitting rewind is WORSE than the anxiety about what the next years will bring.
Am I "acting my way into right thinking?" Or just acting? Some days it's both.
