A Blended Family's Tragedy
sure it would be okay. He packed up his stuff and I told him he was throwing away his job, his chance for a driver's license and his G.E.D. He didn't care. He walked out.
My husband (his stepfather) came home about that time. My son just kept walking. I told him what had happened, and we thought we'd let him walk it off, that he would find out soon that his one little bag of clothing and $20.00 or so wouldn't last him long in this world. I called his father and told him about it, and he drove out looking for him, but didn't see him, and he had to go to work himself, so he would check in later. An hour later we received a phone call from the police station. They had my son there. They wanted to know what was going on. He was 16 years old walking down the road with a bag, and said he was going to another town to stay with relatives. I told him we'd come up and talk to them.
We arrived at the police station and asked them to call in a crisis prevention counselor. He was a nice, but very tired man who told us he was looking towards his 60th birthday. He said he'd seen so much that nothing was new or surprizing to him. He told us the options we had open to us -- either our son agrees to come home with us, and we have to take him, or if he doesn't agree to come home, they place him in what's called 'limited custody', a foster home, until they go before the judge and the judge decides what to do with him. If we don't take him home, we will be guilty of neglect and the Division of Children and Family Services will be involved. We asked him what could we do with a child who refuses to follow the rules and is doing drugs, etc? He shook his head and said they were pretty limited with what they could offer to a parent with these problems. The best he could tell us is that we enroll him in counseling -- which we've tried before, and he just lies to the counselors -- or we could take him in for psychiatric evaluation and put him in a hospital.
Since he has a drug problem, which
Latest Articles