I went to a high school basketball game tonight with a friend of mine, and when I came home I was frustrated that the recycling bin and garbage cans still hadn't been put away. (This is my son's job.)
So I grabbed the recycling bin from the curb and started wheeling it into the garage. My son, who had been in the garage, met me halfway and said, "I'll get that." I was kind of pissed off, so I just kept on wheeling the thing into the garage.
Imagine my surprise when I got in the garage and smelled the unmistakable aroma of pot. "What were you smoking in here?" I yelled to my son. "Just a cigarette," he answered. Not wanting to get into a confrontation, I simply responded with, "Are you sure? Because it sure smells like something else." Then I went into the house.
When I got inside, I told my wife I thought our son had been smoking pot in the garage. I asked her to go outside and see if she could smell what I smelled. She was outside for quite awhile, talking to our son. From the amount of time she spent outside, I could pretty much tell that my suspicion was true.
After my wife came back in, I asked her if I was right. She said I was, and that our son said it was just something he had "come across."
Just something he came across? That's total bullshit. The rules we laid down were simple: If you want to live in our house, you can't use drugs or alcohol. Period. And this is a blatant violation of that rule. I don't care how much or how little pot was smoked in the garage. Our kid once again has laughed in the face of our rules. And I'm totally fed up with it.
I'm not sure what the next move is. As much as I hate to do it, I think telling our son he has to find somewhere else to live is the only solution. A big, fat, giant message needs to be sent. And I don't know how else to do it.
That this happened tonight is kind of ironic. At the basketball game I was at tonight, a friend of mine asked how my son was doing. "So-so," I said. "His depression is still kicking him in the ass, but at least he's clean." Or so I had thought. Silly me.
I've also spent the last couple of days thinking about a line I heard in the episode of A&E's "Intervention" I watched the other night. At the intervention, the father was talking to his addict daughter about her getting clean. He looked at her and said: "I can't want it more than you." Man, I can't tell you how much that line resonated with me. So often I feel like I want my son to get clean more than he wants to get clean. And it's so incredibly frustrating.
I just made this post on my son's Facebook wall:
I can't want it more than you. It has to be the other way around.
