Our nightmare began at 11pm, Christmas night, 2019.
Sean, our beloved son, 15 years old with a pocket full of Christmas money jumped out of his bedroom window with a thud!
The next 4 months are still hard to comprehend. This smart, funny, sporty and popular boy is soooooo loved by his family and friends. What happened to make him choose to run away and try as many drugs as he could find. How did this happen? Was it the sadness from the sudden loss of his grandma? The loss of his beloved dog? We have a wonderful, close relationship within our family, wasn’t it enough? What did we miss?
Bless lockdown! Not covid, I wouldn’t wish this disease on anyone. Somehow lockdown brought him home. Not that we hadn’t seen him. He had come and gone but it was random, sad and scary. So many scares. A call from the hospital saying an ambulance had brought him in after an overdose. A call from him asking to be picked up after being bashed and threatened at knife point. Police bringing him home after being caught with possession of drugs. The list goes on and on. Bless lockdown. He came home. He stayed, mostly.
We’re not out of the woods. Eighteen months on and he still has an addiction. I’m not meant to call it that but he does and that's the truth. Addiction is a cruel disease and it has clouded him. We are on constant alert. Life is so different to how we imagined it would be. That said, we live in hope. He has so much life, love and joy to spread. We will be there when he is ready, we will continue planting seeds of hope for his recovery. We hold on to the belief that it will happen. The positives are that he has wonderful support. He is still at school, thanks to some beautiful teachers and staff who see the good in him and understand the struggle. We have support from awesome organisations such as SDECC, Taldumande House and Streetworks. We have a brilliant GP and pediatrician who helped diagnose ADHD (which flew totally under the radar because he had been performing well at school) and he has us, our family, Mum, Dad, younger brother and dogs. We love him unconditionally.
This journey has taken its toll. His younger brother is having difficulty with the situation. He looks up to this wonderful, funny, talented boy and is struggling to understand. My husband and I have had a roller coaster of emotions and so many sleepless nights. I would say for a year I experienced extreme anxiety. I stopped socialising and felt I had failed as a parent.
Reaching out to other parents and the parent support group run by Wende Jowsey were the best things I could have done. Finding a safe, non-judgemental environment where parents of teens in crisis share their ups and downs and learn concepts of mindfulness, coping strategies and practical, relevant information has given me myself back. I now feel capable of being present for all the situations that arise both for Sean and for whatever life throws at me. In fact, life is throwing me a lot of joy which I know I would have missed if I hadn’t put my ‘oxygen mask’ on.
Anonymous author and child
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