Letting Go

Letting Go

It’s Christmas Eve. This is the first Christmas that William has not been living here. He is now 19. He is having a third attempt at ‘A’ levels, studying at a crammer in London and now living with his grandmother in Surrey. We will see him tomorrow, when the family gets together for Christmas lunch at my sister’s house in Dulwich, about twenty minutes away. Our other boys are now 16 and 13. The sadness and sense of unreality I feel at him no longer living with us is tempered by the relief that we have peace at home, something we have been seeking for many years. We asked him to leave at half-term, in October this year. At that moment I didn’t care whether he ever returned. I knew we were doing the right thing for us all. As a family we had tried just about everything to try to help him, and still the madness was continuing.

Since I wrote the piece for the Daily Express, which you can read on this web-site, a lot has happened. I ended by saying that we were still in the mire, and we still are. I mentioned at the end of the article that William had a job interview, but he failed to turn up for it. We had made it clear to him when he parted company with his sixth form college that we’d expect him to find employment and get an income. He agreed, genuinely appearing to want to begin a career. He has always talked a lot about being independent, and ‘getting us off his back’. Most of all he passionately wanted to have his own money to spend, and to do what he wanted with it. He received an allowance from us, but this had clearly never been enough for him.

Since he has been smoking weed, his main preoccupation has been getting hold of enough money to finance his lifestyle, and he began stealing to fund it. During his GCSE year, money began to go missing from my purse, from our children’s wallets, portable cd players disappeared as did cds, PS2 games, and DVDs, even clothes would go missing - presumably sold to buy dope. William would be mugged and have his mobile phone stolen every two months or so. Again, with hindsight, we can see now that all these things must have been sold for drugs. At the time I wasn’t sure what was going on. He used to spend days away from the house, I knew very little about his life. Trying to run a busy household it’s not always easy to see the bigger picture.

I never believed that William could have become a thief, just as I found it almost impossible to believe that he had become addicted to cannabis. I was unsure whether you could become addicted to cannabis anyway. I’d smoked some during my time at university back in the late 70s, and all it did was give me the giggles then I’d be asleep ten minutes later. I didn’t know then that the stuff on the market was very different, and smoking it as a teenager when the brain was still developing was highly dangerous and could lead to mental health problems such as personality changes, psychosis and even schizophrenia.

My husband suspected that William was stealing from me, and so did I, but I presumed my son would admit he was doing this and then stop. My husband, Guy, is a criminal barrister and I always felt that he was too quick to see our son as a defendant in the dock. It seemed to me that he wanted to write our son off; labelling him a thief seemed cruel and insensitive. He was only sixteen - this did not seem the way to help heal the rifts between us and him. Money or property would go missing and my husband would immediately suspect William. I would say that we couldn’t confront William directly because we had no evidence to support our assertions. ‘What you’re saying would never stand up in a court of law’, I used to say to Guy.

I was convinced that my way was the right way, and my husband’s way wasn’t. I found it impossible then to align myself with my husband’s beliefs. I now believe you must present a united front to your children, but I believed then that as long as you continued to be fair, and loving, you couldn’t go wrong. I always thought with my heart and observed my husband’s inability of doing this towards William, secretly wondering whether he was jealous of our son. William was by this time 6’5” tall, an inch taller than my husband. They reminded me, at times, of two deer locking horns over who was head of the tribe. Instead of letting them get on with this though, often I would step in and try to make peace between them. Looking back, I realise this didn’t help. I have now learnt that I can step right back instead of forwards into the fray, and just let them get on with it. Certain things are not the business of the female; there are issues concerning the masculine that I can leave well alone. Boys learn to be men from their fathers, not their mothers.

In my attempt at fairness, when something went missing, we would often have a family meeting where both our other boys Jack, 14, and Alex, 11, and William, were asked if they knew anything about the missing property. Looking back, I think it might have been better to follow my husband’s lead on this and say to William ‘I believe you have taken this’, and then give a warning.

William always denied stealing from us, and a big part of me wanted to believe him. Over the years I have learnt to respond with a detached ‘I don’t believe you’, when I know he is lying, and he still lies a lot. Back then it would leave me feeling wretched and wrung out each time. I couldn’t understand why he would want to take such a destructive path: drugs, stealing, raging, aggression – what was going on? He’d had a privileged upbringing, in a stable family environment – surely he had no need to do any of this! I was hoping the nightmare would end soon, it had to. Then something happened to open my eyes a little more to what exactly was going on in William’s life.