Getting help

William is back in the house. Speaking to his father on the telephone whilst he was still at my mother in law’s house in Guildford, he assured his father that he was going to try 110 per cent to make things work this time. Guy and our other two children went down to collect him on the 29^th. I decided to stay at home, I needed some time to myself and also I wanted to get the house straight before he returned. Our priority has been to protect our property. We have locked away in the safe all cheque books, and credit card statements. All my jewellery is in a locking box that my sister gave me for Christmas. Our bedroom door is now locked when we are not upstairs.

I was happy to see William, but I’m not expecting too much because past experience has taught me not to do so. We’ve had many new beginnings, all of them ending in failure. He went out with friends almost immediately he arrived back in the house, but these were old friends from his last year at primary school who were getting together for a reunion locally, one of whom came to the house an hour after his arrival. I know that this young man neither drinks nor smokes and so he reminded me of a visiting angel, sitting as he was on top of a small chest of drawers as I went into William’s room to say hello. I have been asking for a miracle after all!

After they left I went into his room to draw the curtains, picking up litter that he had already begun to drop on his floor and amongst the used bits of tissue and cellophane from cigarette packets was a familiar ‘baggy’. Opening it to smell the remains of the weed it had held, I was glad I had decided not to attach to any positive outcome. I’d been here before many times before.

In May 2005, during William’s first attempt to do A levels, about ten minutes before we were about to leave for  Spain on a Whitsun holiday I found around £300 in used £10 and £20 notes on a bookshelf in William’s room. He must have heard me go into his room because he came bounding up the stairs, asking what I was doing in there, pushing past me to slam his bedroom door in my face. I was getting used to this behaviour but hated it. It was only a few months before that he had slammed the front door on my hand as I was trying to escape from his raging.  I was nervous around him now, not trusting that he wouldn’t be violent towards me again.

Since he had been smoking dope he was always anxious to get as much money from us as possible. If he was thwarted over money he always lost his temper: shouting, slamming doors, being verbally abusive towards all of us. A large amount of cash in his room, though, this was something new. Asking him about it, he maintained that he had been working on a building site for a friend’s father who had paid him in cash. We didn’t believe him, and said so. Just about everything he said now turned out to be lies, which was stressful in itself. My husband told him that if the money turned out to be the proceeds of crime he would ask him to leave.

Another £400 in cash appeared in his room some weeks later. This money I banked for him. We presumed that this money had come from dealing drugs, we couldn’t think of any other explanation. I felt sick at the thought, and became very worried as to the company he might be keeping. His conduct at home was becoming increasing difficult to cope with, for example: if he wanted something he would take it. One afternoon I went to look for my mobile phone and spent over an hour searching for it, thinking I must have mislaid it, only to realise that William must have taken it. I was calm then, thinking that he would give it back when he returned, but that night was one of those where he had said he would return and then didn’t. I woke in the middle of the night, realising that William had not come home. I was so angry with him – how dare he take my things? I was furious with him, and spent the night journaling about my unhappiness, asking myself how things could have become so awful. One of the things that I realised when I wrote down my feelings was how very personal my phone was to me. If he had asked to borrow it, I would have agreed, but to take it without asking, how dare he…?

William had spent a lot of time staying with friends for long periods of time; it seemed that he stayed mainly with his girlfriend who was an exceptionally beautiful, sweet girl who lived with her mother, sister and brother in Clapham. A virtual tee-total, and vehemently anti-drugs, I couldn’t understand how she could find our son attractive, nor why she hung out with him and his friends who all smoked cannabis, but then again there were lots of things I didn’t understand! His pattern was that he would come back, be charming to us for a while, get money from us (mainly from me, who he could melt very easily). He would promise to be back that evening, or the next day, promising to text me to let me know where he was (another rule we tried to enforce to stop us from worrying as to where he was). Mostly, though he would forget to text, and not return until he’d run out of money. He would then return, shower, change his clothes and leave, and the cycle would begin again.

At first we would always try and track down where he was when he was away, but often his mobile phone would be switched off, and I wouldn’t have land line numbers for most of his friends. In these days of mobiles, it’s easy for wayward children to lie as their whereabouts. We knew little about his life outside the house, and still don’t. Sometimes when I got to speak to him, he would sound stoned, then promise to be home and not show up for days. It would appear that we were the only household that didn’t allow dope smoking in the house, hence the reason he spent so much time away. He did smoke whilst he was in the house, though, and we would always challenge him about it. He didn’t seem to care.

He had begun studying for AS levels at a sixth form college. His teachers were dismayed by him, he would regularly miss classes, and lie about why he’d been absent, often involving some elaborate deception. The college would then ring me and ask what the situation was. I was becoming increasingly frazzled, turning to my husband when he came home at night to ask him what we should do.

There was very little we could do, except to repeat to William what our expectations were of his behaviour in our house, and to plead with him to be sensible and stop smoking weed. We showed him newspaper articles about the evidence of links between psychosis and cannabis, particularly amongst teenagers. A friend lent us a video of a Panorama programme that outlined this new research that was now coming to light. He refused to watch the programme, and appeared to listen as we spoke about our fears for his mental health and what we could see was happening to him. He told us to get off his back, saying that he would stop smoking if that was what we wanted.

It had been a condition of William continuing to live in our household after he had been violent to me, that we all attend family counselling sessions at our local surgery, which I set up immediately after the Christmas holidays, in January 2005. Often William would not turn up to the sessions. If he did attend, he would be in filthy clothes that stank of weed, often with urine stains down the crotch, his hair unwashed. He would shout at us in front of the counsellor telling her that we didn’t understand anything about him, we were inadequate parents who were out of touch with reality, and that his behaviour was normal for a teenager. The counsellor knew little about cannabis, which was very surprising to me. We live in an affluent leafy London suburb, but right next door to one of the most deprived inner city areas, surely her training would have involved some understanding of addicted teenagers? Had William been abusing Class A drugs, I think she would have been able to help, but her training did not involve the problems of cannabis abuse, and she looked puzzled when we would bring the conversation round again to the effect cannabis was having on our son. ‘Are you sure that is the problem? Let’s just leave that for now, and look at what else it could be’.

After pressing her to consider cannabis as being a prime mover in the situation, she passed us on to a colleague of hers who was working at a drugs project in Lewisham. Finally, I thought we could get the help we needed. William didn’t turn up to the first session, so my husband and I spent a short time talking to the drugs counsellor, apologising for our son, making another appointment for the coming week. My husband could not take the time off work to come the following week, so I took my reluctant son down there, telling him that if he didn’t attend this time he would have to leave. We walked there together, or rather he walked behind me yelling at me most of the way there, telling me I was a schizophrenic (a favourite taunt) and that it was me who should be seeing a psychiatrist not him.

I felt so upset, hardly recognising my son any more, my first wonderful son who had been such a joy, not just to me but to everyone, when he was little. What had happened? Was it just the weed, or something else we’d missed? It had been a long time since we had had a calm, loving exchange, or even a laugh together. I would always be able to find my way back to forgiving him, though, and felt that if we could just get some help with his drug addiction, we might be able to cope and move ahead as a family. We  waited three months for an appointment with the drugs counsellor, and whenever I felt despairing I would reassure myself that the support we needed was just around the corner, and to hold on. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out quite how I’d hoped.

© Debra Bell 2006