…salted lithium.

Andrew is threatening to kill himself.

I haven’t written a lot about Andrew here. His mother and I started dating when he was four. We got married when he was seven. We separated when he was ten. It was very, very ugly. Now he’s 17-years old, just graduated high school, and sleeping in his car in the Walmart parking lot because he’s not welcome at either his mother’s house, or his father’s home.

When he was young, Andrew was mentally and emotionally abused by his mother, my ex-wife, and horribly neglected by his biological father. When Andrew was five-years old, and his mother and I were still married, we’d drive him to his father’s for a pre-planned visit, only to find the house empty. On the way back, Andrew would be screaming in the backseat “why doesn’t my father love me?”. This happened once or twice a week. On the occasions that his father was around, he would put Andrew in front of the TV, in a dark room with some popcorn, then go into the basement to drink, smoke weed, and gamble online.

…except for for hockey. His dad was very involved with Andrew’s hockey. Even becoming a coach for Andrew’s team.

On other occasions, Andrew would refuse to eat his supper. So his mother would put him into a timeout. When that didn’t work she’d start threatening him. Once, as he was sitting on the stairs, she (very seriously) threatened to pull him up and down the stairs by his hair. When I told her that wouldn’t be happening while I was around, she waited a couple of hours then get abusive with me. This was happening multiple times a month.

Andrew’s mother used to call Children’s Services on his father after almost every visit. CS would determine that neglect wasn’t enough of a reason to take Andrew away from his dad permanently. Eventually Children’s Services (that’s not what it’s called around here) decided to investigate every aspect of Andrew’s life — they interviewed his teachers, his principal, his father, his father’s girlfriend, me, and his mother.

Eventually, based a lot on my testimony and some audio recordings I submitted, they determined that Andrew’s mother had been abusing him for years, that his mother had been heavily coaching him on what to say to CS, and it would be in Andrew’s best interest (and Victor and Quintin) to be removed from his mother’s care. Initially I thought I’d be taking all three boys with me but, according to CS, I had no right to take Andrew because his father was still in the picture. So Andrew went to live with his father and his father’s girlfriend, and Victor and Quintin came to live with me.

And that was that. There was no other plan for Andrew. CS demanded all three boys be taken out of the home, or they would be placed into foster care. So I left in the best way I could think of. When I left Andrew’s mother, I paid three months rent, and paid the bills for a month. I was homeless, absolutely broke, living with my parents, with two boys, ages of 1- and 5-years old. After near-weekly blowups with my own mother, the two boys and I were eventually placed into county-run Affordable Housing.

For several years afterwards, Andrew and I had contact, but it was irregular and brief. We always hugged, we always caught up. Four to five years after the separation, and the CS removing the kids from their mothers home, and putting her on a schedule of supervised visitations, CS decided their mother had followed all the rules, and had taken part in all the therapy practices. So we went to mediation over what visitations would look like. After a few hours of negotiations we went with week-to-week with Quintin and Victor.

I warned the CS that any attempt to put Andrew back into his mother’s life would result in things getting worse, not better. But my warnings were ignored. It took his parents months to work out a schedule, but Andrew was back with his mother on a week-to-week schedule. By this time Andrew was 14- or 15-years old. Over the time with his father, I had watched Andrew go from a physically active little kid, to a sedentary, extremely moody teenager. Thanks mostly to his father, his weight was out of control. I think by this time he was almost up to 250-260lbs.

…despite it all, Andrew was doing extremely well in school, and had a lot of lifelong friendships.

For the first year after the CS backed off, he was bouncing back and forth between his father and mother. He would stay with one for a few days until the yelling started, then stay with the other until the same happened. Eventually it started getting physical. Eight months after I warned the CS things would get worse, he got into a fist fight with his mother. His mother’s boyfriend had to restrain Andrew. The CS got involved again, the police were also involved.

…my own involvement was in anonymously calling the CS when I heard about the fight. Victor and Quintin were upstairs at their mother’s when it happened, but they could hear everything.

Andrew, his mother, and his father refused to take part in the therapy offered by both the CS and the police. At least not seriously. His mother went to a couple of parenting seminars, but his father was just too lazy to get involved. Andrew, at this point, knew that any talk of taking part in therapy was just a road to getting his mother’s abusive side to catch fire.

So all of it became a pattern. Andrew would stay with his dad while his mother calmed down. Even after the physical altercation, and after his mother banned him from her home, it took three weeks and Andrew was once again a welcome guest. After screaming matches with his father — and his now second wife, he would get kicked out for a week or two, stay with his mother, and then get forgiven.

The pattern lasted for two years. Andrew would be happy with his mother or father for a week or two, then something would spark an argument and, none of the three having any coping skills whatsoever, the argument would get out of control to the point where the kid was told to leave.

Only now Andrew’s father has separated from his wife, and he’s living with a friend. A friend who has no patience for arguments between father and son. Especially physical fights. So when Andrew and his father got into a fist fight two weeks, ago the police where called and seven of them showed up. And Andrew was forcibly removed from the house. The friend has made it very clear Andrew is not welcome back.

So off to his mother’s house Andrew went. Things were tense, but relatively peaceful. Until an incident where Andrew almost got arrested. He drove some friends to a drug store in a strip mall. While he waited in the car, his friends robbed the store of $750 worth of merchandise. It was mostly a grab & dash. Nobody was hurt, and there were no weapons or threats.

But there were a lot of cameras. It took the police less than thirty minutes to find Andrew’s car, with his friends and the merchandise still in it. Andrew’s friends, to their credit, denied he had anything to do with it and Andrew was let off with a parental warning. His friends were threatened with a charge of ‘Theft Under $1,000’, which is a maximum of two-years and a permanent record. I’m not sure where that stands as of now.

So the tension between Andrew and his mother got worse. Andrew had recently picked up a new job cleaning a National Park, which paid a good wage and, I think, was unionized. A few days ago, while staying with his mom, he misplaced part of his uniform and he panicked. He had recently been accepted into one of Canada’s best Colleges, and he planned on using the money from the job to pay for his car. He started yelling. Within a few minutes things had gotten completely out of control between him and his mother. I don’t know how physical it got, but the police were called.

And Andrew had to be removed from his mother’s house. Several times during the incident, he threatened to kill himself. His mother, and the police, both — to their credit — offered to call the Crisis Line. But Andrew, programmed by now not to accept therapy from anyone, declined. He told the police that he would sleep in his car at the local Community Centre. The police told him if they caught him there, they’d charge him with trespassing. So that’s how Andrew ended up in the Walmart parking lot.

I spoke to his mother a few hours after it happened. And she was devastated. But with no idea what to do next. His father’s reaction was to go to on a four-day trip to a ComiCon event with his new girlfriend where he, according to his Facebook posts, added to his collection of Transformers memorabilia.

So now, as far as I understand, Andrew is couch surfing. I don’t know if he still has a job. I know he has car payments to make, and College coming up — I have no idea if that’s even a possibility anymore. I know his mother doesn’t work full time, I have no idea if she’s on welfare or ODSP. I know she works ‘under-the-table’ to pay her part of the mortgage on the house her boyfriend bought. So, at least in terms of money, she’s no help for Andrew.

Andrew’s last fight with his father was about money, and how his father — who sells cars for a living, couldn’t help him anymore.

I told my psychiatrist all of this, and asked her what my responsibility was. She told me the best thing I could do for him was to call the local Children’s Services (which also has programs for adults), and see what they can do for him. It was the local CS that helped me skip the waiting line for Affordable Housing, mostly because I was disabled, homeless, and living with my mother in an abusive situation. So they have programs to help the homeless. They also have a tonne of therapy options… which, of course, have been offered to Andrew in the past.

…the problem I have to work out is how to approach him. I can’t ask him to move in with me, there’s simply no room. There are also rules that I have to follow with the Affordable Housing and Disability People that preclude anyone else living here. I asked his mother if I should / could talk to Andrew, but she doesn’t want him to know she’s been talking about the situation. She also, of course, doesn’t want him going into therapy.

So I don’t know what the fuck to do. I don’t know what my responsibility is in any of this. I raised Andrew as if he were my own son for five years. I took him to his first NHL game. I took him to the water-park, we went bowling twice a month, I helped him with his homework, I got him dressed for school. I carried him on my back, I twirled him around by his arms until he was dizzy. I sang Happy Birthday to him. I introduced him to movies, and music that he still talks about today.

I held him while he cried about his father’s negligence, and took him for walks after his mother’s freak outs.

…I believe, there’s a chance his mother will take him back. At least I have a hunch. It’s the pattern. The Pattern has existed in his parents’ families for generations. His mother was physically abused by her father, and emotionally terrorized by her mother. His father was raised by two alcoholic parents. But nobody left. Everybody kept leaving and coming back… verbal apologies were never given, everything was reversed. The abused apologized. The abuser given the option of acceptance… the act of coming back was the apology, the act of receiving the abused back into the home was the acceptance.

But I don’t know.

What a total shit-show.

…I think I have to make the call, and see where it goes from there.