Finally, the public defenders took their turn. Armed with seven or eight dossiers each, two of them came out to the crowd to take clients one by one into a private room to discuss their cases. Suspense mounted as the court moved through them one at a time. I kept an eye on Pulaski. At one point, there was a lull in the proceedings, and the defender approached me. We went out into the hall to discuss. She told me the plan was to argue for a diversion, proposing Drug Court for Dylan as a treatment program. He was young, though; this option was usually reserved for someone older who had tried other, less rigorous options. However, he would be a college student with a felony on his record otherwise. A flash of painful recognition passed through me like a sword: My son! No, how could this be? I’d felt that before, always the sharp pain. But the defender’s steady voice continued: completing Drug Court was a way he could get the felonies expunged from his record, as long as he followed the rules. I nodded, taking this in. I didn’t even try to talk. Instead, I imagined a giant eraser cleaning a whiteboard. The image comforted me: Yes, dear God, a clean slate. Please let this happen for him. We returned to the courtroom.
As 10:00 drew closer, a side door opened and inmates were finally admitted to the courtroom by the bailiff. I heard sounds of distant doors closing, keys rattling. I shifted to get a glimpse of Dylan’s face as he entered the room. He looked stoic and glanced briefly at the crowd, but there wasn’t time for him to locate us. He had to take a seat with the others. Only the backs of their heads remained visible as the inmates faced the bench. It was hard to see my one and only child in a line-up like that. Each of them remained handcuffed in court, making it difficult for them to sign their names, which they had to do. Finally, Ms. Wesley Pulaski’s turn came up. As a public defender, her clients were these. Dossier by dossier, she moved through them steadily, a calm, organizing force amid the chaos of some of these lives: shoplifting, assault, non-payment of alimony, drug charges. At last, Dylan’s case was called, and he was summoned before the bench with Pulaski beside him. Part of the ritual was that he must state his name and address, but I could barely hear his voice since he was facing the judge. As Pulaski presented the idea of a diversion, Judge Marlowe seemed to be only half-listening. I wondered if he would be lenient. After witnessing several similar hearings for other defendants, I wondered if the judge felt overwhelmed sometimes by all the chances the court gave to individuals to take a higher road, change their lives, stay off the docket. By then, he’d shown he was willing to be the Judge of Second Chances, but I knew he had to be wary, too. We’d heard him remark in court on a previous case about how clients can lie.
Pulaski presented the evidence on Dylan’s behalf that he and I had discussed and prepared: the letter from the landlord, the note from his marketing professor. The good and the bad had been laid out. I wondered if Judge Marlowe had received my letter. Would it make any difference? Who could make sense of the crazy quilt story of my son’s infractions over the last three years? But after Pulaski spoke, the judge stated simply that the court would take this into consideration. Another date of review was set up: Monday, August 22 at 8:30 a.m. The defendants were led out again. Dylan stole a look to find us. Our eyes met, and he gave a nod. I smiled back. Then he was gone.
Well, that’s life in the courtroom. Dylan’s name had been called, the starter’s pistol had gone off, but then we all found out the race would have to be postponed. Back to the paddock for the tense racehorse.
We all filed out and sought refuge outdoors in the open air. John, Sandra, Patrick, and I debriefed, each of us shaking off the nervous energy of the morning—at least I was. Of course, we were all novices at this court-system business, so we learned that this was just one major hearing with more to come. The public defender mentioned Drug Court. What was that? We wondered how it worked, what was involved? It must be tough. Didn’t Ms. Pulaski say it wasn’t recommended for younger adults because it was so rigorous?
I could tell from John’s face and low energy that he was feeling drained—we all were. He thought the judge would come up with a grand pronouncement or a definitive sentence right away; we only at that moment got the picture that the wheels of justice turn slowly. In a case like this, guilt was only part of the issue. The larger question was what to do with the person’s life for the future. In Dylan’s case: was this guy salvageable? If he had substance-abuse problems, could they be treated? How much of a danger did he pose to society? To himself? What were his chances to get back on a path that would lead to a productive life? With time and cross-deliberation, these questions would be taken up. It took time to arrive at a possible solution. But for a parent, it was hard to be patient, let alone objective.
After the hearing, I felt exhausted, and being with John in the same condition wasn’t helping. We’d met six years ago and had been visiting each other ever since. He’d driven across the state to be with me through this crisis, just as he’d done for several years now. When Dylan was a student in Cincinnati right across the Ohio River, we would meet up there. Crises aside, we actually had a lot in common; we were both college professors, for example, and in the same discipline. We were usually able to tune in to each other’s broadcast frequencies instantly, effortlessly.
Today was different, though. We were both divorced and had sons, but his three sons put together didn’t have ANY of the problems my one son did. Right after our first big court scene, he was clearly baffled by having to deal with this kind of blind uncertainty. I had to recognize that John was from the “other side,” where things like this didn’t happen. Not that he has ever said this; he wouldn’t do that. I acknowledged his feelings as we walked back to our car, but it made me feel even more frayed around the edges than I already was. After a quick lunch, he told me he needed to take a nap to recover; neither of us had slept well the night before. I went back to my office. When we met up again, we discussed our bad moods and agreed to hang in there. We would get through this somehow. When you have a son like mine, you learn to take on strange situations.
Over the summer, there were several other court hearings, spaced out by a week or two. It’s true what they say: Lady Justice takes her time with the scales. By the second week in August, Dylan had court dates in both courts, District and Circuit: one for DUI charges, the other for the felony charges. His public defender didn’t enter a plea for District; the blood alcohol sample hadn’t been analyzed yet, so the case was still pending. The review dates churned by, but nothing definitive was being decided yet. Dylan was getting edgy. I figured he needed guidance and help—but family wasn’t always the best source. Fortunately, Patrick agreed to visit and talk with Dylan again to give him a fresh perspective. Patrick had known Dylan since he was a little kid on the soccer team he used to coach, so there was a bond of trust there.
Later in August, while at the Judicial Building, John and I decided to ask about Drug Court. After the public defender first mentioned it, we wanted to know more. A clerk passed us a name, a phone number, and an address. It was close by, so we decided to go there. It was located in an older, brick building at the corner of 10th and Maple, near the clinic, and had been donated by a doctor. A receptionist soon introduced us to Darlene Winchester, Recovery Coordinator. She smiled in greeting, shook our hands, and led us into her domain, a large room with about twenty chairs arranged in a circle. They were empty, but I knew this must be the room where Drug Court group meetings were held. Ms. Winchester was a petite woman with henna-streaked hair, a long, flowing skirt, and ankle boots. She dressed with flair, a latter-day Stevie Nicks. You could tell by the way she walked that she was determined; not much was going to slow her down. She turned around a couple of chairs and asked us to take a seat across from her.
She saw my stress, asked me how I was doing. As I told her about our situation and she responded, I could tell that she was smart, articulate, and perceptive. Face-to-face, I felt I was talking to Julianne Moore—not the steely character from The Hunger Games, but the sensitive professor/mom persona she p
layed in Still Alice. As she spoke to us and answered our questions, it was clear that Drug Court was her passion. As a social worker, when the judge asked her to head up Drug Court for the circuit court, she knew she wanted to do it, but only if she could have certain things in place: a strong curfew and a long enough time frame to make a difference in someone’s life. From her, we heard again that the program was very tough, very directional. Yes, it did take away many of the participants’ civil rights to privacy (there were home searches, drug tests, possible review of financial accounts), but all this served a purpose. The goal was to teach people with drug issues new skills and a new way of living, and this process took time and mentorship. Participants ranged in age from twenty to sixty, but the average age was about mid-thirties through forties. They’d tried other things, and now for many of them, this was their “last best chance,” at least from a legal-expungement standpoint, to get their lives on track.
Ms. Winchester talked to us about the brain—how the prefrontal cortex, in charge of executive functioning, usually wasn’t fully developed in men until about twenty-five years old, or even later. Consequently, impulse control to avoid risky behavior needed to be internalized. She cited another brain research program that showed how brain cells could heal and develop throughout a person’s lifetime. Scientists were tracking the growth of new neural tissues as well as new messaging pathways, yielding positive findings on how brain plasticity can support recovery from addiction. It was an incredibly complex problem, involving everything from brain chemistry to social attitudes. Still, there was hope.
As she spoke, I could see she was tough, too, but caring. She characterized herself as having been a young person who “pushed the envelope,” who didn’t accept limits easily.
“My own son is just like me,” she said. “So I know the territory you’re going through as a mom.”
She looked at me intently. “Your son might not be ready yet. Don’t push him. Just ask him about having a felony on his record. How does he feel about that?”
She explained the stakes: in Kentucky, you only have one shot at Drug Court. If you don’t successfully complete it, you can’t do it again. So a person had to be ready. The recovery coordinator left us with this advice: “Don’t worry about your son. Go out and live your life. Let him make his decision.” Ah, if only I could!
I felt better after having talked with her. But at the same time I couldn’t help but reflect on how different it was for me, now getting this support from the outside world, while my son was still locked up with fifteen other guys in jail, unseen, all residents of some alien universe unknown to me. I was haunted from an earlier time, when Dylan was sixteen years old and in juvenile court. Would my son continue to get into these situations? How could it be that our two lives could be so closely knit, yet worlds apart? Once again I felt that strange mix of emotions: a desperate hope to bring my son over to my side of life and then, just as strong, a desire to fly away and leave this strange, complex, and unasked-for challenge behind.
John could tell I was lost in reverie.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
We held hands as we debriefed about what we’d just learned from Ms. Winchester. Then we decided to take her advice, the part about “live your life,” at least for the evening. We drove out to Cypress Cove to the fish restaurant by the lake. Everything about the trip was enjoyable: the drive through the rolling, open countryside, the small road through the dense woods as we approached, the way the winding turns eventually open onto the lakefront. We ordered our food: hot, crispy fried catfish with a grainy cornmeal coating, crunchy hush puppies, and beignet-like fried onion rings with a side of coleslaw. Though this was not our usual fare, that night we ate it all, topping off our meal with a huge piece of Mississippi mud pie shared between us. Through the windows, we could see the sky and the lake around us slowly turn brilliant colors with the sunset. When we walked down to the marina later, we saw two young families with children coming back from a fishing expedition and a group of four young men strolling in from a boat, carefree and hungry. We watched turtles swim up to the dock as kids threw bread into the water.
At last, on the drive home, we moved through the cooling air, viewed the darkening dome of sky slowly closing the day overhead. The first stars would soon appear. I’d experienced all this before and hoped to again; the ordinary beauty of it was profoundly reassuring, as if to remind me that, even during troubles, it’s important to keep a window open on everything still good and right in the world.
CHAPTER 6: SIGNS AND PORTENTS
My family and I didn’t know much about bipolar disorder back in the late 1980s and early 90s. It wasn’t much talked about. In any case, if such a disorder were diagnosed, it would be done for persons who were in late adolescence or early adulthood. Children didn’t have it. That’s what the experts said back then. The fact is that we knew Dylan’s behavior was unusually intense. Either he was extremely happy and carefree, or else he was extremely irritated. We knew this from the time he was very young. His behavior wasn’t a problem every day, just sometimes. But those sometimes could be difficult to handle, requiring enormous stores of patience and problem-solving skill. Mike usually was the one to take over in those situations, just like the time he invented the shower water therapy that somehow helped Dylan get through a terrible pre-sleep meltdown. We eventually figured out that Dylan would be at his worst if he got over-tired or over-stimulated for a long period of time. When we went out in the evening, we learned to avoid letting him fall asleep if he would have to be wakened again to go to bed. His interrupted sleep would surely bring on a red-alert, four-limb-thrashing fit lasting forty minutes or more. We knew, too, that he didn’t adapt well to changes in his daily regimen. As he got older, he could tell us more, and that helped. By living alongside my very young son, I could see how acquiring language and a conceptual knowledge of different time frames conferred a marvelous freedom from the particular pain of the moment. “It will be better tomorrow” was such an important mantra for us. But in the long years that brought us to Dylan’s adulthood, we found there were times when faith in our mantra strained against all credibility.
Thank goodness we had Gigi’s calm wisdom to help us in the beginning. Then, when Dylan was about three years old, we enrolled him in the local Montessori School. We wanted to give him every advantage. The teachers were wonderful, the whole learning environment a dream come true. He liked it and did well there—again, except for certain days. I remember one occasion early on when the school director said she needed to speak to us. Dylan had gotten angry and frustrated during an activity. Before anyone even knew what was happening, he had grabbed a pencil and was striking another child in his rage. The director, a teacher herself, was passionate about early childhood development and education. She knew this behavior was something to watch. She told us the teachers had separated Dylan from the other children for a while until he regained his composure; then they could talk to him about it. He told them he got mad and couldn’t help what he did. She told us what we already knew: “When he’s good, he’s very, very good. But when he’s bad, he really goes off the deep end.” Then she said something else that stuck with me: “He needs to develop a quiet voice inside himself that can calm him down in these situations. Until he does that, you (the parents) can be that voice.”
It was comforting to have someone with her teacher’s understanding talk with us and share her knowledge. Dylan stayed in Montessori for two years, learned a lot, and made many improvements in his social skills. Fortunately, there weren’t any other eruptions as serious as this early one. Sometimes, though, I wondered if we should have continued his care with Gigi instead of putting him in pre-school. Maybe intellectually it was better for him at the school, but what about emotionally? With me having to put so much effort into my career at that stage of my life, I didn’t feel I had either the time or the inner resources to be the kind of parent the preschool teacher indicated we needed to be. I was on board
with the philosophy, but the practice eluded me.
Sometimes, Mike and I would have disagreements about how to handle Dylan’s tantrums and oppositional behavior at home. Mike wanted strict guidelines and rules that would be implemented quietly and consistently, like in the How to Raise Your Spirited Child books we were reading. The principle there was to implement timeouts or “consequences” for bad behavior, but to do this in a calm way, not showing anger. I went along with this but was more reactive. When storm clouds broke, I had to work much harder to go with the program and not get angry myself. In this, I became all too aware of my shortcomings as a calm parental guide. Maybe I would have done better if I’d had to attend trainings and report back to a parents’ support group every week. It amazes me that though we’re all obliged to train in the simplest of life skills, like practicing to get a drivers’ license, anyone can take their chances as a parent—no instruction required. It truly wasn’t easy to face a child who was so volatile and so different from myself in many respects, especially one who knew exactly how to push my buttons. Still, with our rules and consequences in place, we were forging ahead somehow. When a particularly bad episode arose, I would worry about my son’s future. How could he be two different persons, as his Montessori teachers had said? But the next day, the sun would come up again; I would look at him and see a strong, smart, healthy kid growing up in front of me. We were resilient; everything was fine. As soon as the trouble of the moment lifted its weight from my foot, I was ready to skip away every time.
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