Suspended Sentence

by Janice Morgan

  As for me during this time, work continued to be my refuge. In that space, I never felt alone. My colleagues were smart people, skilled at whatever needed to be done on any given day. My office itself, with its solid shelves of books in rows, its folders bulging with lesson materials, gave me a sense of order and abundance. The omnipresent computer screen with its magic files, all openable with a mere click, stored my professional archives. Meanwhile, the internet could give instant access to encyclopedic knowledge, seeming to offer answers to any question and solutions to any problem (except the pressing ones involving my family). As for teaching in the classroom, I loved the structure, discipline, and play of it—the improvisational aspects of helping students to engage with the strangeness of a different language, seeing what new aspects of the codes, colors, and rhythms of it they could weave into their lives. For me, as well as for them, class activities were adventures, but they were much more contained than the ones we encounter in the chaotic world. No wonder my workplace offered that island of security I often craved. Now that Dylan was a free man in Drug Court, I felt we were each operating within the appropriate jurisdiction we belonged in—at least, for now.

  And how was Dylan reacting to all this? One scene stands out for me. On a Saturday afternoon, maybe a few weeks into the new regime, Dylan came over to my place while I happened to be raking leaves in my garden plot. He was basically doing OK, but he wanted to vent his frustrations. Mainly, he felt that Drug Court was running him ragged with one requirement after another. And the endless meetings! There was another one at AA coming up that evening. He barely had time to breathe.

  “You’ll get used to it. It’s just hard at first because it’s all new to you,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, you have no idea. These people are addicts, Mom! ADDICTS! They’ve been on meth, cocaine, opiates, and who knows what else? And this is who I’m spending time with—a lot of time, too!”

  He was already mounted on his moped in the middle of the stony driveway, ready to take off. As if to emphasize his point, he gunned the engine and spun around in a circle, stones flying out from under the wheels in a dramatic spray. In that moment, my son looked like an angry centaur, rearing up on its hind legs, revving its engine with the roar of a thousand killer bees—as if to assert, “Me, an addict? No way!” I guess he was forgetting about the empty bottles of vodka I’d found lined up around his apartment in June, or the flourishing pot garden he’d planted—not to mention a second DUI. Small stuff? Well, the consequences hadn’t exactly been small. Before I could say anything at all, he peeled out in a blast of noise. No, I wasn’t surprised, but I was worried. How in the world was this going to play out?

  When the second DUI charge had been confirmed, no one in the family thought he should be driving this wheeled vehicle, or any other, anytime soon. After his release in September to attend Drug Court, and up until the time he had to appear in district court for the DUI, he had continued to ride the moped around town, arguing that he needed transportation to get to meetings and various odd jobs. In fact, he’d spent quite a bit of time fixing up the inexpensive Chinese Tao-Tao. The scooter had been all black, and he’d decided to paint the fenders a bright yellow, a vivid contrast to the black core body. Dylan was pleased with the effect; not only was it a safety feature to brighten things up, but it was a way of giving the moped a new identity. “Just like I’m doing for myself now,” he said.

  Though I admired the paint job, I confronted Dylan with the fact that his license had been taken away. He said he knew continuing to drive the moped could be a legal problem, but he seemed sure this would not affect his main charges in the higher court. I wasn’t at all convinced. He told me Drug Court knew he was still driving the scooter. “It’s OK, as long as I park it behind the building and don’t advertise the fact. They know I have to get around.” I remembered how, early on, I’d had the idea of hiding the bike from Dylan in a friend’s garage, but that plan didn’t meet with enthusiasm on the part of the garage owner. Now it was way too late for that. So during most of that autumn, Dylan was inseparable from the moped. Besides, I had to recognize that Dylan was twenty-three years old. When I talked with him about my concerns, he said, “You don’t need to worry about me, Mom. I can make my own decisions. I know what the consequences might be and I’m prepared to take them. This is a risk I’m willing to take.”

  I could only shrug my tense shoulders. “We’ll see.”

  And so it happened that Dylan was literally flying by the seat of his pants down the road. No longer a student for this semester, he had to find work. I thought it would be relatively easy for him to snag a job at a sandwich place or one of the fast-food restaurants all over town. Anything would do. He said no one would hire him with his bad record, but I’m not convinced he tried all fifty-plus possible employers. Did he try even one of them? Instead, Dylan ended up being a chronic gig chaser. Sometimes working with his housemate Connor, sometimes alone, he would clean out garages, do repair work, help out with construction, do whatever odd job came along. He heard about these jobs at AA or through the Drug Court group or from an internet listing. This more or less worked out for him, but not always. And on those occasions, I tended to be the first to find out about it.

  One day in late fall, Dylan had a plan to make $80 a day working for a farmer who had a ranch and needed help repairing fence posts. The job was on hold for a while due to heavy rains. Finally, the weather cleared, and the plan was a go. The only problem was the fact that the ranch was a good forty minutes away by car, and Dylan didn’t have one. Instead, he found himself on a country road on his moped. As it happened, the scooter gave out about two or three miles from his destination. That is to say, it continued to work, but at a top speed of maybe ten miles per hour. Don’t ask how many phone calls I received that day from unknown byways in the country! I’d be sitting in my office, answering e-mails (fortunately, it was a slow day), and yet another update from remote Strandville would come in. Since I couldn’t leave my job to pick him up any time soon, I discussed the situation with him on each occasion: call ahead and leave a message; hide the scooter and walk to the ranch; look for the farmer—all to no avail. The man was older and didn’t have a cell phone.

  This episode turned into something like Sandra Bullock’s situation in Gravity when she’s lost in outer space and has to call in to Mission Control: “I’ve lost my contact; my capsule has lost power. The plan is failing; tell me what to do now.” When Dylan found the ranch, there was no house there, and no one around to ask about the job. The whole day was a wash. Instead of working on fence posts, what he could do was continue on the road, slowly—very slowly, and with a long line of vehicles behind him—into the distant town for a late lunch and a long wait. More phone calls came in: “How can I dock up for rescue out here? How can I get back to Earth?”

  I admit in my second career as an X-treme Parent, I sometimes felt like Peter Graves’s secret agent character in the old TV show, Mission: Impossible. The show always started with Graves playing a small cassette tape and opening an envelope of photographs to find out about his next assignment. Dylan’s moped predicament was about to become mine. Already I could hear the inevitable words, “Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to …” Along with the words, I could already hear the hiss of smoke as the tapes started to self-destruct. Oh yes, and just like for Graves, if I failed, all the authorities would disavow my actions.

  By the end of the workday, I managed to locate a friend named Gordie who had a truck with a trailer big enough for the docking operation. It was getting dark as we pulled up to a parking lot outside a boat shop in Riverton. I immediately caught sight of Dylan in a tan, one-piece work suit and waved. He walked up to the truck, no doubt glad to see us. In a few minutes, he and Gordie roped the recalcitrant Tao-Tao firmly into the trailer, then all three of us squeezed into the front seat of Gordie’s vehicle. We talked hunting and fishing on the way back—well, Gordie did most of the talking. Dylan was clearly mortif
ied by having to be rescued like this. He admitted it wasn’t such a great idea to go so far with a scooter that had an unfortunate tendency to conk out every now and then. Tinkering with the engine in town was one thing, but there was a limit to what you could do an hour from home with only minimal tools.

  True, on occasion, I felt I still had to jump in and be the rescuer. Though Dylan was out there fending for himself and answering to a judge every week, there were still times, like that one, when I could be on tap for special interventions. Other days, though, I had to sit back and be the “silent witness.” This is the art, known to many but not fully mastered by me, of listening with empathy but not feeling like you need to rescue the person—or even do anything at all, other than listen. Every parent has to learn this, no matter who your kid is or how protective you may be. But let me tell you: it’s extremely difficult to practice this craft with an at-risk young adult you have every reason to believe will NOT always make the right decision.

  Such a test came up, for example, on the evening of the disastrous fencepost trip. After Dylan went to one of his required AA meetings, he called to ask if I would pick him up afterward and take him to Walgreens. Seated next to me in the car, he started opening up about his addiction situation. The meeting had evidently triggered a recognition of how his own drug and alcohol use had been getting worse over the years. He had never talked so openly about this with me before. Usually he would dismiss the topic if I brought it up. Instead, he’d maintain the story that he only used alcohol, for example, on “certain occasions”—to steady himself after a bad day or to counter-balance one of his ever-fluctuating mental states. That’s what his mood-balancing meds were supposed to do, but people with bipolar don’t always trust their meds, or the meds don’t always work, or they just prefer to take their chances with their own form of self-medicating. All the same, I was glad Dylan had finally agreed to make an appointment with Dr. Peltay again to renew his prescriptions.

  Well, today had definitely been a bad day for him, only now instead of pouring the booze or smoking pot, he’d been attending an AA meeting—hearing other peoples’ stories, thinking about it. He’d always somehow managed to convince himself that marijuana and alcohol helped him along, but he also knew that alcohol had gotten him two DUIs within twelve months. His legal problems were worse, and without a license, his options for improving his situation were less appealing. He was facing the magnitude of it all—that alone was remarkable. And now he was actually saying that a person had to face his own choices, take responsibility for them. Could it be that some kind of self-realization was starting to take hold?

  Suddenly, I checked the time. It was getting late. Dylan had limited time to go into the pharmacy, get what he wanted, and get back to his place before curfew at 10:00 p.m. When I dropped him off at his place twenty minutes later, I found myself sighing with relief. But, later at home, a twinge of worry crossed my mind. I hadn’t reminded him to call in, but something told me that on this particular evening, he probably needed to be. “Wait a minute: why should I have to?” I thought. All these micro-worries. I haven’t been reminding him, and I shouldn’t go so far as to take on his curfew responsibility.

  Well, I found out five days later that Dylan was headed for a sanction: two nights in jail, Wednesday and Thursday, for curfew infraction. Turns out that very Friday evening at Walgreens, something had come up after he got back to his place, and yes, he’d forgotten to call in on time. I couldn’t believe it, but I remembered that wave of concern crossing me that evening, like a sixth sense tuning in. At the very next moment, though, I knew I had to set it all aside. Dylan had to take responsibility for what he did or didn’t do. Hadn’t he told me this himself?

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” he said. “I’ve got a ride to the jail. And it’s OK: I’m still in Drug Court. I just have to take this sanction; that’s all.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Just filling you in. But I was wondering, can you pick me up when I get released? That’ll be Friday at 6 p.m. at the jail.” He must have sensed my distraction because I didn’t reply right away.

  “OK, I’ll be there Friday.”

  “6:00, on the dot. I’ll probably be outside already.”

  He didn’t know it, but I was practicing being The Rock. That’s my code word for setting aside my impulse to fret, grieve, or feel like I have to jump in and try to solve somebody’s problem—especially my son’s. Instead, I was trying to be the silent witness, making myself as steady as a boulder.

  Whatever my initial reaction to his telling me about the jail sanction, I was still processing things hours later. The wonder of it was that every time my son got sent to jail, I felt two overwhelming feelings at once, and they were completely contradictory. On the one hand, I was hugely disappointed that he messed up once again—to the point of almost being ill. But then—and here is the strange part—I also felt a great sense of relief. He’s safe; he’s going to be OK. Though that may not have been completely true, the fact was that, for me, having my son lifted out of the enormous pressures of life and placed in a structured environment was like having someone in a storm being taken to a calm place of shelter. And I didn’t always know if that someone needing shelter was Dylan or myself.

  During this same time period, however rock steady I may have tried to be, the two of us definitely had a few blowouts. In general, it seemed that our relationship was having as many fits and starts as the Chinese Tao-Tao engine. Not long after Gordie dropped the yellow scooter off at Fred’s Small Engine Repair shop south of town, Dylan called me one Saturday afternoon because he thought maybe the power failure had to do with drawing fuel. Maybe if he installed a new fuel pump, that would fix the problem. He said he’d ordered one; it had come in, so would I take him out to the shop?

  I wasn’t at all enthusiastic. I’d just been about to go for a long walk in the park to decompress, but I reluctantly agreed maybe it was worth a try. Arriving at Fred’s in the middle of the afternoon, the scene looked completely different from what it had been during an earlier season. Gone was the canopied summer workshop on the hill among the trees. Instead, small, motorized vehicles of all sorts were parked in every available space close to a large shed near the house. This was moped land in late autumn, and on a Saturday afternoon, Fred and Company were nowhere to be found.

  Dylan soon located his scooter and set to work installing the new pump. I wondered how long it would take, and should I come back at a certain time? He told me it would take about fifteen minutes, and he would find out if this took care of the problem or not. I strolled among the small vehicles for a bit, then approached Dylan’s scooter where he was working on it, adjusting parts and then spraying some kind of starter fluid on a mesh-covered cylinder, the carburetor. In a while, he asked me to help spray the fluid while he adjusted something else. After repeated attempts to get the engine started, we could both hear it trying but not fully kicking in. The next thing I remember was Dylan glancing up and getting enraged at me for, in his words, “having a dumb grin on my face.” I don’t remember grinning at all, but from my perspective, I—knowing next to zero about engines and getting machines to work—was just trying to make the best of getting into a job I didn’t want to do.

  The explosion (a different kind of combustion emanating from a different kind of carburetor) continued with my son launching into a tirade about how selfish a person I was, not willing to take fifteen minutes of my day to help him out, and why was I grinning when he was doing all the work, and it obviously wasn’t going well? Was I making fun of him? I was surprised at the intensity of his anger, which seemed way out of proportion to what had actually happened. Resisting the urge to defend myself vigorously from what I considered an unjust attack, I made some kind of neutral remark, then subsequently found out that no matter what I said, it was just going to inject more fuel into the combustion engine, so I’d better lie low and wait for it to sputter out on its own. Time again to be The Rock. Reflection would have to come
later. After some more fruitless tinkering with the fuel pump, Dylan decided to abandon the effort. The elusive Fred would have to work on it next week.

  The tirade went on, too, for most of the trip back, a whole riff on the selfishness theme. I knew this had its roots back in my son’s childhood, him believing that I chose to spend so much time on my career, apparently abandoning him, not having cared for him as much as he needed when he was young, not wanting to spend time with him, not being there for him.

  “Life is easy for you, Mom. You don’t have any problems!” he roared. “Me, I’ve got nothing but problems, one after the other. As soon as I get one solved, another crops up—or maybe two or three at once! Life is really unfair. Why don’t you get that?”

  Finally, pulling up in front of his residence, I remember him getting out of the car, still taking a few parting shots, but then—as he spotted someone else coming down the street—toning his voice down and saying something dismissive, like “Well, I’m not even that mad anymore. See ya.” I drove off, thinking, “Great, glad you’re feeling better, buddy. I should have just taken that walk.” But, I admit, deep down I was hurt—just as hurt and wronged as he felt he was. He’d been subject to flash anger ever since he was born. It probably reminded me of times I tried to comfort him as a baby, and it didn’t always work. Then, later on, there were all those broken-off pencils in his jeans pockets, the hole he kicked into the wall, the torn-up drawings on the floor that were perfectly good ones—he just ripped them up because he got frustrated that they weren’t perfect. Just like I wasn’t the perfect mom.

  To tell the truth, when it came to my son’s predicaments, I often didn’t know how much credit I could claim for helping, or how much blame I should take when things went badly. I talked about all this with Sandra, but more often with John. That’s when John would let his word-bomb drop, the one he had first used earlier in the summer. He suggested I was letting myself get trapped in a codependent relationship.