Yesterday

I knew something was gonna happen yesterday morning. My older son had been texting me about him being in some kind of a fight with two girlfriends and how both of 'em totally hated him now and I wasn't sure how to respond, so didn't.

The phone calls started as soon as I walked into my office. My wife said that my son was freaking out and wanted her to drive him to school so he could talk to the girls and she had justifiably refused, knowing that he was in no condition to go anywhere, and that just set him off. He began to scream and curse at her, blasting loud music and slamming doors and when my wife called me back, I told her that I was coming home.

Meanwhile, my son began wildly searching the house, looking for my wife's handbag so he could take the keys to her car and drive himself to school and when she tried to stop him, he picked up a small serrated knife and threw it at a cabinet, shattering glass all over the kitchen floor. That's when my wife called 911.

When my son saw the cops at the front door, he panicked and bolted out the back and that's when he called me, screaming and crying how he didn't want to go back to jail. I told him to take a deep breath, turn around and go home and that if he did, the cops would treat this whole thing as a psychiatric incident and take him to the hospital instead of arresting him. And that's how it played out.

An hour or so of a torturous train ride home later, I met my wife at the hospital emergency room and she went home to decompress while I sat with my son, waiting for him to be admitted. He was perfectly calm and we started goofing on all of the drunk and crazy people the cops were bringing in and we sat there for almost four hours before they finally found a bed for him in the adolescent psych ward. We hugged and kissed and then some orderly took him upstairs.