It's All Downhill from Here

Freddy was smart in ways I would never be, he was strong and able and I wanted to think that he had potential. I’m his mother, of course I did.  I decided then to prepare him to take his GED test instead and then figure out where we’d go from there. I printed out a practice GED test and gave it to him.  He made a 60.  I was heartened and thought he didn’t have far to go and we could do it.  The neurotic half of me however felt his opportunities might be limited by having a GED and I just didn’t know what we should do. 

Freddy and I talked it over ad nauseum and I did some research and talked to my stepmom and I’m not sure how we landed on it but we decided that Job Corps was the best course of action for him.  He could get his diploma or GED and obtain a technical certificate and I left that decision to him. He decided on welding and I felt that was just as good a choice as any.  He had to wait until his sixteenth birthday which would happen two months after summer and that left us both at loose ends for the next five months. The preceding events were weeks of agonizing and my crying over how I’d failed as a mother.  Freddy’s tears and beating himself up over not being smart enough or good enough to be “regular. It was tough and now it meant that he was home alone with Tucker for that time while I was at work and Harlow was at school. 

Freddy

There is time to explain now the powerhouse that is my son.  Again, we must name him for the interest of storytelling and though I do so love his name, we’ll call him Freddy.  My Freddy is an enigma wrapped in a mystery shrouded in controversy...yah not really but he is a handful.  When he was 3 ½ and his sister was 1½, I left their dad.  He worshiped his dad but couldn't understand what was wrong with him either.  He wasn’t the attentive Daddy he’d always been and was often hateful and angry.  He had descended into a very real, very frightening meth addiction.  There has been much talk swirling in the family about "whose fault it was" and blah blah blah but let me just come clean right now.  The first time he ever did that shit, I was with him.  Some friends of ours we’d gone to dinner with had stopped and picked some up when we'd gone out one night and he asked me had I ever, and I told him I had. He asked, “Is it ok?”

I said, “I guess so if you want to party.”  We did it together.  We did it every other weekend then every weekend then the weekends began to stretch over Thursday to Monday and I chose to pull myself out of that headlong descent into fucking madness.  He did not.  I realized it was too much and my children needed me.  So after a year of trying to get him to quit and trying to give him help he didn’t want, I left him. It made my little man upset that Daddy wasn't there anymore and he blamed me.