A Dangerous Son

 

A Dangerous Son – An HBO Documentary

WOW...just WOW.

Did that just hit home.

I was all over the place emotionally. I laughed, I cried, I argued with the TV, and more than once I caught myself yelling at the TV, "YES! Exactly!"

If you've ever wondered what life has been like for me over the last decade, this documentary gives you a glimpse.

It doesn't tell my family's story, but it tells a story that feels painfully familiar.

One family featured was from Aurora, Colorado. While every family in the documentary struggled to find treatment, watching the Colorado family's experience hit especially hard because I've lived so much of it firsthand.

If you haven't seen it, A Dangerous Son follows several families raising adolescent boys with severe mental health challenges. This isn't about kids acting out or parents who "can't control their children." It's about families desperately searching for answers while trying to keep everyone safe, including the child who's struggling the most.

I have two teenage boys, both with very different mental health challenges. For this story, though, I'm talking about my oldest. My younger son has his own journey, but this documentary mirrored so much of what I’ve experienced with my oldest that I couldn't stop thinking about him.

He's 17 now.

So where do I even begin?

I guess we start at the beginning.

My pregnancy was mostly uneventful...except for one bizarre medical mystery. Around six months along, I ended up in the hospital for a week with severe kidney pain caused by a blockage no one could explain. After countless tests, procedures, and stents, the blockage eventually cleared on its own. To this day, no one knows why it happened. Thankfully, it never happened again. Just one more mystery to add to my collection...haha.

The delivery itself was pretty typical...well, mostly. It was a teaching hospital, so I swear there were about a billion interns in the room. Of course, I had FRIENDS playing on the TV because...well...of course I did. Haha.

When he was finally born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck twice. He was blue. The NICU team rushed in and quickly took him to be checked over. Those few minutes felt like forever, but thankfully everything turned out okay. We went home a day or two later like any other family.

As a baby and toddler, he hit all of his milestones. Well...mostly. He never really cared much for crawling the "normal" way. He mastered the army crawl and got so fast at it that he rarely bothered crawling on all fours. Haha.

His younger brother was diagnosed with Autism at an early age, so our home became a revolving door of therapists for several years. By then my oldest was around three or four, and while those services were there for his brother, he naturally became part of many of the activities too. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if having so much attention focused on his younger brother affected him in ways I didn't recognize at the time.

Then came first grade.

One afternoon, I received calls from three different teachers. They were all concerned because my son had suddenly started violently jerking his head throughout the day.

I got him into his pediatrician as quickly as I could, and we were referred to Children's Hospital.

That was when he was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome.

We quickly learned that stress, anxiety, fear, and anger made his tics much worse. The harder he tried to suppress them, the worse the headaches became.

Kids can be incredibly cruel without realizing the damage they're doing. They accused him of faking it. They'd tell him to "just stop" twitching, laugh at him, and insist he was doing it on purpose. They couldn't understand that he had absolutely no control over it.

Not long after, ADHD was added to his list of diagnoses.

At the time, I honestly believed those diagnoses explained what we were seeing.

I had no idea we were only at the beginning of a journey that would change all of our lives.

As time went on, his behavior became more and more concerning.

By second grade, he had been expelled because his behavior had become a danger to himself and others. By third grade, I was missing work so I could sit beside him in class all day. I'd leave work early to pick him up after another suspension or another phone call from the school. He threw chairs across classrooms. He screamed at teachers and classmates. Some days, just getting through the school day felt impossible.

But here's what people didn't see. When he wasn't struggling, he was incredible. Kind. Polite. Helpful. Funny. The kind of kid who would go out of his way to help someone else without expecting anything in return. That is my son too.

Then came the pandemic.

Like so many families, our lives were turned upside down. We had just moved, he was starting at a new school remotely in sixth grade, and whatever balance we had managed to find completely disappeared.

His anger became more intense. He became increasingly aggressive toward me and his younger brother. Most of the aggression was directed at his younger brother. He ran away from home. He destroyed televisions, remotes, other electronics, toys, walls...if it was in his path, it wasn't always safe.

Over the next few years, we lived through what felt like an endless cycle of crisis. There were countless trips to Children's Hospital, seventy-two-hour psychiatric holds, longer inpatient stays—including one that lasted more than a month—intensive outpatient programs, medication changes, appointments, and waiting lists. We'd get hopeful. Then we'd get disappointed. Before long, we were doing it all over again. Every time we thought we might finally be getting somewhere, we'd find ourselves right back where we started.

Eventually, another diagnosis was added: Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). At the time, I fought for that diagnosis because I believed it might finally open another door to treatment. Looking back now, I'm not even sure it was the right diagnosis. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. I'm not a doctor—I never wanted to be his doctor.

My job wasn't to diagnose my son. My job was to tell the doctors everything I was seeing: the voices he said he heard, the suicidal thoughts, the homicidal thoughts, the destruction, the violence, the running away, and the emotional crashes that seemed impossible to explain.

I wasn't asking them to agree with me. I was asking them to keep looking because something still didn't fit. I was simply asking them to keep an open mind.

And here's one of the hardest parts to explain to people who haven't lived it. Colorado has resources. On paper, there are resources everywhere. But having resources and actually being able to access them are two very different things.

If your insurance doesn't cover it...if you don't qualify...if there isn't an open bed...or if you simply can't afford it...those resources might as well not exist.

That's what our reality felt like.

My biggest fear wasn't that my son was a bad kid, because he wasn't. My biggest fear was that he would grow into an adult without ever getting the help he truly needed. That he'd end up homeless...or in jail...or dead.

Not because he was a bad person, but because he was a kid who desperately needed the right tools, and no one seemed able to hand them to him.

Now let's get into the really hard part.

When my son was 13, I made a decision I still think about to this day.

I had him arrested. It was never a decision I imagined having to make as a parent.

Even writing those words hurts.

That day, he caused more than $2,000 worth of damage to his bedroom. During the incident, he shoved me to the ground and banged my head against a door. He wasn't acting like a rebellious teenager. He wasn't throwing a tantrum. He wasn't well.

By the time law enforcement arrived, he had calmed down. Because he was no longer considered an immediate danger to himself or anyone else, taking him to the hospital wasn't an option. The officers explained that if I wanted them to do anything further, I would have to press charges.

Those were the choices in front of me: keep him home and hope another violent episode didn't happen...or have my 13-year-old son arrested.

No parent dreams of making that decision. I chose the option that I believed gave us the best chance of keeping everyone safe, including him.

Do I still question it?

Absolutely.

I probably always will.

When these episodes ended, something else happened that made them even harder to understand. He would completely crash. After hours of destruction, screaming, threats, and violence, he'd fall asleep from pure exhaustion. When he woke up, he often remembered very little of what had happened.

That's mental illness.

Not long after that, another night changed everything.

He was yelling, slamming doors, throwing things, telling me he hated me, saying he wished he had never been born and that he'd be happier dead. Then he kicked a yoga ball directly at me.

To most people, that probably doesn't sound like much. To me, it was a warning because I knew the pattern. Throwing things had often been the beginning. Physical violence usually came next.

Earlier, when the violence first started, my dad told me to keep a baseball bat nearby.  I couldn't do it. Instead, I bought pepper spray. Not because I ever wanted to use it, but because I hoped that if things ever became dangerous, I could stop the situation without causing permanent harm.

That night, I used it.

Afterward, I cried harder than I can remember crying in a long time. I felt like I had failed my son, but I also knew something else.

Everyone in the house was safe.

Even my son later told the responding officers that he deserved it. He admitted he had been out of control and didn't know what might have happened if things had continued. That doesn't erase how awful it felt. I don't know if there was a perfect decision that night. I only know I made the best decision I could with the information I had.

Not long after that, people I considered close friends stepped in to help. At first, I was grateful. They gave my son another environment, another routine, another chance to decompress away from home. For a while, I thought maybe they were seeing something I wasn't.

Then another violent episode happened at my house. His mentor witnessed much of it firsthand as he became extremely destructive again.  During the incident, my son threatened to kill himself and threatened to hurt me.

I called the police again.

That single phone call changed everything.

Almost overnight, people who had once supported me began questioning everything I did. I was suddenly the bad mother. My house wasn't safe. I was the problem. Some family members believed it too. It was devastating.

These were people who had watched me spend years searching for answers, sitting through appointments, calling hospitals, missing work, and doing everything I could think of to help my son. Now they believed I was the reason he was struggling.

Eventually, the courts placed him with those same “friends” under a temporary kinship arrangement. For a while, everything looked wonderful.

Then the honeymoon phase ended.

He became destructive there too. He ran away. He became violent. The same behaviors followed him. Eventually, they asked for him to be removed from their home.  They discovered what I had been trying to explain all along, and in the end, it was simply too much for them.

This wasn't about parenting.

My son needed far more help than any one household could provide.

From there, he entered foster care. Because he was over 13, his wishes carried significant weight, and many decisions were influenced by what he wanted in the moment. The foster home gave him far more freedom than I would have.

At first, everything seemed fine.

Then the honeymoon phase ended again.

School problems returned. Legal problems followed. At one point, I found myself helping him complete court-ordered community service because the adults responsible for supervising him weren't making sure it was getting done.

Nearly two and a half years had passed, and I was still asking the same question I'd been asking since the beginning.

Can someone please help my son?

I wanted a full psychological evaluation. Not another twenty-minute appointment, another medication adjustment, or another discharge because he had finally calmed down. I wanted someone to see him from beginning to end. I wanted someone to see him when he was calm, when he was escalating, when he was at his worst, and afterward, when he crashed so hard he barely remembered what had happened.

I wasn't looking for a label.

I was looking for answers.

At one point, I became convinced that maybe bipolar disorder explained what we were living through. I read everything I could find. I listened to podcasts. I searched for stories from families who sounded like ours. Some things fit. Other things didn't.

Then I came across Borderline Personality Disorder.

Again, I wasn't trying to diagnose my son. I know I'm not a doctor, and I also knew he was a teenager. I understood why many clinicians are cautious about applying certain diagnoses at that age. What I wanted wasn't for someone to agree with me. I wanted them to stay curious. To be willing to explore every reasonable possibility with an open mind. To listen. To ask questions. To keep looking. Because I knew, deep down, that something still wasn't adding up.

There are huge pieces of this journey I'm leaving out. Entire chapters. Court hearings. Therapists. Caseworkers. Lawyers. Missed holidays. Broken relationships. What I now recognize as parental alienation. Small victories. Huge setbacks. Almost three years of our lives were consumed by a system that often seemed more focused on checking boxes than finding answers.

Eventually, the courts ended. I was awarded full custody of both of my boys. Their father also lost custody. That chapter closed. Not because everything had been fixed, because it hadn't, but because for the first time in a long time we could finally begin moving forward instead of constantly fighting to survive another hearing, another placement, or another decision made by someone who didn't live our lives.

Watching A Dangerous Son brought all of those memories rushing back. For the first time in a long time, I didn't feel like I was watching strangers. I felt like I was watching pieces of my own family. Different faces. Different names. The same fear. The same exhaustion. The same hope that somewhere, somehow, someone would finally know how to help.

As I watched these parents, I realized how easy it would be for someone on the outside to misunderstand them. There are moments when they seem detached, almost cold. You might question their words or wonder why they made a particular decision.

But what you're seeing isn't a lack of love.

You're seeing years of living in survival mode.

At least for me, it was never about control or power. It was about keeping my composure, making the best decision I could with the information I had in that moment, and doing everything possible to keep everyone safe.  When you've lived through the same crisis over and over again, you learn very quickly that if you lose control of your own emotions, you're no longer able to help the person who needs you most.

If you've never lived this life, I hope you never do.

If you have...I hope you know you're not alone.

And if you ever see a parent whose child is struggling with severe mental illness, please remember this: you're seeing one moment. You're not seeing the years of appointments, the sleepless nights, the fear, the second-guessing, the impossible decisions, or the love behind every one of them.

Mental illness doesn't just affect the person living with it. It affects every person who loves them.

Watching this documentary reminded me that our family isn't the only one living this reality. There are parents all over the country searching for answers, making impossible decisions, and hoping someone will finally see the whole picture.

I don't pretend to have the answers. I won’t ever have all of them. But I know this: my son has never been the problem. The problem has always been finding the help he deserves.

Until we become better at supporting families before they reach their breaking point, there will continue to be parents just like me...doing the very best they can with the information they have in the moment, hoping that somehow it's enough.

#MyBeautifulShitShow #MentalHealth #ADangerousSon #NotAlone #AMothersLove