by Erica Willis

“Mom.”

As I left Sprouts Market my phone rang and the caller ID noted it was a call from a jail.  It’s him! I answered the call excitedly, and heard my son Riley on the other end of the line.  He wanted to check in to see how I was doing and to let me know where he was.  He sounded good to me.

“Are you on meds?”

“Yes, Zyprexa and Remeron.”

I knew that Zyprexa was an anti-psychotic so I did a happy dance right there in the parking lot. 

“Are you in a mental health pod?”

“Yes.”

The amount of relief I felt at that moment was immeasurable.  I began to cry tears of joy.

He had already been in Tucson jail for 2 weeks at this point.  Over the prior 2 weeks I had expected that once he was feeling more normal again he would reach out; thankfully he did. This was a far cry from our communication over the previous few years.

I had been visiting the jail website daily to make sure that he was still there.  Every day it was the same:  He was still there, apparently on assault and drug charges. Because of his addiction and mental illness I thought it a better alternative than the street.

Two days went by and he called again. After that, I started hearing from him regularly.  By the following week, everything out of his mouth sounded happy. He didn’t even seem to mind the fact that he was in jail.  He told me he felt like he was in summer camp, and that he was entirely relieved to have been plucked from the depths of hell and given a place to dry out. He was able to formulate organized thoughts, and the hints of delusions diminished.  Off of meth and on medication is the master key to life.  My hope skyrocketed.

The last time I had seen him was several months earlier,when I had visited him at the ramshackle Tucson motel where he was staying with his girlfriend, that I was paying for.  He was living in misery there but I was afraid to stop paying for it and have him wandering the streets.  His days consisted of things like hiding under the bed, because he thought people were watching him.

His girlfriend opened the door and I found someone completely out of his mind lying on the bed. First he didn’t speak at all.  He looked at me but wouldn’t answer me.  Later, he started pacing back and forth on his tiptoes, breathing heavily and drawing extremely close to my face as he yelled how I was an awful mother, I should have given him up for adoption, I am a liar, I am a bitch. He was sweating profusely. He smacked me upside the head, bruising the side of my face and ear. It stung, and I was terrified for my life as he had recently pulled a knife on his girlfriend and I didn’t know whether to expect the same. The door was blocked and I couldn’t get out.

“Hey, I would like to go to 7-11 to grab some snacks for us,” I calmly stated.  My heart was beating out of my chest but I acted natural and unafraid.  I was trying not to panic.

Something caught his attention and he briefly looked away, and I got my chance to pounce at the door and scramble down the hallway like wildfire.  I was sobbing, hyperventilating, and trembling. 

I called 911 and could barely put together a coherent sentence other than that I had a very sick adult child who needed help.  Several officers arrived within minutes.  Riley was holed up in the motel room and refused to come out.  I was hunkering down and praying that they would peacefully apprehend him so that he could be taken to a psychiatric hospital.  I couldn’t believe it when the police decided to leave him there.  They didn’t think it would be wise to exacerbate the issue by breaking down the door. 

I was handed an incident card.  “You’ll eventually hear from someone about the assault,” I was told.  They waited for me to get into an Uber before departing.

Not a matter of days later, I started getting the texts. 

“Fuck you, hoe. You’re fat and Alex is probably embarrassed to be seen with you.”

“I hate you. You’ve ruined my life and never want to help me.”

“I hope you die, cunt.”

I have long suffered immense remorse, guilt, and shame over the kind of mother I was, so the words pierced me through the heart. I struggle from my own mental health issues, and wasn’t aware of how to help myself until he was already an adult. Had I been capable of getting real help earlier on, things would have been different.  I would have chosen different things in life, which would have led to better outcomes for my children. I suffered from an undiagnosed disorder for much of my adult life, that made its landscape particularly difficult to tread.  One of the ramifications of this was that my relations with others were severely compromised. Another was that I ended up in abusive and dead-end relationships with men, two of whom were supposed to be fathers to Riley, who instead abandoned him and took no interest in his life as he grew up.   For these reasons, it is difficult not to internalize the comments.

I finally took a deep breath and hit “block”, which I simultaneously felt guilty about and relieved by.  In order to keep from losing my own mind, I had to create some boundaries.

Two years earlier, I had been forced to learn how to do so.  He bought a 1970s RV for under $500 and parked it in a shady part of town and lived in it with his girlfriend, without electricity or running water.  That jalopy piece of crap was unbelievable. When you look out your window and see this dilapidated hooptie sitting in the junkyard previously known as your driveway, you cringe and know the neighbors are judging and finger-wagging. Begging him to drive it away didn’t help because half the time the old junker wouldn’t even start.  One day while smoking meth they accidentally burned it down.

Riley’s mental health issues began around age 2, when he started to act out against other children in preschool, hitting them, scaring them with scissors, and generally being aggressive.  Per the teacher’s recommendation, we began play therapy. I hoped things would get better. Things, however, did not improve.  On the contrary, they continued to get worse.  By late elementary school, he was in special schools geared toward children with emotional disturbance.  In high school he went to three residential treatment schools, for a total of two and a half years. I believed with every fiber of my being that I was saving his life.

The three times I had to send him to residential placement were some of the most painful decisions of my life.  Once, I had to have him get in the car to go to his new school, without having told him he was staying there.  Another time, he was essentially kidnapped in the middle of the night, shackled, and driven to Utah.  Orchestrating these things was nauseating. I had to practice radical acceptance:  I had to accept what was, not what I wished was. I had to do what I believed was in his best interest, no matter how difficult. Still, I lost countless hours of sleep, first knowing what was imminent, and then thinking about it after-the-fact.

Riley is a sensitive soul who has always seemed to lack the capacity to emotionally self-regulate.  He grew up as such a loving boy, caring about his family and animals, and enjoying games from the early 2000s such as Pokemon and Bey Blades.  He always displayed a love of all things related to electronics, specifically computers, and cars.  Many a time he would wheel home items others had discarded, by pulling them atop his skateboard, so that he could get an in depth understanding of how they worked and to try to piece them together with other items to invent something new.  He has an infectious laugh and his sense of humor really packs a punch.  We have always had similar senses of humor, and that has always been a source of connectedness. Because I knew that the abuse he had witnessed, and the abandonment he had endured, had torn a small corner of his soul, I have spent his life running behind him with an umbrella, trying to shield him from the rain.  It would often rain on him anyway, and ironically, he would turn around and see me there and assume I was the one making it rain, and get angry at me.  Perhaps in a way I had made it rain for him, and will spend the rest of time trying to make up for it.

Around age 20, he started telling me that men in red shirts were following him everywhere he went.  I didn’t grasp what was occurring, likely due to severe denial, which was that he was having hallucinations and delusions. 

“Mom, there are people walking around upstairs in the attic.”

“Riley, I promise you, there aren’t.”

“I can hear them every night.  I’m going to try to capture them.”

He put thin paper over all of the windows so that if someone opened them he’d know it.  Obviously the paper always remained intact.

I discovered that he was in severe psychosis when he was 23 and driving from California to Arizona.  His girlfriend was with him and she told me that he started thinking someone was following them and trying to kill them, so he started speeding on the shoulder of the freeway, passing all of the other cars.  He got off the freeway and parked near a car dealership.  He somehow ended up ripping the bumper off of a car, and breaking the windshield of another car in the dealership.  He called the police himself because he thought they were in danger. 

When the police arrived they promptly transported him to a psychiatric hospital where he was placed on an involuntary hold.  He was there about a week and was stabilized.  I went to get him and bring him to my home.  No sooner did we arrive and the meth pipe was once again blazing.  That same night, my 17-year-old daughter had to call 911 because Riley was breaking the wall, screaming that there was a skull inside it, tearing off medicine cabinets to look behind them, and searching under beds.  He believed someone was in the house and his agitation was reaching a fever pitch.  We were scared for our safety and his.

When the police came, he was hysterical because he thought I was in danger. No amount of consoling could calm him down.  I begged the police to take him to the hospital for another psychiatric evaluation.  After a lot of pleading they finally relented and took him to the emergency room, where he was processed back to the same psychiatric unit he had been released from earlier that day.

Things deteriorated still.  He ended up in Illinois with his girlfriend and her parents.  While there,  he became non-verbal.  He would “air spell” words because he thought people were listening to him and he didn’t trust anyone.  He tried to walk away from the people he was with, leaving without a coat in freezing weather, without money, and without a phone.  I was in close communication with his girlfriend and her mother during this time, and we jointly decided that the police had to be called because he was unable to care for his own basic needs.  I was once again ill as I awaited word back.  I felt so powerless.  It was a feeling of pure terror. I was praying that the police would be savvy enough to surmise that he needed immediate mental health help.  I was further praying that he would come into contact with kind and competent professionals who would be able to help him.

Much to my relief, and with my immense gratitude, he was taken to a psyche unit.  He spent about three weeks there.  During that time, he told me that he thought several episodes of Sponge Bob Square Pants had been written about him, that some of the rap songs he listened to spoke to him directly, and that he was seeing clones of people from our hometown in Illinois.  By the end of the three weeks though, he was able to communicate fairly normally again, and it seemed like he was steady enough to board a train back west. 

He, his girlfriend, and her mother waited for the Amtrack but when it arrived Riley refused to get on it.  His mental status was spiraling again. They had to get on or lose their tickets, so they boarded without him, trying to convince him to follow them.  After the train left, he had an apparent seizure at the station and was extremely confused and scared. Someone called 911 and he was brought back to the psyche unit once again, after only about three days post-release.

Then, some headway was made.  He was much more jovial and lucid. He decided he would try going to a rehab after discharge, so I set something up back in California.  I flew to Chicago one Monday morning, picked him up from the hospital, and flew him back to California the same afternoon.  Someone from the rehab met us at LAX and transported him to their facility. He was loved there, and he was happy.

Eight days later, he was gone.

“I’m better now mom, I am going to live a good life now.”

I later found out that he was staying on Los Angeles’s Skid Row, surrounded by people living in sorrow, filth, and despair.  Knowing he was there and there was nothing I could do about it set my weary soul ablaze. I was barely surviving. I would fall into desperate bouts of weeping.  I would imagine him padding down the road hauling his suitcase and trying to find bits and pieces of scraps to eat and drugs to smoke.  My heart was broken.  I was in excruciating pain and knew he was in imminent peril.

I found out that meth-induced psychosis can mimic schizophrenia and that sometimes it’s difficult to parse out which is which.  When a person has used meth for a prolonged period of time, it’s not unusual for there to be delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia, all of which he suffered from.  Meth use can be a contributing factor in triggering schizophrenia in people who were already prone to develop it. In his case, doctors who have tried to distinguish between the two have faced a conundrum due to a few factors.

Generally, schizophrenia’s onset is slower than that of meth-induced psychosis.  In Riley’s case, he slowly became increasingly paranoid, and his delusions and hallucinations heightened.  The age of onset is also not definitive in his case because schizophrenia usually develops in young adulthood.  Negative symptoms such as impoverishment of speech and flat affect usually do not surface with meth-induced psychosis, but these are symptoms Riley has had.  Meth-induced psychosis often includes tactile hallucinations such as someone thinking bugs are crawling on their skin, and he has never had that.  It has felt important to me to know which it was, even though both conditions are treated in a similar fashion, which mainly includes the use of anti-psychotic medications.  If he has schizophrenia, perhaps I feel the blame can’t be laid at my feet as much as it can if it’s all drug-induced, however I do know both can potentially be life-long sentences that can interfere with any life I would have wished for him.

The DSM-5, which is a psychiatrist’s bible, outlines that any psychosis that lasts longer than 6 months be diagnosed as a primary psychotic illness, like schizophrenia.  For now, we treat it as if it is schizophrenia and will see what unfolds as things either subside or progress. If it’s meth-induced psychosis and he is able to treat his substance abuse disorder, chances are he will get better.  If it is schizophrenia, he will both need to treat his substance abuse disorder, and have a long-term treatment protocol, since schizophrenia would be for life.  Either way, I probably have to be braced to interface with it on a long-term basis.

After over four months in Tucson jail, Riley was released to probation, to a probation-approved rehab.  All of the necessary mental health services were secured.  He spent a little over two weeks there, and then unfortunately left the program.  Things are currently up in the air and I’m holding my breath.  

I will never stop hoping, trying to help, and advocating for him. I will never stop celebrating incremental improvements.

Once I apologized to Riley for failing him as a mother.  “You didn’t fail yet mom, because it’s not over yet.” 

I strive to be the mother he needs.

Erica Stenta Willis is an attorney specializing in workers’ compensation law.  A recent empty nester, she has returned to one of her original loves, writing.  This is her debut essay.  She resides in Ventura County, California with her fiancé and terrier.