Continuance...

Oh for the love of grapefruit. I can't concentrate on homework this week...

So my story continues.

Home for my new family was a carpeted, curtained off dining room in a three bedroom, one bathroom house with a 28-year old single mom, who quickly became my "adoptive" mom (I still call her mama), and her three children. I was approaching 16 years old and had moved in with this woman about a year before when my mom moved away. I was her live-in babysitter while she went out and she babysat for me while I continued living like a teenager. To make a long story short I will state the obvious and move on.

It didn't work out between the loser and me. Not long after our son was born he split and we have had sparse civil conversations over the years. Enough said.

Following the semi-uneventful exodus of my baby's daddy and his squalid group of friends, the lady I had been living with became tired of my juvenile behavior and gave me the boot.

Enter new boyfriend (loser).

I lived without a home for the following time period.

For the following few months, my baby, loser #2 and I lived from couch to couch, party house to party house until I finally came to my senses and realized that I wasn't doing right by my child. So I called mama and asked her if my Zacky could come and stay with her until I got on my feet. She invited me over and we talked about the way things would work, how often I would come and visit, when I would bring food, etc.

Then I said goodbye to my baby.

Over the next several weeks, I came and visited and brought food and diapers and the things I knew Zack would need. But my visits were not enough. I still didn't have a job, a home, or a car and so my visits became fewer and farther between. Then I heard that Child Protective Services (CPS) wanted to talk to me. Well, I avoided them like the plague because I figured if they couldn't find me they couldn't take my baby away. I was so wrong.

CPS finally got me into their office to tell me that they were taking custody of my son and I would be ordered to complete a number of tasks in order to get him back. Jumping through hoops, if you will. The first thing I was supposed to do was complete 60 days of inpatient drug and alcohol treatment. They apparently didn't believe me that the only addiction I truly possessed was tobacco. I had been smoking pot at that point for five years pretty consistently, tried LSD a couple of times, speed once and refused to get into the alcohol world because I had seen what it did to my family. I drank very occasionally. However, this was my first duty in the sequence of events that were supposed to end with the return of my child.

Unfortunately, my son was the ultimate unfinished project in the smorgasboard of victims to my ADHD. I completed the inpatient treatment but not the other things, that included another 30 days of out patient treatment in a half-way house, finding a job, taking parenting classes, and getting a place to live. Half way through the half-way house I was 18 and I left for a life of daisy chains, rainbow gatherings, and the gratefully dead.