That Explains It!

I have an unexplainable situation here. I was hoping you could help me try to make some sense out of this. My 28 year-old, recently married, secretary wrote me the following note: “Dear Mr. Altshuler,” it reads. “My head hurts and I have been throwing up. I am going to the doctor. What do you think it could be?”

It’s a stumper. Here’s another one situation I can’t explain. Help me figure this out, would you please? My house smells like a gymnasium. There are dirty socks everywhere. Sweaty tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans have sprouted like kudzu in the quarters of my four adolescent children. (“Our sport is your sport’s punishment;” “Your pace or mine?” “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”) Groceries have started disappearing at an alarming rate: I bought a dozen bananas yesterday. Today, they’re all gone. My grocery bill looks like the Marshall Plan. I can’t keep pasta on the shelf; it evaporates by the pound. And the most inexplicable of all? All four children return late from school, exhausted and non-communicative. They sleep like stones. They used to run around and play in the back yard, now they don’t do anything except stagger through their homework and collapse into bed. Worst of all, they disappear every Saturday before the sun is even up only to show up again hours later covered with mud, smelling like goats, grinning triumphantly and whispering to one another about “splits” and “PRs.” It makes no sense: What do “banana splits” and “Public Relations” have to do with one another? Like I said, it’s a befuddlement.

Complicated explanations include the children having been kidnapped by aliens. The more realistic, and in this case, blatantly accurate account, is that they’re all running cross country for their middle school and high school teams.

Indeed, cross country explains each and every particular: the sweaty clothing, the constantly hungry and worn out kids, the early morning workouts. “Splits” are mile times in a 3.1 mile race. “PRs” are personal records. And, of course the tee-shirts, “No time-outs, no half-times, no breaks. The only true sport” refer to cross country as well.

How could sensible parents miss these obvious signs? They couldn’t. No one could. Just as no one could fail to infer that my 28 year-old, recently married, secretary, is pregnant.

But here’s a situation that parents miss all the time. And the explanation is just as obvious: My 16 year-old son is grouchy all the time. In middle school, he was loving and polite. Now he’s surly and disrespectful. We used to love his friends, they would come over all the time. Now, he meets them “at the park” or who knows where. We seldom meet them and when we do they don’t look us in the eye or talk much at all. He won’t do homework, says he “doesn’t have any” or that he has “already done it.” Of course, his grades in school have plummeted. Worst of all, things keep disappearing from our house: there are a few pieces of jewelry that I can’t seem to find, I always seem to have fewer twenty-dollar bills in my purse. Our son comes home at all hours and sleeps the days away. What could possibly be wrong?

What’s wrong is that this young man has an issue with substance abuse; there’s no doubt about it. It’s as clear as the Western sky. No other explanation takes care of the facts as cleanly. Whether or not the substance abuse has mutated into addiction or chemical dependency is unclear and unimportant for now just as whether or not the cross country runners competed on fields or wooded paths at their last meet. Once substance abuse has been accepted as the working hypothesis, each and every particular makes sense: the missing jewlery and money, the lower grades, the non-communicative friends, the secrecy and the lying, everything.

This kid has been smoking pot every day–several times a day–for a year. Once he has been clean and sober for a year, the grades, the choice of friends, the frictional family relationships will all start to heal.

I’d like to write more about the wonderful potential for this young man’s recovery, but I’m off to the grocery store to buy more bananas and pasta. I’m all in favor of cross country running, mind you. But if I see a sign in one of the kid’s rooms that reads: “26.2. Because 26.3 would be crazy,” I’m selling the house and leaving no forwarding address.