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Getting My Son Ready For Rehab
It’s been a long time coming. I’ve seen the signs for years, but there has been little I could do. His father and I are divorced, and don’t see eye to eye on many things.
My son dropped out of college after one semester. No, that’s not true. He was kicked out. He had a grade-point average of below 1.0. Below. He had hardly gone to any classes at all, and in his English 101 class, he had plagiarized his midterm paper so badly that he had an F for the course by mid-semester.
He was 17 then.
He tried to tell us that he was changing majors, that instead of acting, he wanted to pursue business. He thought we wouldn’t know he had been tossed out.
I told him he could live at home until what would have been the end of his freshman year, but then he had to grow up and live on his own. He was out by April, because his partying and late-nights were too much for me to handle. I still had a daughter in high school and a son in middle school. I couldn’t fight with him any more.
He worked at a pizza shop and a Starbucks. He lived in squalor with five or six students who were still taking classes.
Then he got a job at a bar.
He was 19 then.
He bounced around from that apartment to another, and from the first bar job to another…
