Our lives were beginning to crumble. We knew what all of these signs indicated, but we just couldn’t bring ourselves to accept it. We took David to several psychologists, hoping for who knows what. Our “Brady Bunch” lives were becoming a living hell.

 

Finally Terry Wayne and I talked privately and frankly about all that was going on and we decided to take David for a drug test.  We took him for one, two, even three drug tests to a facility that did this on a regular basis, and he passed them all. We even surprised him at school on the last test so that he would not have an opportunity to take anything that might dilute his specimen. It was perplexing because he had all of the signs of drug use, yet all of his tests were negative. Our hearts told us he was using, but because of the negative drug tests, we had no sure proof.

 

The summer after David’s junior year of high school, we were faced with a situation that pretty much confirmed our suspicions. Late one night as Terry and I were watching television the phone rang. There was a man on the other end of the line, and he told Terry that David owed him money and that if he didn’t get it that night, David was going to be harmed. We had no idea what to do or where to turn, so, gun intact, Terry left to meet the unknown man in the Walmart parking lot to give him his hundred dollars. That same month we also received a call from David’s employer telling us that he had been fired because he was caught trying to sell alcohol to minors. Our hearts were once again broken, but this was the evidence we needed to make the tough decision that was facing us.

 

Unbeknownst to David, Terry and I had been discussing whether to send him away to a boy’s home for at least the remainder of the summer. Our home had become nothing but a battleground, and we were feeling desperate. With lots of research and the help of some family members who were knowledgeable in this area, we found a place that would take David in. We made the decision to go forward.  The group home was a Christian facility for troubled teens but strict and aggressive with discipline.

 

We prayed about it and felt like this was what we needed to do: in July we would take our family vacation to the beach in Alabama, and then we would come back to take David to the boys home in northern Arkansas.

 

At this point, we were still almost hoping for some kind of physical evidence of David’s drug use. He had, of course, given us a wild story about owing the man in the Walmart parking lot money for something totally unrelated to drugs. We didn’t buy it, but we honestly wanted something even more tangible than this.

 

We could tell that our extended families did not 100 percent support us in our decision to take David to the boys home. But I believe that one of the reasons they were skeptical was that, up until this point, we still had no positive proof we were dealing with drug use. We only had proof of alcohol use, failing grades, and the intense arguments that extended family members had only heard about. But we were living a nightmare. No one realized we had become fearful to go to bed at night and we were concerned about the other kids being harmed or David harming himself when he went into one of his rages. We had begun making sure the guns were hidden, and sometimes even the knives. I would go into David’s bedroom at night when he was asleep and pray over him just like I did when he was an innocent, sweet, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy.

 

Excerpted from Weeping may Last for a Night… by Kimberly Youngblood

Copyright © 2016 by Kimberly Youngblood

 

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