How to Live with Admitting Your 5 Year Old to a Psychiatric Hospital. Again.
I begged and bartered with any and every God that this wouldn’t be his life.
My car sped through the green rolling hills of blanketed farmland. Amish farms blended in sequence with rural outposts, tiny grocery stores, and a shoe repair store. In between the farms, luxury suburban housing developments plotted on what was once family farmland. Rows of identical 4,000 square foot homes on treeless streets mingled with livestock and built by hand homesteads with no electricity. Shapes of forward and backward flowing together as one.
I didn’t know if this hospitalization was for me or for him.
I crawled to a stop and made a left turn into a group of six identical brown rectangular buildings forged to match the earth and appear translucent among the greenery. Invisible, almost identical ranch style buildings unbeknownst to the world except for the sign that read: The Meadows.
Bonus: The Meadows had a big parking lot with lots of available spaces.
My son, Dominic, was equal parts drinking and spilling a bottle of water while rolling around the back seat of the car. We pretended to be able to keep a seat belt attached to him…
