Gary V. Powell, Author

A major challenge you face with a child who has  bi-polar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and a drug and alcohol addiction is that her disorders are integrally intermingled with a lack of self-discipline, immaturity, and laziness. A second major challenge is that you never know when some or all of these demons will visit with a vengeance.

Ashley arrived on New Year's Eve with her demons in tow. She spent an apparently normal evening with us, then got about the business the next day of arranging a drug buy with a friend. She begged me to allow her to visit her friend at work, I consented to an hour, and (based on reconstructed text messages) Ashley burned us with a drug buy in front of our house from a dealer who lives on the Penninsula. After Ashley made the buy, her friend showed up, shook my hand, and talked to my face about her son playing with my son Reilly. Then Ashley and her friend went upstairs and snorted coke in the room that was once Reilly's baby room. Shortly thereafter, when the drug inevitably let her down, Ashley suffered a rare combination of clarity and remorse , made possible by the drug Paxel she's been prescribed. While we slept, she took a week's worth of medications that included uppers, downers, and mood stabilizers. She left a suicide note. She fell asleep with a paring knife in her bed, superficial cuts on her wrist, and an empty pill box by her side.

Five-year old Reilly found her this way the next morning, when he went to awaken her.

An hour with the paramedicals, a rush to ER, two days in a coma, followed by nearly a week of involuntary commitment to the psych ward of a local hospital.

Tuesday she was discharged. Yesterday, my birthday, I flew her to Chicago, boarded her on a plane back to Nebraska, and flew back here so I could at least have dinner with my family.

In the interim, I spent an inordinate amount of time and energy in hospital rooms, lawyers offices, and online with probation officers.

I hope her treatment in Omaha, where she's in an intensive outpatient program, will help. She's connected with the therapist there and has a chance of success.

But one of the things you learn after dealing with this for as long as I have, is that while it's about Dad and Mom, while it's about drugs and meds and therapists, while it's about disorders that wire the brain in ways that make no sense, it's ultimately about Ashley and what she wants. She has to want the therapy to work, she has to want the meds to work, she has to be willing to work hard to save herself. If she doesn't have that inside, for whatever reason, there's nothing else any of us can do.

I don't know if she wants it or not or if she has the capacity to want it or not.

I can only hope she does.

To read more about Ashley and our challenges with her ADHD and ODD, visit the following entries:  I Rolled a 130, Dad, Thanksgiving, The Family Counts, A Confluence of Crap, Hard Lessons, Probation, In the Company of Felons, Life at the Speed of Light, Reconciliation and Anguish. Goodbye Ashley, Fly Away, Six Bucks, Ashley's Run, Graduation, Grounded by the Family, and In Defiance in the Family Archive).