While living in Colorado my husband had started his own business, doing general contracting. When he had big jobs to do he would go to the homeless shelter to find guys that wanted to work that day. He was trying to employ people that needed that second chance. In doing so he put himself into the position of not always being around people that were sober. He had the best of intentions, but became weak, and before long he had relapsed.
He landed a contract cleaning the irrigation ditches for the farmers, myself and our boys usually would help but I also was working full time at the gas station and the boys were in school so it was more so than not that he would go to the shelter and try to recruit workers. It didn't take long for his using to get out of control, at one point he was going to the ER on his own or was calling an ambulance because he thought he was dying.
The hospital I am assuming contacted the state because they knew we had kids at home. The boys were in 8th, 9th and 10th grade. When CPS came to our home they would always offer help to him so he could quit, he never accepted the offer, he would simply tell them he was going through our church for support and help. We did reach out to our church on several occasions but would never get as much as a phone call.
Fast forward a few months and I eventually started using again too. My husband had found one guy that he hired from the shelter, it was him and his girlfriend. We ended up moving because our place was really small. There was 5 of us living in a 1 1/2 bedroom basically, the boys had the bedrooms and Louis and I had half the living room as our bedroom. We found this really awesome house to rent, it had an upstairs with 2 bedrooms, huge living room, kitchen full bathroom, dining room and a sitting room with a fireplace, and a mud room. The basement had a cellar room, washer and dryer, living room, full bathroom, full kitchen and a pantry. So the boys were old enough to have the basement as pretty much theirs. We had this extra bedroom upstairs so we let the guy working with Louis and his girlfriend move in.
Things got bad between Louis and I after we moved, he would stay out all night, never answer my calls, other things were going on too, but I will put that in a later blog. Not knowing where to turn but knowing where this path that I was on led to I made a decision to call the CPS hotline and ask for help before I ended up losing my kids because something crazy happened. I felt safe calling them because of all the times before they had came to the house and offered Louis help. I also felt calling and asking for help was the right thing to do because then I would be held accountable. Calling and asking for help ended up being the worst thing ever. They didn't come in and try to help me, they came in and made Louis and I leave and allowed the boys to stay in our house with the couple staying with us and what is really messed up about that is they were using too. Never in my life did I think they would come in and do that, I honestly believed that they would come in and we would sit and make this plan together, I would be made to do random UA's go to classes, and really just be held accountable. It shattered my heart when I was made to leave my house and couldn't see my kids. I still to this day don't understand, if my life hadn't been so crazy then I probably would have stuck up for myself in the situation a little more. I would have stood in front of the judge and explained to them why the phone call was made. It wasn't like my kids were young and depended on me for 100% of their care, my boys were in high school, hold me accountable, help me, don't just take me away from my kids, I reached out to you asking for help so I didn't get my kids taken.....the system that is in place let me down. Time and time again.
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