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A mother struggles with her son's
drug habit

The sky poured buckets of rain on Ellen Holland's blue Chevrolet van. The wipers squeaked across the windshield, a steady rhythm blending with Holland's son's mumbled conversation.

Peter's words poured over themselves in a frantic rush. What if the doctors locked him in the psychiatric ward? What if they did weird experiments on him? Why was she forcing him to go anyway? Why was she trying to hurt him?

Holland (names have been changed to protect privacy) pulled off the road and stopped the van. She thought of the 45 minutes remaining until they reached the doctor's office and gave her son a choice: He could quit his irrational questions now, and she would continue to the doctor's, or he could keep it up, and she would drop him off at his friend's house where he could find his own way.

Peter chose to remain silent. She pulled back into traffic, but two minutes later Peter started again, unable to control his paranoia and fear.

They arrived at the red brick office and seated themselves in the waiting room. Holland ignored the magazines on the tables.

Holland felt a determination to see this through. She had managed to get her son inside the doors. And she needed relief. She needed to know the truth about her son's condition.

She glanced at her blond-haired, blue-eyed, 20-year-old son. His skin was pale, his 5-foot-10-inch frame skeletal under the baggy pants he wore. He had been thin when she first got him as a 4-month-old baby through a foster-care placement. He had suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. He vomited his food and remained stiff in her arms, his legs curled tight against his chest. Over time, he gained weight and began to relax. He laughed easily; everything in the world amused him. Holland loved him and knew she could never let him go.

The last adoption paper was signed when Peter was 2-and-a-half years old. The Holland family celebrated by inviting nearly 100 guests to their home. A train cake more than 5 feet long stretched across the dining room table. Peter never left his seat beside the frosted medallion that signified his new name.

Holland always told her son of his adoption. Yet when Peter was 5 years old, he approached her with a question.

"Was I in your tummy like Jeremy was?" he said, referring to his 6-year-old brother. The room faded and she only saw her son. "No," she told him. She said that he wasn't from her tummy; he came from another mommy's tummy. But she loved him very much, and he was her and Daddy's little boy.

Holland saw a change in Peter's face, one she could not describe. After that moment he went from a child who laughed easily to one whom laughter seemed hard to find. His embraces were never again as warm.

A nurse in a brightly colored uniform led Holland and her son into an examination room. Holland took one chair, Peter the other, and they faced the examination table with its white streak of paper down the center.

Soon the doctor walked in. His brown hair was in a ponytail, and he had an earring in one ear. Holland felt relief. Perhaps Peter could relate to this man and feel more at ease. The doctor asked her to leave.

The trouble had started when Peter attended junior high. Holland and her husband never actually saw Peter smoking marijuana. But they found pipes in his room. When he was in high school, a neighbor called and told them that Peter had sold her son marijuana. "Our hearts were broken over him using the drug himself," Holland said. "But in some ways it was an even greater heartbreak that he was dealing it because he was responsible for other people's lives being ruined. It was just horrible to think about." Peter skipped classes. He dropped out of school when he was 16.

"I'm not your son! I don't fit in! You don't love me -- no one does!" he often said during this time. "My heart was broken every time he would say something like that. But I knew he was speaking out of anger, not a rational mind," Holland said. She realized that some things she could not fix, she said. Richard Holland felt frustrated that his wife allowed Peter to talk to her in such a way.

"[She desired] to be a sounding board. She had a mother's heart, loving a child through every circumstance, even though he was speaking badly to her, even though he was destroying his life. She felt so deeply and was not able to separate herself. When someone hurts, she hurts. She takes on the burden of someone's pain and can't find relief from it," he said.

Holland often wondered if her son's problems were a reflection of her parenting. "Wasn't there some way we could have hog-tied him and stopped him from doing the drugs?" she wondered. "Did we have our head in the sand?"

Yet she knew that God was a perfect parent, and his children rebelled against him. She stopped asking the questions; she found them unproductive. After Peter turned 18, he moved in and out of the Holland's home. Every time he came back, he promised he would change. As a parent, Holland wanted to give him the chance.

Holland felt she gave and gave to her son and wondered when he would give something back. Sometimes, all she could do was rest her head against her husband's shoulder and cry. She knew she could not change her son's life by merely telling him to. She began speaking to her son about Teen Challenge.

She heard about the program through her church. The program's representatives were men who had lived the life her son was living and were changed by God. She wanted Peter to be one of those men. She wanted to see him with a clear and uncluttered mind telling people how God helped him clean up his mess.

She knew the program used biblical principles. "[A] biblical approach on how to deal with life-controlling problems," the brochure said. She knew about the program's 86 percent success rate. "The proven cure for the drug epidemic," the slogan read.

By the time Peter turned 20, his rebellion turned to confusion. He thought he suffered from life-threatening diseases and heart problems. People stared at him. The airplanes in the night sky were alien spacecraft coming to take him away. He was afraid his parents would peel off their faces to reveal the monsters underneath.

As her son lost his sense of reality, Holland's own mind filled with fears. Was Peter suffering from mental instability?

Her son lost weight. Holland wondered if he had contracted AIDS. She wanted her son tested. So now she sat at the clinic, waiting for the doctor's prognosis.

The doctor came out and sat beside her. He looked concerned, his eyes watery with tears.

"How are you coping with this?" he asked her. Holland nearly broke down in the face of the doctor's compassion. She was distraught for a reason. The times she had forced Peter to leave her house for lack of other ways to control him were not unfounded.

Holland and her husband were adopting a 10-year-old boy. When Peter yelled at them, young Trent cried himself to sleep. They could not let Peter's choices poison the life of another child.

Peter called them constantly. He was frightened; he wanted to come home. She knew he was hungry. She knew he was scared. Yet she knew if she let him back in she would "enable him to be irresponsible," and the irresponsibility would turn into an incapability to care for himself.

"It was the hardest thing I had to do to tell Peter, 'No.' I'd hang up the phone and cry," Holland said. "We were trying to force him in a corner where he would get miserable, where he would do anything to get help."

Peter agreed to join Teen Challenge.

The doctor's office phoned to tell her that Peter did not have AIDS. She knew he was well enough to join Teen Challenge.

At the interview to enter Teen Challenge, the intake man asked, "Peter, what have you done?"

Peter merely grunted.

Peter is now in the eighth month of the 14-month program.

The program requires that he attend chapel every morning. He must memorize one proverb from the Bible a week. He is taught the disciplines of reading his Bible and praying daily.

According to Holland, her son looks better. He has gained weight and developed muscle. He does not hallucinate any longer. He wrote to her and said, "Mom, I don't know how you stood watching me do what I did."

Soon after Peter entered the program, he decided to get baptized. He stood before a group of 300 people and declared that he loved Jesus. Holland said that her heart was bursting with joy.

But Holland still worries about her son. She wonders if he suffers from brain damage. He becomes overwhelmed at looking at pictures of family members. He cannot remember something he was told 15 minutes earlier. His movements are robotic. He is constantly nervous.

Holland vacillates between deep sadness at her son's loss and anger at his choices. She wants to ask him, "Why?"

"Barely a year ago, our child had a normal mind. [He was] rebellious, but his brain wasn't fried," she said.

She knows her son cannot do many basic tasks such as balancing a checkbook. She wonders if she will care for him for the rest of his life.

Holland wonders what her son's life will be like when he leaves Teen Challenge. Will he go back to old friends and an old way of life? "With one binge, he'll be back where he started. I don't want it to go back to the way it was," she said.

Her biggest hope for Peter is that he will love Jesus Christ. Yet, despite the outcome, Holland said, "We're committed to him for a lifetime. He's our kid, and we're going to go on from here."