Ashley spent three days in Charleston, and I fervently hoped she wouldn’t come home. It was bad enough when she tried to provoke me into arguing with her or that Mike was always taking her side. But the physical attacks were over the top. I just didn’t have the strength to fight this, and I refused to visit her in the hospital or participate in any therapy there. It wasn’t like the hospitalizations were doing her any good. I felt we’d done everything we could, and it was time to give up.

I lobbied Kerri to petition the hospital to keep Ash until a live-in facility could be found, but Mike disagreed. As usual, he blamed her behavior on me, but in this case I knew it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t have to give in to her every whim, and as her mother it was up to me to help make decisions for her protection. It could’ve just as easily been one of the younger children she punched. But Mike was adamant. Besides, the IEP that the school district was working on wasn’t complete yet. Defeated, I finally agreed that if her psychiatrist would take her off the Elavil, which seemed to be triggering the violence, she could return home.

Mike called Marilyn, the high school youth leader from church, and asked her if she would go see her. Ashley was enjoying the Monday night Bible study at her home. Marilyn was one of the few adults Ash got along with, and they were on their way to cementing a friendship. We hoped the woman’s influence would produce some stability in our daughter’s life, and to that end Mike met with Marilyn and her husband a couple of times to discuss her. Ashley was in desperate need of an attitude adjustment.

On Wednesday, Ashley returned home. On Thursday, she started school at Oakside. The school, which was the educational component of their day treatment program, was an offshoot of a behavioral treatment facility which also incorporated a separate inpatient program. Those who lived at Oakside attended school alongside kids like Ash who showed up every morning and departed in the afternoon. And oh, how lucky for us! Ashley met up with some teens she’d met at San Ramon hospital who were now Oakside in-patients. One boy in particular, named Ron, had been in San Ramon the same time she was and had a brother she knew from Covington High. Old friends had always been one of her downfalls, especially if they were male.

Ashley fit into the new school true to form. She started off badly by missing the first two days, and it was all downhill from there. I think her biggest problem was that she chose not to do well. She couldn’t care less about her grades and made up excuses about why she didn’t want to participate in P.E. She decided to wear the two skirts in rotation which Mike had purchased, and the staff was appalled because her clothes were too tight and too short. Considering the fact that she was constantly around emotionally-troubled adolescent boys, her clothes were considered overly provocative. She also clashed with her counselor, Bart, who oozed smarm. It was our daughter at her “best”.

But Ashley had a method to her madness, misguided though it was. She badly wanted to go back to Covington High, and I think she hoped getting kicked out of Oakside would accomplish that. Not that we had any plans to put her back in a public high school. The IEP team was well aware of her emotional problems, and we all felt a public setting would be a disaster. Ash was an emotional ticking time bomb.

Hard as it is to believe, Mike became even more protective after her attack on me. He and Ashley stuck together like glue, and he planned his entire day around her. He had always been an early riser, and now he would wake up at dawn and go down to his office for an hour of answering e-mails or whatever it was he did. After getting her off to school, he felt free to work for the six hours she was absent from the home, and he timed his reappearance with her arrival home on the school van. Late afternoon and evenings were spent with Ash, either running errands, out and about doing something fun, in his office or eating in the kitchen. At night when it was time for her to go to bed, Mike would lay down outside her bedroom door. She was taking a medication to help her relax, and it pretty much knocked her out. Once she was sound asleep, she stayed that way until morning.

Mike often fell asleep on the floor for several hours until he knew she was out for the night, and then he’d come to bed. He was no spring chicken, and even though he was in fairly good physical shape, his body ached from sleeping in front of her door. Of course, due to the medication, rousing her for school the next day was an entirely different issue, and often her alarm clock would sound for an hour before Mike went in to shake her awake. Everyone else heard the alarm exceptAshley. He was exhausted. The entire family was.