First Attempt.




Well, I've been reading blogs for about 2 years now and have had this account for over a year. I'm finally going to give it a shot and start my own.

There have been a million things going on in my life over the last year. I suppose I should have started writing a lot sooner, maybe it would have helped me unload some of the stress and anxiety that I've been dealing with over these trying months.

Some of you may know me, others may not. Here is a brief outline for those of you who stumbled upon this blog.

I'm a single mom of three beautiful girls, Raven ( 15 ) Danielle ( 12 1/2 ) and Maggie ( 8 ).

I work full time as a processor for a title company that is partially owned by my mother. It's a good job with a lot of responsibility. Business has been slow for the last year or so and I'm dying for it to pick up. It's so boring to sit here day after day with barely anything to do.

One of the big things that has been going on in my life is that I have found that one special someone. You know, the one that when you were growing up, you always hoped you'd find? I am so in awe at the power of our love. I've never felt anything like this before and it's so amazing I really can't find words wonderful enough to describe it.

The other thing that has been going on is almost over so maybe it's kind of pointless to write it all down. I think I will anyway, just to get it off my chest.

It all started last year at the beginning of Raven's Freshman year in High School. She was on cheerleading, softball and track. A very popular, well liked kid.

Just before the school year started, she started hanging out with some kids that were not in her normal group of friends. They were friends of her "boyfriend" Neil. This was the beginning of many months of drama.

Three weekends in a row starting in late August 04 Raven got into trouble and this started her on a downward spiral that we are just now pulling her out of.

The first weekend, she came home drunk and 2 hours late for her curfew ( at 14 years old no less! ) So I hustled her into the mom mobile and shuttled her butt right to the police station. I told them I wanted her to have a breathalizer and a drug test. The officer told me that if they gave her a breathalizer and she tested positive, then they'd have to arrest her. I decided against that because I already knew she was drunk, so instead I took her to Walgreen and bought an over the counter drug test (cost me $30! )and made her take it. She tested positive for marijuana. So, I promptly told her she was grounded until the new year. No phone, no friends, no nothing until 2005.

The following weekend, I had a wedding to go to about 10 minutes from home. So I left Raven in charge of her younger sisters and went for a couple of hours. When I came home around midnight, I had a few too many drinks at the reception and wasn't feeling too great so I headed straight to bed. At 3am the phone rings and it's the police. They picked Raven up riding a bike with her friend, ( a guy) and it was past curfew and they wanted me to come get her. So I go to pick her up and tell her now, not only is she grounded but she's not going to homecoming either.

The weekend after that she asked me if she could stay the night at her dad's house (biological sperm donor is more like it actually. She has had almost no contact with him since this happened) and I say ok. She tells me her step sister is coming to pick her up. Next day, she comes home around noon everything is fine, or so I thought. Later that evening her dad calls and asks me to check and see if Raven had Brittnay's (her step sister) flat iron because she hasn't been able to find it since Raven was there last week....Wait...Last week? Why didn't you ask her while she was there last night? " She wasn't here last night." hum...Well then would you care to ask Brittany where the hell she dropped her off then? Because she came here to pick her up to stay the night at your house. Lo and behold, Brittany comes clean and we find out that she had dropped Raven off at her then ex boyfriend, Neil's house. So at this point I'm at a loss..I've already taken so much away from her...What do I punish her with now? The only thing left to me was driver's training. She could have taken it at 14 and 9 months so I told her she couldn't take it till she turned 15.

During this time I was randomly giving her drug tests and making sure she wasn't using anymore and all of them turned out fine.

Then one day last October, I get a call from the office concerning Raven. The principal tells me that they had drug dogs in the school today and they made a positive ID on Raven's locker. I thought this was kind of odd because she barely ever even used her locker. It was way out of the way and very small so she always carried all her books in her cheerleading duffel bag.

Raven insisted that the tiny amount of pot they found in her locker wasn't hers, that she hadn't used in a long time.(which she hadn't according to the tests I had given her.)She had never been in trouble before, and there were others who had her combination for her lock because she had been in the hospital with her asthma just 2 weeks before. So the administration believed her and gave her a new locker and just called to inform me what had happened. Scary, but not a big deal or so I thought.

Later that day I get another call from the office asking me to bring Raven in the following day. That there was new "evidence" against Raven and they needed to see her. I asked them what was the evidence? The told me that they found a note written by Raven and some pills ( Adderol) so I said yes and went home to confront her.

I asked her about the pills and she said that they were for her friend Donna. She showed me a note that Donna had written 2 days before to Raven that said... Yay! I'm so exicited! I'm going to get a whole bottle of Adderol from this guy...I'm going to be rolling all weekend. According to Raven this is what happened the day of the drug search.

On her way to class some kid (gothic kid by Raven's description) that she didn't know (of course) came up to her and said, " Do you know Donna M?" Raven answered yes and he said , " Here, give these to her." and handed her a handful of pills, Raven stuck them in her pocket and went to class. Then an announcement was issued on the PA about the drug dogs being in the school and for teachers to keep their students in the classroom for the next 45 minutes or so. Raven heard this announcement, got scared , wrapped the pills in a paper towel and threw them away. Wrote a note to Donna and told her she had them but threw them away and assumed that was going to be the last of it. Well, someone found the note, turned it in and they searched every garbage can until they found the pills.

So the next day (a Friday) at the meeting they tell me that the bad news is Raven is going to be suspended for a long term suspension. ( 12 days ) but she could make up all her homework and stay on cheerleading.

That day her biological sperm donor calls me and asks me if Raven is in Juvey because he heard through the grapevine that she was in trouble ( Raven knows some of the same people his step daughter knows ) " No, she isn't locked up but she is in trouble." I start to tell him what happened but I was losing my cell phone signal so I asked him to call me back at home in 20 minutes. When the phone rings 10 minutes after I walk in the door, it's child protective services on the line. Saying that they've had a complaint against me that my daughter Raven was allowed to do anything she wanted to do and that I was addicted to the computer and drugs. Mmmmmmm...Okay? Well, I knew immediately that her "dad" had called them.

[A little background on her dad. He and I never had a relationship. Raven is the product of a one night stand when I was 18 years old. The whole time I was pregnant, her "dad" was locked up in Juvey. From that point on, he's spent most of his life locked up either in the county jail or Jackson which is the state PRISON for Michigan on one drug or assault charge or the other. When Raven was 9 years old he wanted to get involved in her life...Got a DNA test that proved he was the father..But has done little to nothing to be any kind of a father to her. Since meeting him when she was 9, he has been locked up several other times. Now he's finally getting his act together, but his wife and 2 new sons leave little or no room for Raven. He's Chaldean, ( Iraqis Catholic )he was born here in the states but everyone else in his immediate family wasn't. He is very old school in his beliefs of how a female is supposed to act. He once called her a slut at like 11 years old for wearing blue nail polish. ]

I explained to the child protection people that I knew it was her father who called them and went on to explain the situation with him and with her and the trouble she had been in for the last few months and what I had done to punish her and try and stop her behavior. The lady was convinced that there was no cause to investigate anything further and was sorry to have bothered me.

Anyway back to the story...

The following Monday I get a call from the Detective at the local police department telling me I need to bring her in to the station because she was being charged with possession of an analog ( the adderol=controlled substance) I take her in and she has to give a statement of what happened and he tells me we'll get a notice from the court in the next couple of months.

So we finally get the notice and go to court. She gets a court appointed attorney and they make a deal that if she completes the "Drug Court" program then there will be no record of this. So we agree and start our journey through drug court.

Drug Court is an intensive outpatient counseling/therapy program that has 3 phases.

Phase one is counseling on Monday's for Raven and For me (with the parents group )Wednesday's and Saturday's . Calling in every day except Sunday to see if she has to "Drop" for a drug test and go to court every other Thursday to go in front of the judge and report her progress. Also has a very early curfew.

Phase 2 the counseling goes down to just Saturday's but all the rest still applies.

Phase 3 the same thing.

Well, we got through phase 1 and 2 with no problems. Unfortunately Phase 3 was another matter all together.

In July of this year, just after the 4th of July, 1 month before she was due to graduate the drugcourt program, I get a call from the supervisor of the drug court program that Raven had a "diluted" drug screen. They had a negative result the day before and the day after so she was trying to mask something with the test in question. I know she hadn't gotten high so the only thing I could think of was drinking. We go to court and the judge tells her she will be detained in the juvenile Justice Center for the weekend. She swears up and down she didn't do anything to dilute her drug screen but the court will hear none of that, so they take her away and lock her up for the weekend.

About a month later I get another call, that she had dropped a positive drug screen and that she would be getting locked up again at court on August 11th, (the day after my birthday) ironically, the day she was supposed to graduate!

Then in September she dropped another positive drug test...This time for an amphetamine (speed) Her excuse for this one was that she had gone to work out with some friends of hers and he gave her a pill that he said was Creatine ( a water/workout pill available at GNC ) and she assumed that what she took was perfectly legal and didn't question it. So who knows what he actually gave her. She swore up and down that she didn't get high off of it or anything and she thought nothing of it because he told her it was totally legal. The judge believed her but still locked her up for a weekend for being stupid and taking anything that wasn't prescribed to her.

Then in September, as I'm sitting outside with my love and the 2 younger girls, a lady walks up and says she's with child protective services...????....Ok? So she proceeds to tell me she has gotten a complaint about Raven and that the informant was concerned that she wasn't getting the supervision she needed and that she was being allowed to "stay the night at boys houses" and mentioned something about her "myspace" website. I knew immediately that it was her dad again. He hadn't even bothered to call her when her baby brother was born because after she had gotten into trouble the last time they spoke to each other they ended up cussing each other out... He told her she would never amount to anything and that she was going to be knocked up and living on the street by the time she was 16 and that he didn't ever want to see her face again. ( nice father , huh?) But now, all the sudden he wasn't to play Mr. Concerned father. I knew exactly why he had done this too...There was a picture on her myspace account of her and her boyfriend Neil kissing and I figured his step daughter saw her my space and showed him and he got pissed off about it.

So I explain to the social worker again what kind of person he is and that she had been on house restriction for almost 3 months with drug court and she hadn't stayed the night ANYWHERE in months. I had to give her Raven's probation officer's name and all that info and they said they may have to talk to Raven and meet her for themselves but other than that, there was nothing to investigate.

The following week Raven and I go to drug court and who is there in the lobby waiting? Her biological sperm donor and his wife. ( Mind you, this guy isn't even on her birth certificate, has never paid a dime of child support and has never done anything good her whole life.) Come to find out, he has been talking to Raven's probation officer since he knows all too well how the system works, He found out who she was, used his dark good looks to get on her good side and then showed up at court complaining about Raven's myspace account. Because he didn't like some of the pics she had posted. He had even printed out blurbs from some of the user comments and brought them in to the PO earlier that week.

The judge decided to take exception to the fact that on her info she answered that she was a smoker and a drinker and it said her aol nick was partybabe something or another and said that was not fitting behavior for a drug court participant and proceeded to lock her up for the weekend and ordered her to have no unsupervised computer time.

After court was over and he left, I went to speak with Raven's probation officer and asked her why no one informed me that any of this was going on. She had the nerve to get nasty with me yelling at me that she didn't have to notify me of anything and that he had every right to be there because he was her father. She was so nasty in fact, that the judge came back out and told her to stop yelling at me. I was furious and I told the judge that now that he came in and caused all this trouble that he would probably never hear from the jerk again and that he had no legal rights to Raven. None of that mattered and so she got locked up again for a total bullshit charge as far as I'm concerned. I mean...That myspace should be protected ...Freedom of speech right?

The last thing that happened was about 3-4 weeks ago. I had called Raven's PO and asked her where she could stay for the weekend because I was going to Ohio for the weekend to look at houses with my love. Her PO asked me why she wasn't in school the day before. I had dropped her off at school that morning so I didn't know why she wasn't there unless she skipped. Come to find out , that's exactly what happened. After I talked to her PO, some coworkers and I left for lunch and after I ate and we are about to leave, I go to grab my debit card to pay my bill and it wasn't there. I dump my purse out 3 or 4 times and search every nook and cranny. No card. GREAT!

Later that night, Jeff(my love) says.." You better check your bank and make sure no one has been using your card." Good idea honey! The next day I go online and look at my account and sure enough, there was a charge for the day Raven skipped school for $$45.00 at PacSun. No surprise that Raven had turned up with a new purse and wallet the day before that she lied and said belonged to her friend Nicole. I was so furious that she would steal from me ...Her own mother that I called her PO and told her what happened and asked to go into court that same day. She agreed and when I told the judge what happened he locked her up for a week.

While she was locked up, Raven did some serious soul searching and realized that she was really screwing up and that she wanted to get drug court over and done with so we have had no problems in the last month or so...She now has either 4 or 5 weeks left in the program and I'm praying that nothing happens to set her back again.

This whole ordeal with drug court has been a strain on the whole family, not only financially but in many other ways as well, not just to Raven and myself, but also to her younger sisters.

So...There is my last year or so in a nut shell. May I never have to deal with another one like it as long as I live!

I thank God I've had the support of the man that I love throughout this whole process and that he loves me enough to not run as fast as he can in the other direction. He is taking on a huge burden by loving me because my girls and all their drama come along with me. He is truly one in a million. I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with him. We have found the perfect place for us to call home and we are just waiting for the owners to decided if they will rent it to us or not. So put in a good word with the man upstairs for us if you talk to him in the near future :)