Family Matters IV: What about my Son?

 I had to get this off my chest.

I’ve been divorced for officially 20 years as of October 28 of this year. At the time of our divorce in 2002, my son was just two years old and we didn’t know what the future held for him.

Three years later, we would get the diagnosis that he was on the autism spectrum and despite that, he did have a relatively normal childhood.

Now he’s in his 20s, and he’s a grown man.  Albeit a grown man who has the mind of an 8 year old, if that.

His mother is now remarried, and will be remarried for a total of five years this February coming up. 

They don’t live in Tulsa anymore, and as of this writing, my son has no job and there are no plans currently for him to enter a program that might give him job and life skills he will need moving forward beyond the lives of myself, and his mother and stepfather.

This troubles me. It troubles me on a level that has been very hard for me to put into words.

If you know me in the real world, you know that I work with people like my son, who are on varying areas of the autism spectrum.  My job includes giving my clients vital job and vital life skills training.

My son was in the program that I work for in his junior and senior year in high school. And he loved it.  I had attempted to get him back into our program, and that was interrupted by inaction and debt brought on by his mother, and their departure from Tulsa last year.

Time after Time I have tried to convince his mother that it was time for us to think about his future and every time I have it seems as if she either doesn’t want to do it or she refuses to discuss it with me. 

It continues a pattern that has been going on for most of the time that he’s been alive. She considers him to be a trophy of our failed marriage, and she just doesn’t seem to have any clue as to what to do with regard to his future. 

At this point, if something catastrophic happens with me and his mother and his stepfather, he will literally be left to his own devices and that is just unacceptable. It scares me to death to think that he would be left all alone in that circumstance.

I’ve made the offer to my workplace to somehow work out a way to pay off the debt by payroll assignment and it might actually work.  Problem is, they are pretty well entrenched in Texas at the moment, and the arrangement for his living situation is precarious at best.  I seriously fear for the future for my son.