“It’s not abandonment.” I tell myself as we pull up the long drive of Embark Residential where I am admitting my daughter. I’ve cried almost the entire drive. She has cried a little too but I can feel her putting on a brave face.

It’s been a year now of trying to find her help. Different therapies, hospitalizations, intensive outpatient programs. A year spent making appropriate boundaries with toxic family members. A year of my own therapy. A year spent wading through the aftermath of trauma, trying to find a way out from beneath the sludge of it.

But nothing has worked. I mean it did for a little while. But now it’s as if she’s taking all of the bad choices she could possibly make and ticking them off one by one. Drug abuse…check. Failing school…check. 10 day out of school suspension…check. Sneaking people into the house while I’m at work…check.

When she sits across from me and cries, telling me that she only feels better when she smokes the weed…I believe her. I think to myself how hard it must be. To be a teenager. To have all of the hormones. To have been through this level of trauma. To not have a father figure. To have a mother who is stuck in her own varying levels of depression.

When we pull up to the house the therapist is waiting. Warm smiles, welcoming vibe, helping hands. Here let me accommodate you is the attitude we are given. And it is nice. But I feel the wall going up between us as we sit on that couch and begin to talk about the reasons we are here. I feel her shift slightly away from me. I feel the air between us change. I know she’s angry. I understand her anger.

When we hug goodbye it’s short and clipped. I kiss her on the forehead and promise to bring the dog to visit her as soon as I’m allowed to.

“It’s not abandonment.” I tell myself not too surely as I drive back down that long drive now alone with our dog Raina. This time I can’t stop the sobs from coming.