Trevor began his morning by throwing his soiled underwear at the nurse who happened to walk by his bedroom. This was day 3 of my visit at the Pembroke Hospital Mental Ward.

I began that morning inquiring for the third time if I could get deodorant or find a way to do my laundry. I arrived on April 12^th, escorted by police whom I called to remove a man I had trapped in my furnace room. The man was part of a surveillance team sent by my ex and her family to dig dirt on me in order to strengthen her case that I was unfit father.

Just one problem – there was no man in my furnace room. Another problem – this was the third time I called 9-1-1 in the past three days.

Grief. Most people associate that word with feeling you get when you lose a loved one. But sometimes the same emotional gauntlet we experience after a death invades us when we lose something just as special. In my case, this would mean my family unit.

I like to make jokes about things that are important to me. Those who know me probably cringe whenever I make a joke at my ex-wife’s expense. But the underlying message I am really signaling is a feeling of utterly failing my children. I sometimes occupy myself for hours staring at statistics that shows children who grow up in a one-parent home have a decidedly more difficult time traversing their lives than those in a two-parent home. Of course, this does not mean destiny has been carved out for them, but I had a goal for my kids, and every day that went by reminded me that I failed them.

As I write those words I think of the poison that conceived them. That voice we all struggle to ignore inside us that tells us we are no good, or that we are destined to repeat the mistakes of our parents, or that we are all alone at the end of it all.

The fictitious man in my furnace room had manifested via 3000 mg of Adderall, ingested over a period of 60 hours, one handful at a time. I was trying to stay awake so that I could devise a plan to stop whatever it was that was happening to me. Instead I had slipped into what’s called a state of psychosis. Too blind to see reality, too high to make sense of my own thoughts, what was happening to me was all my own doing. I was riddled with grief at the finality of my situation, and I took it out on the one I had secretly been blaming for the past year – myself.

In the hospital, I was a model patient. Outwardly I was respectful, focused, and cooperative. Inwardly I was in the fetal position and wishing I could hug my children. But my children were not there. Little did I know that at that very moment my ex-wife was moving the kids out of their childhood home, taking advantage of the chaos I had caused by eating enough amphetamines to kill a horse.

In a mental ward, you quickly find out that for every underwear flinger like Trevor there are 2 or 3 patients who are professionals. A soldier was my roommate. I spent most of my free time conversing with a nuclear physicist, or quietly marveling at the irony of playing cards with a social worker who was there after the fallout of being raped while on vacation. Her husband blamed her for not taking his advice and leaving the resort.

Most of the examples of people who fell off the knife’s edge include two facets; a sense of experiencing a profound injustice, and a humbling realization that their reaction to said injustice was to shoot themselves in the face, the ricochet inevitably finding its way to the hearts of those who love them.

That process of finding a way to balance a sense of confidence with the grounding force of humility is one of the steepest hills we can climb. I had to undo habitual thought processes that placed me in a box with rotating labels like failure, or victim, or know-it-all. Once I climbed out of the box, after some cognitive and talk therapy, my job became simple; I had to find a way to love myself, in spite of myself.

By the time I was discharged, 6 days after being admitted, I was refreshed but anxious. I knew I was about to arrive back to my family’s home, minus my family. Despite the furniture still being there, I could hear the echo of an empty house, my footsteps bouncing off the walls with far less energy and joy than when the walls deflected the voices of my kids.

I can’t tell you how much I miss them. I can’t even begin to share how much I wish I handled everything differently. Today is day 2 of living alone, and all I can think of wrapping my arms around them and never letting them go. But I have work to do, Lots of it.

So that’s what I am doing. One day at a time. One step forward towards a life I did not plan for, but one I have to secure in order to save them from the type of father who leaves them with more scars than hopes.

Grief. It has a way of humbling a person. The energy packed inside the sadness we sometimes like to live with has a silver lining; if we can find a way to transform that same energy into something positive, everyone wins. That’s my mission.

See you soon, kids.