Reply To: Going off the Derech

Ezrat Hashem, you are so right. I did ‘latch on’ to some hopeful signs last week, only to fall completely on my face this Shabbos. He is really hurting me and my husband by his behavior, and he just doesn’t care. Motsei Shabbos, my husband and I decided to take a walk, one reason was to get out of the house and talk privately, but also secretly hoping we would see our son, since he hadn’t come home the whole day. It was about 11pm when we saw him at a distance, with some other kid who was holding a laptop under his arm. The other kid quickly disappeared, and my son approached us,angry, and accusing us of trying to find him. He started to smoke in front of us to get us angry, since we never saw him smoke before. He was really trying to flex his ‘independent’ muscles and show us how ‘big’ he is. We eventually walked away, hoping to see who the other kid was with the laptop. This only made him more angry, so he left. If this week we went one step forward, it feels like now, we went five steps backward.