Beautiful Boy

I am currently reading the heartbreaking book by David Sheff, Beautiful Boy.  This book is a father's story on his son's journey with drugs.  The book starts with the son coming home from college, going to AA meetings, not breaking curfew, reading to his little siblings, and ensuring his parents he is not going to do drugs ever again.  But then, one night, he comes home hours after he should have, and his parents want him to take a drug test.  So, he admits he has been on crystal meth the whole time, and runs away.

Then, the story goes back to when Nic, the son, was just born.  Then the father tells of his troubles with his wife, Nic's mother, how they got divorced, and how he got remarried to someone else, had a son, and then later a daughter.  It talks about Nic's birthday parties, games, summer vacations, and finally, when David found Nic smoking, then when he found marijuana in Nic's bag, and then when Nic got suspended for buying drugs in school.

When Nic's father found the drugs in Nic's bag, it was very hard for him.  He kept thinking back to when Nic was a little kid.  How he would never do anything to break the rules, how he never would have thought of anything like this.  He thought about the time that Nic and his friend got in trouble for throwing away Nic's friend's mother's cigarettes.  How he cringed at the idea of smoking.  And now he had completely changed.

It is really hard for Nic's father to accept that Nic is not the little kid he used to be.  He wants to pass this off as a one-time thing, as a phase.  He wants to believe that Nic is still the innocent boy he once was.  But he's not.  When he catches Nic smoking the first time, he just passes it off.  He decides that it was just a peer-pressure, once in a lifetime occurrence.  But then, he realizes that it's not.

It is really hard for Nic's dad to realize that Nic is growing up and changing.  But it is an important and necessary thing he has to do.  He will not be able to get along thinking that Nic is still the same as he was when he was a toddler.  People change, and David had to learn that Nic will change too.

Even though I am still at the beginning of the book, I think that an important part of the book will be the father's journey in seeing that Nic is changing and growing up, and how he will cope with that fact.