Yesterday, María informed Sherod that she wanted to go back to her regular routines.  With Matthew taking a turn closer to Broward, it made sense for Sherod to head home a day early. Initially, his plan was to stop somewhere along the way since he’d pulled away from Lauderdale in the early afternoon. But late, late last night he got home.

Maria made her usual six AM wake up call to me, sounding chipper and good.  Today had already been a very long day and I had given a group I was doing some training with a break when I got Sherod’s text about an hour ago.  This afternoon our girl had such a serious crisis that after everything else failed, she was Baker Acted and taken by the police to the psych unit in The Pavilion, one of the Bedlam’s of our time.  For those of you who are not familiar with the Baker Act, it is a legal remedy to a situation where an individual presents such grave danger to herself or those around her that she is involuntarily hospitalized and involves a three day stay in a psych unit to stabilize and evaluate the person. With a serious hurricane threat, it is hard to know what care she might get in these next days.  My fear is that as before, the psychiatrists will play the pyschopharmeceutical wheel of fortune with my daughter and María will not go back to square one but will emerge even more shattered. 

We will not know what comes next for a bit. What we do know is the depth of our love for her doesn’t waver. And that no matter how much ground is lost, we start over, again.