Stands, whether you go to see him or not, you are teaching your son how to treat you. If you go now, you may be teaching him that ignoring you and treating you with disrespect is what will work for him in the future.
Is it difficult for him to keep contact with you? I mean, are they preventing it in some way? Then, going to see him is the correct course of action. But if he CAN make contact and is simply choosing not to, I think you might want to rethink this visit.
Whatever we do when we don't know what to do where our children are concerned, we are usually left feeling that whatever we did (or decided not to do) was the wrong thing. It helped me to be prepared for those feelings.
Label and refuse to allow them.
If you have to do it ten times a minute, push the inappropriate feeling away.
It helps me sometimes to say "I already thought that ~ already followed that thought to its conclusion. If I can come up with something helpful, I will think this again ~ but not now."
There is nothing normal or good about parenting kids like ours. There are no right answers and most times, there are no rewards, no improvements in behavior, no welcoming smiles, for us.
You aren't engaged in stinking thinking, Stands. You are thinking like any normal, loving mother would think who had not heard from her child in three weeks. What we need to remind ourselves is that our troubled children are not able to respond normally right now. We need to learn to change the nature of our expectations, or the pain will overwhelm us.
Still, after three weeks, I would need to verify that my son was safe, too.
If he is safe, then there is nothing more you can do at this point but hold faith that, crazy as it seems and whether we can make sense of it or not, things are working themselves out as they were meant to.
Hang on, Stands.
You are getting stronger and stronger, every day.
Barbara
