Congratulations, Mayor Parker. Now don’t call in the National Guard.

This week, Philadelphia elected its 100th mayor, Cherelle Parker, a politician who has said that calling in the National Guard will be “a part of the solution” to shut down the open-air drug market in Kensington.

This is a big show of power, but it solves nothing. How will bringing in the National Guard help anyone heal? How will it stop the rise of overdoses? Or halt the spread of disease? Or lessen the chaos?

As a mother, I am aware of how distasteful and alien addiction is to most people. Addiction was the last thing I wanted for my child, and I did everything I could think of to provide stability and support to my children: homemade meals, story time, museum trips, tennis lessons, art classes, kayaking with Outward Bound, and unconditional love. My children were raised in Narberth and, later, Roxborough. They went through the Lower Merion school system.

But my humble offerings were no match for the Sackler family’s legalized heroin.

In 2009, when my son was 16 years old, he called me at work and pleaded for me to come home. He said he needed to tell me something. By the sound of his voice, I knew it was serious. I asked what was wrong. I told him I’d come home, but I needed to know what was going on.

Through tears, he told me he was a drug addict.

The Earth shifted. My world would never be the same, but the mothering instinct prevailed, and I heard myself ask, “What kind of drugs?”

“Heroin,” he said.

On the car ride home, I pulled over to wail and scream and sob. My mother was an alcoholic. My brother had been a drug-addicted schizophrenic who died in 2005 at the age of 45. I didn’t want my son to have a similar fate.

“Just don’t die,” I found myself thinking over and over again. I didn’t know then how those words would come to live inside my head.

That day I drove my son to Fairmount Behavioral Health System, an alcohol and drug detox rehabilitation center in Roxborough, but he was too young for their program. They sent us to Altoona, Pa., to a facility that offered detox for minors. It took us four hours to drive there, but when we were in the hallway waiting, we were told that detoxing from heroin is not life-threatening, so it would not be covered by our insurance.

The rehab facility offered to cover the expense of my son’s detox, which was the first of many kindnesses his father and I encountered on this journey.

After a 28-day program, he was released. He looked shell-shocked, as if the world he stepped back into was reeling from an explosion, and as his father and I spoke words — “We love you. You look great! How are you?” — he just stared at us in muffled confusion.

For the next 13 years, we fought to get our son into good programs. Some were better than others, but they all told us the same thing: “When he’s ready, he’ll stop using.”

Our son had stolen from us — money, a blender, his brother’s computer. Crashed our car twice. Nearly overdosed several times, was hospitalized with a bacterial skin infection, broken down doors and windows, punched holes in the walls, and threatened us, until his father said, “Well, we haven’t tried the streets.”

So we kicked him out in 2018, and our son lived on the streets of Kensington, where he was beaten with a hammer and shot. The hospital got him a taxi and sent him home to us. Fortunately, my sister, who is a nurse practitioner, cared for him and taught me how to clean his wounds.

My younger son loves his older brother, but he says the relationship “is strained.” Our youngest has developed some pretty strategic coping skills; he had his master’s from Temple’s Fox School of Business by the time he was 27.

Today, our oldest son is doing well. He works as a pizza chef and is learning new skills all the time. He’d been on the monthly Sublocade shot, but his insurance changed and it was no longer covered, so now he uses the Suboxone strips, though he prefers the monthly shot. With the Sublocade shot, he’s more balanced and peaceful. He’s able to work and exercise, and to care for himself and his home. He can maintain healthy relationships, which becomes impossible when in active addiction.

And my son is alive today. My son is alive, and I get to go to lunch with him at Reading Terminal and swim in the ocean with him and laugh with him — all the things so many parents can’t do.

At one point, he was incarcerated for selling heroin. When my son relapsed and failed a drug test, while in drug court, Judge Frank Brady told him that he didn’t want to punish him; that was not the goal. Relapse is a part of recovery. What he wanted to do was help him heal.

My son calls the city’s drug court program a “great, beautiful, lifesaving thing.” It took a whole community to get my son off the streets.

The Parker administration needs to talk with people on the front lines. I commend the Never Use Alone programs, Narcotics Anonymous, and the Prevention Point workers, and all the government officials who support finding a workable space for supervised injection sites.

As a mother, Mayor-elect Parker, I beg you to give our children another chance to heal. They are good people with a bad disease. They need help, not judgment.

There but for the grace of God go I.

Germaine Fountain is the middle child of nine. She was raised in Bala Cynwyd and, like her sons, was schooled in Lower Merion. Now she lives by the Jersey Shore. [email protected]