To say that my younger son's adolescence was pure hell is an understatement.

To say that I handled it well is an overstatement. So let's skip to the happy ending. At 23, Jesse is doing great, going to college, active in his church, ministering to kids who sit now where he used to: at Juvenile Hall, in Santa Rita, on the mean Oakland streets. Five years ago I would have given everything I had (and I sometimes thought I'd have to) for this outcome. Today Jesse's well-being is a happy fact of life.

Why was Jesse in so much trouble, and how did he get out of it? Once his crisis had passed and I could breathe and think and work again, I wrote a book about teenagers in drug rehab to try to find out. Following 16-year-old Zalika, a prostitute and drug dealer since age 12; 15-year-old Tristan, a big fan of all substances psychedelic; and 17-year-old Mike, a methamphetamine addict; through a few rough years of their lives yielded an unexpected gift: unique relationships with the teenagers I wrote about - relationships I couldn't have with my own kids; relationships their parents couldn't have with them.

I quickly realized the usual rules of adult-teenager engagement did not apply. These kids weren't stuck with me the way they were stuck with their parents, their counselors, their probation officers - the way Jesse was stuck with me. If I patronized or pathologized them, as they thought most adults regularly did and Jesse thought I did, they'd lose their only motivation to keep me around. If I got "frazzy" - Jesse's word for my maternal anxiety - when they relapsed, or ratted them out when they cut school, or turned them in when they ran from the law, they'd have no reason not to run from me, too.

I couldn't ignore the truly dangerous things that Zalika, Tristan, and Mike did. So, like the photographer deciding between photographing a burning building or dropping the camera to save lives, I often found myself caught between wanting to protect my subjects and wanting to protect their bond to the only unshakable adult pal they had. So I borrowed a page from the therapists' rulebook: I told the kids I'd protect their privacy unless they gave me reason to believe that they might hurt themselves or others.

The safety of our arrangement made me the one Zalika called when she thought she might be pregnant. "Bring me a test, please," she begged. "If I ask my mom she'll kick me out." "You have to tell your mom if it's positive," I warned her. "If you don't, I will." I bought the test at Walgreen's, where I'd filled Zalika's previous orders: the feminine hygiene products her profession required, the My Little Pony toothbrush and bubble gum-flavored toothpaste she'd requested. In the bathroom of her parents' suburban home, I held Zalika as we huddled over the sink, holding our breaths, willing that one pink line to appear. "If she were my own daughter, I'd be having a heart attack right now," I thought, only mildly frazzy, because she wasn't.

I was the one who got to plant artichokes with Tristan in his family's garden one sunny Saturday, because he was grounded for flunking a drug test, and he couldn't have friends over, and he and his mom were too mad at each other to garden together. As Tristan and I kneeled in the dirt, patting the spiky plants into place, I reminisced aloud about how worried I'd been about Jesse, how crazed my fear had made me, how hard I'd found it to give my son both love and consequences. Tristan listened earnestly, as he always did; asked questions, as he always did; reassured me that I'd done the best I could.

As we were scrubbing the compost off our hands, Tristan mentioned his plan to buy a bunch of pot, then sell most of it to pay for concert tickets. "Mom would freak if she knew," he reflected, regret etched into his peach-fuzzed face. "If I were your mom, I know I would," I agreed, un-frazzily.

When Mike ran away from rehab, he called his dad, then his mom, then me. "I'm gonna stay clean, and I still wanna be in the book," he told me breathlessly from the phone booth where he was waiting for his dad to pick him up. "Mom wants me to keep hanging out with you," he added. I knew that was true. "A kid like Mike needs at least two moms," his mother had said when I'd approached her about the book.

Mike didn't stay clean, but he did stay in the book, and his Juvenile Hall teacher gave him extra credit for the many letters he wrote me. "Your project is good for Mike," she told me. "It makes him feel important. Every kid in here needs that. And we don't have many ways to give it to them."

I couldn't "cure" Zalika, or Tristan, or Mike. I couldn't cure my own son. But I could give my "subjects" something I couldn't give Jesse, something all teenagers need: one adult who's guaranteed not to punish them, who listens endlessly without judging them, who appreciates them steadily, come hell or high teenager.