Well, like always, I see it a little differently.
When any of us were young, how much did we consciously "love" our parents? When I think back, what I remember is feeling safe with my parents because I was not responsible for my own upkeep. If I starved? It was their fault, not mine. (Not that I thought of it that way, then ~ this is a looking back thing.)
Most adolescents need to fight home a little to grow up and away.
Now add drug use or, like Fran says, brain wrinkles.
Our kids are in trouble. Whether that is because they use drugs or have a brain wrinkle or have something else going on, their ability to even understand, let alone communicate, the complexity of feelings that makes up love is as messed up as anything else about their growing up.
I don't understand how they could do what they have done to us either, CAMom. I think that is what drove me for so long to try to find it ~ to find where I had gone wrong in raising someone who seemed to hate me. I had my ideas about how I should have done this or that differently? But there was nothing which would justify him hating me enough to destroy himself right in front of me ~ which is what all our kids are doing, if you think about it.
Or at least that is how it looks, to me.
So, you know what I concluded?
Whether they love us or not cannot matter, now.
That we love them has to be enough, because it is all that we have.
And if we give in to that hopeless, what-did-I-do-how-did-this-happen, then the drugs, or the brain wrinkle, or the whatever it is wins.
Sometimes, I have to reach back really far to do that.
Too many times, I simply refused to see anything I did not want to see. I wanted it to be my problem, because if it was something I had done, and if I could just figure out what it was, I could make amends, take control, fix it.
So many times, the other ladies on the site have had to shake me up and make me look at what was really happening to my son ~ and to myself.
It is like watching someone kidnap and torture my child.
Only the person who kidnapped him, and who is torturing him right in front of me?
Is all I have left of my own son.
That is why I have the quote about faith at the end of my posts.
That is what I have left.
And though it doesn't feel like it some days, that is alot.
And because it is all I have?
It has to be enough.
Barbara
:crying: