D H and I were reminiscing the way you do when your children are having such a hard time of things and we consider, with our 20/20 sterling crystal vision hindsight, what we should have done instead of what we did. All that stuff that somehow, no matter how sure we were it would help seemed, almost in spite of our best intentions, to actually make things worse.
And we never even saw it coming.
We were still in the thick of it with daughter at that time, just on another level. (Remember that I found CD for Son's sake. I came back here, some years later, for Daughter.)
And I am still here. Because you guys are so fascinating.
:O)
Anyway, regarding Son: We concluded we should have sent Son to Military Academy. That was the thing we might have done and had not done. (By the time Son began acting out, we had already been through two treatments with daughter or maybe, three. So, while we did not know much, we did know that to send the child to treatment only made matters worse. That was because the heart of daughter's problems was more complex than we were ready to acknowledge. But we didn't know that yet, either.
Mostly, we didn't know anything that mattered, at all. The worst part of it was that neither did the professionals. So, I added alot of bad words here which I then took out. The professionals did not help us. The Police department did. The Juvenile court system did help us, so much. The probation officers daughter was assigned helped us every time, and the people assigned to come to our house at any time, and to search her room at any time. Those who did not help us were the psychiatrists and the treatment centers. They made everything so much worse, because they eroded our authority as parents, not only to our children, but to ourselves. We deferred to the "experts" who left all of us high and dry the instant the contract was up or the money ran out.
It was disgusting. I don't suppose anyone will like it that I say so. Still, when your child is in trouble, what else is there to do.
So, D H and I pretty much beat ourselves up over that one for a number of years. (The Military School thing. And for Daughter, we just beat ourselves up indiscriminately because no one knew what else to do.)
I think this site may not have existed, yet. In any event, I was not to find it for another few years.)
And then I did find the site and received much good help and began posting all the time here like I still do.
And Echolette joined us, here on P.E.
And she was beating herself up because she did send her child to Military Academy.
Huh.
So, between she and I, we both were able to let go of that one a little bit. Which was a blessing, because we are so hard on ourselves, we parents. It is as Albatross posts: Her daughter loves her and forgives any parental shortcomings out of existence. (And of course there are going to be shortcomings ~ times we wish we'd known better what to do.) But Albatross' son, like each of our troubled children does too, is more than ready to criticize, to take the wild road to hold us in such contempt our heads are spinning because we love them so and we don't know what to do.
Here is a secret. Like Albatross' daughter, my daughter too, even with all the terrible things she copes with, admires me and her father. She doesn't spend alot of time picking through her childhood and when she does, she apologizes to us or remembers something totally cool ~ or, she will wish we'd known what to do about night terrors or unmanageable anxiety or the other rotten things we were soon to learn about and that she did not have words then, to explain.
Our son?
Blames us for everything.
And here is the thing, everyone. He was not that kind of boy. That these things have come to be the truth of Son's life surprises the (pick your euphemism) out of us. It is like a spooky mystery or a drive in horror flick, right? The main characters do the worst possible thing. And everyone can see it coming and no one can stop it and sure enough, the worst possible things keep happening.
I still slip into...it isn't self pity. It is more an aghast feeling of unbelieveablility that this is how the story turned out to this point. (Never write the end of the story ~ not with your kids, and not with our own lives, either.) I think that is part of our healing. We can witness our own stories without assigning blame or requiring forgiveness or explanation. The stories of what has happened to us, and to our kids that we love so much are that terribly bewildering.
***
For Son, and maybe a little for Daughter too, I think it has to do with what drug use does to the brain and how that changes how our children see everything. Including us. Like every responsible parent, we are going to hear them from our sane place of responsible parent. We are going to take their words seriously. Of course we are. We were good parents. But when there is drug use involved and our children seem changed ~ that is the key, I think. Personality change. Lots of kids (and grown ups too) use all kinds of substances without essential change to their personalities. But for some of us, those very same substances do cause personality change.
There is something like that going on with our Gift From God kids.
Regret when we all ~ parent and child alike ~ feel badly for the way things have happened feels one way. That is how it feels for us with daughter, and you all know the terrible things that have happened with daughter. She can be manipulative and awful and etc, but she always loved us and felt badly for what she'd done and where she wound up and so on.
She did what she did anyway, but she seems not to hate us at all.
With our son, for whom the main problem as near as we can determine is drug use, the situation is different. The regret for D H and I there is a piercing, self-accusatory thing. We don't know whether it is true or not that, as Son claims, I psychologically abandoned Son and that is why this happened. (But what we do know is that is the fulcrum from which Son manipulates me. I didn't learn that in time for it to help any of us either. But I know it, now.) We don't know why this happened to all of us. Regret when we feel badly for the way things have happened but we can't say for sure how and the child responding with some version of damn right, we should feel badly...that is the feeling we feel from Son. That is the way we feel when our children have been addicted to something that alters the way their brains see things ~ their childhoods and their parents included.
Still we wish we had known to do things differently.
But even today, even knowing now things I had no clue about back when all this started happening...I still don't know what I would have done differently. Although there are so many things I would have done differently because what I did do didn't work.
So, I would have done everything exactly in the opposite way of what I did do.
This is true.
This is why we are at a disadvantage around parents who have no clue what we've been through. They do not see their parenting as something they would change if they could. How damaging is this, for us?!?
That is one of the reasons I feel badly for myself and D H, too.
That we do know, and that we do not feel comfortable with our parenting. Though I believe the truth may be that we were and are amazing parents.
Every one of us, here.
***
But who could say whether that would have helped any of us. That is one of the values of CD. I hear the stories of parents who did those very things I beat myself up for not doing. But here you guys are, too. Just like me. So, that thing, whatever you did that I did not do ~ that wasn't the elusive something I should have known but did not.
Either.
That wasn't it, either.
***
D H and I were taking about this very thing a few weeks back. We could have moved with our kids to some farm somewhere. (Know where that idea came from? We are sort of seriously considering doing that, now. Buying a farm somewhere and having everyone come and live there until the money runs out. Which would be such a bad way to do things.) We could have homeschooled. These terrible things might still have happened but at least we would have known that we did everything we knew to do. But here is the thing: Those choices we did make? Were the best thing we knew, too. This was true of myself and my D H, and it is true for every parent here.
As I am coming back to myself (which I am, finally, after all this long time), I feel something like a deep and abiding compassion for me, for D H, for our kids. It has been a rough, rough ride. It is still pretty rough, as we face terrible choices like the choices Copa has had to make ~ and like we all have had to make ~ about our own children that we love so much and cannot seem to just stop loving them more than ourselves long enough to get a handle on what it is we need to do.
And then, we have to live with those things that seemed so right at the time, but that we would give almost anything to change.
***
Okay.
I am posting more for me than for you at this point, so I will stop.
Mostly what I hoped to tell you is that where we are is an unfolding. We deepen and ripen and at the end, there is compassion for all of us.
For our children, and for ourselves. Not just "Oh, you poor thing." compassion. Compassion of the kind where every ugliness is known intimately and the pain of it and the confusion and the survival.
It is the puzzling compassion of one human for another between parent and adult child.
And also, we walk alone, in this thing that we know.
***
I am still so much in love with my family.
So we don't need to fear our own anger over what has happened. We need not retreat into anywhere where we were perfect and the kids were poops. I think I had to reach that place of "I don't know." before I came to this place I am now, though. But I think too that when our kids are in trouble, we force ourselves to be people who do know. We will not, we tell ourselves, be taken by surprise ever again. We become whizzes at internet research and community referral and self-help groups and books. We become super-competent in our own lives.
Remember when that wasn't true about us?
Remember when we trusted the day we were in?
That is where we are going, all of us. To being okay with "I don't know." Or, "I only know I love you, and I feel so badly this is happening. But for your sake and mine, you need to work it out for yourself and I know that you will."
At first, it was really hard to say those words. I felt like such a failure, because I did not have ten thousand answers at the ready. I didn't know and I said so. But the kids did work things out somehow.
So now, I feel better saying those words.
And I realize they are true.
I don't know.
I never did.
I only know that I love my people. That is the only thing I know, for sure. And I know that whatever they do about that is up to them.
***
The thing that most amazes me is how much I do love my kids. After all this, after everything I have had to come to know about contempt and manipulation and hope and betrayal.... I am still so pleased to hear their voices, so happy to think of them, to know they are in the world, however impossibly hard their paths. That part, when I first see them or when I first hear their voices on the phone, only lasts for a second or two. But you know? It is as pure a joy as any I have felt.
So, I'll take it.
Remember when Headlights Mom posted to us about relishing deep gratitude for having known even the smallest smatterings of joy in the past "lest I grow bitter".
I have never forgotten that post.
So, I think that must be where we all will get to.
I may not be ashamed, anymore. There is no changing what is past. So, it just is what it is.
Maybe, that is the difference, now.
And it is just like they say in all those goofy love songs.
Cedar
