I really don't want to do this anymore !!!!!!

[sooooo tired]

I love all of you like family !!!! I depend on this site.....it is my life line!!!

 

[tishthedish]

Dear Sooooo,
I have a grandson that I used as justification to stay enmeshed in my son's and the baby mother's lives. 5 years later it's still a mess, we have custody and come spring, we don't know what will happen. Alanon helped me immensely and still is. Feel free to go back and read my posts. If I had to do it all over again I would have done it sooner and with quiet resolve. They have to hit their bottom and I am afraid he is going to go through a rough patch. Try to see him and call CPS. Do not give them your name. They say they keep it confidential but I have gotten burned twice. Good luck and blessings.

 

[Copabanana]

Hi Tishthedish,

How have you been? If you have been posting I have missed your threads. I will go look.

COPA

 

[Copabanana]

I see myself, now, as having no choice, but stay detached.

I was helped by my health. My physical health. I could have tolerated psychological abuse forever, unfortunately, but physical deterioration is impossible to ignore. When my son is near me I am ill. I have unbearable stomach pain, the doubled over kind. I eat Prilosec, many times the prescribed amount. My life when he he is near is a nightmare.

So while I see I had no choice, I credit myself still. I could have continued to kill myself. I chose not to.

The change will likely be slow, and it won't feel very good. Because your feelings---fear, frustration, disappointment, etc.---all of those feelings will continue.

Yes. I am in this place. Because my son is not changing.

Except to get worse. While I am unaware that he is doing worse things, he continues to ever more firmly reinforce the worse things in his character especially projecting responsibility to others and believing he has power when he does not. He seems indifferent to how he affects other people.

I am his last resort and the only one left who can help him. He called last night, and I refused. He wanted to come to my home. I refused. Because I know what is at
stake for me. I followed COM's rule, I made myself the 51 percent.

I am thinking how and if I will help him, because he will most certainly come to my town.

Start by devoting time to your own life and your own recovery.

The only way to extract something positive from this all is this. That each miserable and conflict-ridden contact serve to recommit us to ourselves, our lives and our changing. In my case, my self-denial is a lifelong pattern. So any commitment to MYSELF really IS changing my life. I need to remember this.

You will start to find that the mere act of spending time on YOU instead of HER will start to move the needle of your life.

I have found this to be true. Absolutely true.

You have to learn how to let go of your 39-year-old daughter. It's time. She is a grown woman with the right to make her own choices, whatever they are. Let her go.

It is not that you do not love her, it is that you do not love her more than you love yourself.

Perhaps in my life, I have never loved myself more than the other person. If I succeed in changing this, even sometimes, it will be a victory. Still, if I knew that self-sacrifice would save my son I would do so in a heartbeat. I know it will not. I have tried this. It failed.

The recognition that you cannot save her, is the hardest of realizations. There are people in this life who cannot be saved. Probably all of them. They need to save themselves.

I adopted my son whose parents were dying of AIDS. I wanted to save myself, through loving him. While it seemed to work for years and years, eventually it no longer did.

It was a fantasy. I am coming to grips with learning to believe in real life. It was always a true thing that my son's life would be determined by all kinds of things...his early history, his genetics, his personal choices, and of course, my best efforts to parent him....My love was only one thing.

I am confronting that my love to him could never have saved me. I have to do that myself.

My sadness now is not only for my son, it is the death of my own fantasies. That does not mean the death of my dreams. As long as I am alive I can dream and work to make those dreams real. For me.

There is no way it is not a good thing for me to experience this reality check. And for my son it is a good thing, too. I see that now.

It is very, very painful nonetheless. I am sad. More than I can express.

I was a good and loving parent. I still am. That was all I could ever have been. Nothing more.

COPA

 

[Albatross]

I am confronting that my love to him could never have saved me. I have to do that myself.

My sadness now is not only for my son, it is the death of my own fantasies. That does not mean the death of my dreams. As long as I am alive I can dream and work to make those dreams real. For me.

There is no way it is not a good thing for me to experience this reality check. And for my son it is a good thing, too. I see that now.

It is very, very painful nonetheless. I am sad. More than I can express.

I am so sorry, Copa. Your words about the death of our fantasies hit home with me. Seeing all of the little and large parts of ourselves we have invested, seeing how little control we had, yet how much power we gave away.

My husband and I were talking about this last night, about how raising children is such a crap shoot, and if we had known how little control we have over how our children turn out, we would have been so much more terrified at the prospect of parenting.

 

[Copabanana]

if we had known how little control we have over how our children turn out, we would have been so much more terrified at the prospect of parenting.

Albatross, thank you.

While I have a significant other, M, he is not my son's father. Selfishly I wish I had somebody on this earth to share my pain with, like you have your husband.

They say nobody would live their lives if they knew up front where they were going. Would we have done it again or not? Would you, could you have imagined what this would be?

I have had a successful life, by measures of success. While not necessarily a happy life, I have had success. I can list achievements.

Adopting my son was my greatest one. I know that deep inside me was a sense of deep hopelessness and a sense of not being good enough. With that the ground inside of me, I persevered. With such a strong need to succeed, to counteract my own inadequacy imagine what it is for me to be tethered to this struggle together with my son. I cannot even bear to think about it.

I am sorry to be glum. But I have to face deep inside myself my own deepest fears and deep sense of damage. Only then can I be strong enough not only to face what will come, but to have real hope based upon the reality of life, not upon fantasy.

COPA

 

[Jackievg]

What changed for me is this: I began to see my life and my son's as separate entities. That I had a right to be happy, content and safe. That he had a right to his own decisions and priorities and I did not have a right to judge.

We are only miserable if we feel tied to them. That they take us with them. If you decide that you will not go there, by that I mean, limit conversations to that which you can tolerate, not asking questions, and cutting short complaining--your misery will stop.

If the children, her children, are in danger, there is the responsibility to involve authorities. Other than that, your daughter is an adult, well into adulthood, who has the right to choose her lifestyle.

Your life is your business and responsibility.

I have chosen to limit phone calls. I choose not to invite my son to my home. Things have gone missing in his last visits. A tablet computer and an electric razor, both of which he had expressed interest in, and I said no. I would never have believed he would steal, because that is what it was. I feel obligated to myself (and to him) to not invite him to my home until I feel sure that he will respect me and my home.

These are the steps that were necessary for me. They run absolutely contrary to my choices in the past. Since making these behavioral changes on my part, my state of mind has improved very much.

You can do this.

You are judging yourself very harshly.

You want your daughter and grandchildren fully in your life. On your own terms. Which I do not see as possible given that your daughter is fully an adult and her children are her own. Forgive me if I am seeing the situation incorrectly, but a choice can be made. The only options I see are these: To choose yourself, your self-respect, your peace of mind, your sanity, etc. or to continue as is. As is means subjecting yourself to the chaos and irresponsibility of your daughter's life style, over which you have not one bit of control.

There are no other options that I can see. You or any one of us, long ago lost control over deciding how our adult children live. That can be faced, or not. It is your choice.

As long as you choose to keep involved with your daughter without setting limits to protect yourself, you will continue to suffer. We have all been there. We understand.

Keep posting. It really helps. The actual responding to other parents helps as much or more as does posting about your particular circumstances.

Take care. Stop being so hard on yourself. You do not deserve it. It is not your fault. You are a mother who loves her child who would do anything to make it different. You cannot.

COPA

Excellent counsel here, especially the "We are miserable only if we feel tied to them..." How true this is. Detaching does not mean that we do not care. It means that we are taking our lives back. Limits must be set for our adult child, then those limits must be adhered to - without fail. We must get over the idea that we can change our child. It won't happen. They can only change themselves.

 

[BusynMember]

In continuing Copa's and Patriot's excellent posts, I'm going to say that when Bart was very young, say five, my entire life happiness depended on his being happy. If he came home from school and was crying, I cried. I did not see us as seperate people.

One day I read an awesome book called "Toxic Parens." It is NOT the same Toxic Parents now being sold and had different writers. In fact, the writer was Chicago born and raised and I got to see him as a therapist for a long time. In his book, he talked about parents who were living their lives through their chidlren and that they were the ones who felt the same emotions their children felt rather than sympathizing but feeling our own emotions. I saw myself in this at once an d took myself out of it. It was easy because Bart was so young. I never forgot it though. That doesn't mean I never feel bad when my adult kids do. I'm human and a mother and of course I do. But I have learned it is up to my adult kids to choose their own paths and am very good at staying out of their lives unless asked. And not giving advice unless asked.

This book was a Godsend or I may have been a multiple personality....myself and my four kids It is hard sometimes to remember we are not supposed to feel their emotions or make their choices f or them, but it can be done.

 

[Albatross]

I have had a successful life, by measures of success. While not necessarily a happy life, I have had success. I can list achievements.

Adopting my son was my greatest one. I know that deep inside me was a sense of deep hopelessness and a sense of not being good enough. With that the ground inside of me, I persevered. With such a strong need to succeed, to counteract my own inadequacy imagine what it is for me to be tethered to this struggle together with my son. I cannot even bear to think about it.

Copa, I just saw your reply.


I have a friend I lost touch with for many years. We reestablished contact and have been catching up on where our lives' journeys have taken us. She elected not to raise any children and has led a very adventurous life, one I would probably wish for myself even if I hadn't spent so much of my life force parenting a d.c.

One day I kind of jokingly asked her, "Knowing what I've gone through with d.c., do you regret not raising any kids?" She was quiet for a really long time, then answered me, tearfully, "You love your child enough to die for him, without hesitation. I will never feel a love like that, and I really regret that."

And it's true, Copa. We do know loving someone enough to die for them. We do it a little bit every day, until one day we see that it wouldn't do any good.

Adopting my son was my greatest one. I know that deep inside me was a sense of deep hopelessness and a sense of not being good enough. With that the ground inside of me, I persevered. With such a strong need to succeed, to counteract my own inadequacy imagine what it is for me to be tethered to this struggle together with my son. I cannot even bear to think about it.

I know that sense of hopelessness and inadequacy, Copa. But I am not sure that is what made you persevere. I think you persevered because you are strong enough to feel and hold that great love. The challenge, I think, is to see that it wasn't inadequacy you were feeling, it was a need to love.

There is a saying I come back to in times like this: "To be loved deeply gives us great strength. To love another deeply gives us great courage." We have been burned in the worst possible way. But we survive and we carry on, and we don't stop loving. We just stop dying for them, because we have seen that it won't do any good.