keeping strong boundaries in the midst of feeling so weak.
Stay strong. I know it's hard.
Yes.
I am the parent, and I feel abused by my own child. I become enraged and then I turn the anger against myself. It is not a dynamic I am proud of.
But it is a dynamic you are aware of, and that is a place to stand. You are being abused by your child. Like my daughter was doing too, your son is hurting you with exquisite precision. He is angry, too. He does not have what he wants ~ which is domination over you and M and your home. He wants you afraid in your own home, in your own life, Copa.
You had to stand up.
You did.
Walrus, Nomad, Albatross, New Leaf, SWOT ~ each of us saying the same thing, Copa.
When our children are behaving in these ways for whatever reason there is no alternative but to parent them by The Rules of Engagement to the letter.
There is no alternative, Copa.
To parent in those ways will destroy something fine and beautiful within you. To parent in any other way will destroy you altogether. We have all read the stories of the aging parents being physically, emotionally, and financially abused by their live-in adult children.
You cannot let him move home, Copa.
There is another way ~ there has to be.
It is all about being able to meet our own eyes in the mirror.
It may be that a time will come when you can have relationship with this Son. Now is not that time. Now is the time of The Rules of Engagement. You have had your son living in your home, Copa. To have him there altered and nearly destroyed your relationship to M and affected your health.
It did not help Son.
I remember your posting about the oranges. About the black eye.
If it were up to Son, you would be very sick, and...M would be gone.
There are certain rules you and M discussed, Copa. Now is the time those rules were made for. Walrus is right. There is not one thing about any of this that is easy or pleasant or easily remembered. It is a terrible thing that this has happened. But it has happened. It is happening. Son must understand in no uncertain terms what you will and what you will not, do. You must understand Son is playing you.
Don't buy in, Copa.
Fight it.
You are right. It isn't supposed to be this way. I remember Headlights Mom's post about gratitude. Though she wrote it differently, what I took from it and have taken comfort from in it is this: That we hold our memories of when we loved them close as breath. They cannot take those times away when we loved them, Copa. Whatever is happening to that child turned adult, we can and should and must cherish that time, cherish all those times when our children were little "lest we grow cold."
Lest we grow cold, Copa. Lest we grow bitter and brittle and break.
Your son is a man. He was hungry. You fed him. Unless you will work with him to turn him into someone who begs for his dinner and for a place to sleep you must send him away, Copa.
For his own sake.
He is not getting younger.
I think it was responsible of you to have given him the numbers of Social Services. What you cannot do Copa, for Son's own sake, is allow him to move into your home or worse yet, to torture and shame all of you by sleeping outside any of your properties. Somehow, Son seems to think you are responsible for him in the same way you were when he was six.
You cannot encourage that kind of thinking, Copa. For Son's own sake, you cannot. That is another huge difference between all other parents and ourselves: Their illusions about themselves as parents, and about the wonder that was born into their lives when they had their children, are intact.
We have no illusions.
Those we have not yet burnt away will further destroy our children and kill us.
Literally.
So, here is a way to see this time maybe, Copa. In the Wizard of Oz, before Dorothy could learn any of the things she needed to learn to face and stand up in and cherish her own life, the house had to be whirled off from its very foundations and up into the sky.
It landed on something very evil, killing it dead as a doornail and freeing Dorothy in some way she was never to understand.
And there was a journey through a world where nothing was known, and where the old knowings did not apply.
And at the end, it was learned that Home is a matter of Choosing.
So right now Copa, you are whirling through the stormy sky, soon to land on something Evil, killing it dead as a doornail.
All you have to do right now is hold tight to Toto,
and remember who you are.
You can do this, Copa.
You have done harder things for people you loved less passionately than you love your Son.
I am sorry for the pain of it, Copa.
Your son should be protecting and cherishing both you, and himself.
But he isn't.
Cedar
FOO issues enter into this is this way, I think: We have been taught that the abuser is satisfied when we suffer. When we break. It could be that you break now to protect your child; to make him stop destroying himself and hurting you. That is where our thinking gets messed up, Copa. FOO was not healthy. Anything we learned there cannot help us now. It can only hurt us. We need to be stronger than we have been in our lives, Copa.
There is no one to help us know what to do, now. But we are very bright. We see what has made a difference for other parents and their difficult child sons and daughters.
So, if we are very strong (and we are) we do that.
I think I will for now make a very strict boundary. I will make sure that I observe it. I will adopt some practices of self-care. I will report back on them here.
We will be waiting to hear, Copa.
No, that's not a good thing, but it shows he has normal energy.
