Category: parenting

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When is helping not really helping?

I keep telling myself I’m helping my son.  I’m doing what I have to in order to help him get his life back on the road it needs to be on.  But when is helping not really helping?  What am I really helping him to do?  Am I helping him to get it together or am I helping him to keep running from what truly needs to be fixed?  By that I mean he has a lot to face and fix still.  Am I helping him to get to the road that helps him face and fix the mess he has created all on his own or am I helping him to run from it all and not really face it?  I wish I had the answer.  I wish someone had the answer but when they do, I don’t really want to hear it.

I have been told that I am only enabling him and not helping him.  That’s a hard pill for a parent to swallow, enabling instead helping.  I have prayed and prayed and still I can’t find the answer or don’t really want to hear the answer I get I’m afraid.  I don’t know which it is.  This is my firstborn son.  My blood, my child in my eyes even though in all reality, he’s a grown man that has to learn to live his own life and be responsible for his own choices.  What gets me is this was the most independent child we had.  I think his first words were ‘I do it’.  And do it he has, his way always.  That can be good but in his case, it’s hasn’t always been.

Still I have this darn decision to make about the truck.  Part of me wishes that someone else would make it for me and then I could say to my son that I had no choice but that’s the cowards way out.  Women think they are the only ones that suffer for their children but they’re wrong.  Father suffer and worry too, we just don’t allow it to show like women do.  There’s a part of me that wishes I could show it too but I’m a man and that’s not the way a man does things.

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Life can be hard sometimes

My oldest son has been a bit of a challenge from birth.  He’s basically a good kid but seems to get into crap without even trying.  Well I know I have sang the praises of my children which is what parents do.  No one wants to really air out their dirty laundry in public, now do they?  But I have come to the conclusion that to only hide these things doesn’t help anyone, especially someone else that might be going through a similar thing.

Drugs were a problem with my son for awhile but he basically has a handle on that now.  He’s working hard to get his life back in order but has a long way to go still but he’s working on it.  I’m not sure if those are just the words I want to believe or if they’re the way it really is.  As his father, they are the words I want more than anything else to believe.

Trouble seems to find him no matter where he is or what he’s doing and that has happened yet again.  He was in the south working with a carnival.   I now look at Carney’s differently than I used to since he took that job because the people he works for are really helping most of these people more than we know or could imagine.  Anyway, a lady asked him to drive him to the store and he said he would for $10.  He needed money.  What he didn’t know is that she was an undercover cop and lead him right into a sting operation.  That night, 4 guys were arrested and my son was one of them.

He didn’t have any drugs on him but he had a pipe and some scales in his truck.  The truck is in my name and therefore I’m liable for the tow and storage bill.  He may go to prison for solicitation and drug paraphernalia.  Now I have to decide what to do about his truck which has a lot of his belongings in it.  It has a camper shell on the back and that’s what he slept in.  I have been told that I need to get the truck out of my name because if he was to have an accident, I am liable for what ever damage he causes, even a loss of life.  I could lose everything I have worked for.  Now I have a tough decision to make that I don’t really want to make either.

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Cherokee Legend

Do you know the legend of the Cherokee Indian youth’s rite of Passage? His father takes him into the forest, blindfolds him and leaves him alone. He is required to sit on a stump the whole night and not remove the blindfold until the rays of the morning sun shine through it. He cannot cry out for help to anyone.

Once he survives the night, he is a MAN. He cannot tell the other boys of this experience, because each lad must come into manhood on his own.

The boy is naturally terrified. He can hear all kinds of noises. Wild beasts must surely be all around him. Maybe even some human might do him harm. The wind blew the grass and earth, and shook his stump, but he sat stoically, never removing the blindfold. It would be the only way he could become a man!

Finally, after a horrific night the sun appeared and he removed his blindfold. It was then that he discovered his father sitting on the stump next to him. He had been at watch the entire night, protecting his son from harm.

That’s what a father does……….protects not only his son but his whole family.  Unfortunately once they become a man, they are supposed to take care of themselves.  It doesn’t always turn out that way so who’s to blame if anyone?  That’s the question I want answered because I have no idea what the answer is myself.