“I am done”
I am done.
I have heard that word hundreds of times from parents who are at their wits end.
I know the feeling. In the summer of 2013 I was done. We were in a place where my son was young, just 16. We could have never asked him to leave our home (short of emancipation) but we also couldn’t force him into treatment anymore. He had to be “willing” to sign himself in and he was far from willing.
I was done. I couldn’t do “it” anymore (whatever “it” was). I didn’t like who I was. I didn’t like what our home had become. I didn’t like what my marriage had turned into. I didn’t like what my behaviors where doing to my son and our other children.
And as I sat in front of a trusted pastor in tears, asking what to do, he looked at me and said “are you going to be right for the sake of justice or are you going to love for the sake of relationship. Because love never fails.”
I was done. But not in the way you would think.
I was done…instigating confrontation
I was done…placing demands on other people
I was done…treating my son like he was bad, rather than ill
I was done…taking the behaviors of the disease personally
I was done…putting MY expectations on my son
I was done…putting societal expectations on my son
I was done…feeling like a failure because I didn’t measure up to my faith communities expectations
I was done…walking in ignorance regarding the disease
I was done…perpetuating stigma about the disease
I was done…being mean and nasty
I was done…with the old way of “tough love”
I was ready to change.
And I began…
I began… to learn about addiction from the perspective of behavioral science and neuroscience
I began…to see my son as ill, not as bad
I began…to understand that his behaviors where the symptoms of the disease and they were not personal..
I began…to understand the idea of collaboration
I began…to communicating better, removing “tellling” “you have to’s” “you need to’s” and “if you would just” statements from my vocabulary
I began…to understand that change is not linear and it takes time so I needed patience
I began…to stop putting MY expectations on my son and began to empower him to make his own decisions and choices
I began…to simply allow for natural consequences, moving from a punitive mentality to a restorative one
I began…to understand that this may take time, but all I have is time
I began…to make every moment count with my son, knowing that I may not have him tomorrow
I began…to do my own hard work, looking at the patterns that I needed to change in my own life
I began…to practice compassion not just with those around me, but with myself. 2 steps forward, 1 step back and that is ok.
And as I began….. I found peace.
I found joy
I found love
And I found real hope.
Not pie in the sky hope but the hope that came from a repaired relationship with my beautiful boy.
The hope that come in a newfound atmosphere in our home.
The hope that came in a life that was no longer coping or surviving.
I found hope in the deep understanding that we were going to be ok. No matter what happened…. We were going to be ok.
Copyright Pam Jones Lanhart 2020