Gosh. Thank you. As I read through your posts I clicked (Quote) so many times, now I have a million.
Please do the changing the channel thing before you take a rash step, thinking it will make it stop.
Yes. Thank you.
Albatross. You know, I did not remember I could change the channel until I read your post. Either I did not think of it because I was in FOG or because I was the deer blinded by the headlights of my son's words...and paralyzed...it felt too real, for Mother/Adult Child Disaster Channel. I conceptualized that channel as functionally /dysfunctional. I think yesterday I was on a different channel called, The Adult Child Trauma Network, CTN, (I own no stock.)
One thing about being a child of a parent who commits suicide is it is always on your mind, as a tantalizing option, a way out.
I had forgotten this. Thank you Elsi. Yesterday as the train home approached the platform I had the image of my climbing down onto the tracks. Kind of like a vertigo feeling, of wanting to hurl oneself from a height and fearing the inability to restrain oneself--I backed away from the tracks.
And at the same time there was this hitting bottom sense, again. The awareness that I was crashing against the rocks. And that I could tie myself to the mast. The mast of my own life and my own destiny and my own truth.
I have never written on this board what happened 10 weeks ago, that gave me backbone. I did not try to commit suicide myself, but it was something, an unconscious reaction to trauma, when my son was trying to force his way into our house, where something horrible could have happened. I had been forced to see I had to factor myself into the equation. I had become somebody else. i had become less than somebody else. Road kill. Road kill in my own life.
And that was the wake up call.
Tears are coming to my eyes, now. Not for myself, but to that image. That that is what we are dealing with here. All of us. The sadness that we permit ourselves to become road kill in our own lives. How very, very sad for us. That this happens. Not in the newspaper or TV but in our real lives.
I know there is a difference of opinion among us as to whether we get to this point, due to our extreme love or extremely bad patterns of responding to these stressors, or both. But like our children WE ARE capable of learning, and taking responsibility for what we see with our own eyes. I am responsible. For what I see in my own life. I am responsible to myself and to my life.
So. There is lots of learning here.
Last night's sleeping was very bad. We sleep with the cat in our bed and our two dogs are in our room in their beds. The three wake us up all night long. I kept waking up remembering my son is outside in the cold. He has no tent; probably no sleeping bag; and no warm coat. He is probably in a wooded area behind a shopping center a few hundred yards from a bay. It is a wet cold. I find this juxtaposition intolerable to feel, that my animals are here in the warmth with me, and he is where he is, how he is.
This is the hardest for me, my consciousness of his circumstances. I can bear it if I do not know. Because I can imagine something better.
So. I am clear here. I cannot go back into the way things were. Because however bad the Disaster Channel is the Trauma Channel is worse.
And I came up with a place to stand: I cannot offer him solutions. He needs to come up with one. He is capable of coming up with a solution. Right now his bargaining position, if I infer it from his texts is this:
I am degraded. What are you going to do about it?
To offer him a solution from this place, I think, would be an error. But to think about my options is smart. Thank you, people.
I am seeing several options, based upon your posts, my thoughts, and M's contribution.
!. Come back. Smoke weed. I will ignore you and let you be.
2. Come back as a dependent adult. You lose control of the money, and you are clean and sober and you are monitored.
3. Come back, no weed. That's all. We ask nothing else.
4. Stand pat. (We are playing cards here, and I am thinking of my mother) And wait for him to come up with another bid. That the worst thing I could do now is either fold or call. I need more information. And the information that is needed is that he act. That he come up with an idea or a plan or an actual putting something in place, for him. Or even that he come up with another few words in the conversation. That take some responsibility. That mend. That make a next step.
After all this is a relationship. It is not only a manipulation. I am not just the bull to be baited or misled or led with a red flag.
This is the genius essence of the situation:
Or he can be a man and make his own choices, and live with them.
The decision is my son's. Be a man, and live with consequences. Or be a dependent child, and live within constraints. My son is saying: Neither.
My son has always wanted full autonomy and independence of action, without responsibility and real independence. He seeks the range of action of independence while dependent upon others to pay for his lifestyle and to deal with consequences. The jerk.
$900 a month would have him living like a king.
This could be true, Elsi. But could it not end up the same as with my son, who sees his payment as an allowance to buy his fun stuff, and his maintenance of his actual needs, as the responsibility of others, namely us?
You are not rejecting him, he is choosing not to live within the conditions you have set. And they are not unreasonable conditions. Live like a human. Take care of yourself. Be sober.
This is the truth.
What hangs me up is that I begin to get dizzy from thinking, maybe he is incapable of making better decisions. His judgement is horrible.
But M said this last night: Look. The cat and the dogs make good decisions. They want to be comfortable. They come in when it is cold. They do what it takes to be in our good graces. So that they get what they want and need. They learn. J does not want to learn.
But the essence of what Elsi says here is profound.
He is choosing. Animals choose. He is too.
Yes. He is depressed. And that does not absolve him from choices. But comfort and security do not seem to help him choose better. He chose poorly when he was here to force our hand, to make us accept 100 percent his conditions and domination.
All weed, all of the time. It seems he is still acting from this position. From domination.
All of the decisions really are his to make. I cannot control his story. He controls it. It is a very, very sad story for me, because of my own life story. But I am not the only one here on the forum who had early losses and the bad end of a parent. I am not alone here in having been damaged and having to repeat early traumas and losses vicariously through the behavior of my child and my inability to control it.
This is real life. And I am not alone in it. How much easier this is to type in the light of day, than to feel in the dead of night.
So. I don't know exactly where I am for sure, except for this: I think I will stand pat. For me to fold right now is to collapse into mush. It is to cease to be a person. It is to basically forfeit my whole life. I am not necessarily thinking of my current life. I am thinking about my whole life, the trajectory of my life, as seeking dignity and purpose. I would be giving up that, my sense of self.
There are options for my son. Jail or prison is one. The reality of death, is another. And he knows of a number of more favorable options: treatment, 12 step groups, meditation, work. (He has worked in concrete. He could be a helper. There is a lot of work, if he has not burned his bridges, with these people. He can work under the table. He can admit himself to the psychiatric hospital. He can go to the police. He can go to agencies that help the homeless. All of these things (except death and prison and jail, he has done before. These are actions within his repertoire. They are not all of them, bad. So. I guess what I am thinking is for now, my son has to decide.
Your posts about finding the place within yourself and finding your own life are right on.
This is the bottom line. In so many ways. The wisdom of this is that it forces me to look at my own decisions and my own thinking about my son, as it affects my life right now, and as part of my whole life story.
I am accountable in so many ways. Not just to him. Or to myself and to M, as long as we stay together. I am accountable to my life. To learn the lessons of my life and to change course where I need to. And I am accountable to my life, to live it well. My choices of what to do with respect to my son, have to be compatible with my own life story. Do I take a tragic turn, or something else?
That part of it we seldom acknowledge but I see us doing that all of the time. Holding ourselves accountable for our own life stories, as well as our children's. And for me, the tension is being quite damaged myself and having a father and brother who killed themselves off by drugs and alcohol, but having tried to redeem myself by my acts as a human being. Which has included becoming a mother of a child who himself had been traumatized in worse ways than had I.
And not knowing what to do, when our life stories came to be on a collision course. And having turned away from family, in order to save myself, and then ended up encountering what I had tried to run from staring at it in the mirror. With nowhere to run to. Which really is no different from anybody here.
I will today try to do the best I can for myself. And to pray that he does the same.
What he did to me yesterday was very very mean. Anybody would be reeling. But there are things I can do today to soothe myself. And to keep going.
Thank you very much for your support.
.
