Parenting

When you deal with a relative with drug and/or alcohol problems, it is difficult not to fall into the standard responses that society tells you to: for me, its not that I want him to stop entirely, but if it is a case that he 'sucks at drinking or doing drug' then stopping might stymie all of the other issues he has. You stop being angry, and sometimes it veers between premature enlightenment and exhaustion when you see the cuts on his forearms, when you show him how to apply for a twelve hour a week cleaning job and when he offers to wash up his cup, you forget how young he is. It hurts when you can see how much pain he is in, and you cannot do a single thing about it. That you can only learn to seperate who he is, from the things that he does and that still hurts like nothing I have ever known.. It is worse for Patsy, she has that maternal instinct to contend with and sometimes war against, because some of you will never have conversations where you agree that prison might be the best thing for your son. It teaches you compassion, it teaches you to be tolerant and it teaches you that there is no one way to raise a child, or to deal with his problems. I wish I could make him better, but it is not down to me or my wife or any of the people who support him as he exists. He has to make the choice as to what sort of person he wants to be.