"Uh,.....choke." Exactly his words.
"What?" I asked.
"Uh...my uh dad and K (his stepmother) are having a kind of party for me tonight."
"Oh." I said, not getting it. "Oh!" again, I said, starting to get it, and then a very meaningful "Oooh!!!! " A balloon letting the last of its air escape.
Maternal care kicked irritation that was beginning to take over my brain out of my voice, which brightened, slightly strained...."Not a problem! I'll come tomorrow!" I didn't want him to feel caught, as he always does, in the middle of parents who can't seem to communicate with one another, to show common courtesy. I hadn't told his father (who, apparently, expected to be asked....) what our plans were. I assumed that B would let him know, but that was asking B to do something that, if you understood the situation, was really too hard for me. My bad.
But of course I wasn't invited to the party, either.
So. Care for my son, love, really, temporarily overruled anger, but then irritation flared up every so slightly in my next question: "Did you tell your dad that we had a plan?" "Yes." "When?" "This morning." "Oh." Another balloon deflating. "What did he say?" "He said he didn't want to cause me any trouble..."
For the moment I was willing to give his father the benefit of the doubt--he meant well, as I did, but he was there and I was here and he had geographical dominance. What could I do but bow out gracefully?
"So," I said, "I will come down but I am not sure that I can undo tonight's reservation. And if not then I'll come tonight and stay over and we'll do something tomorrow." No point in forcing Brendan to make a painful choice, as his father did, on his birthday of all days. I didn't want him to feel more awkward and miserable than he already did. His father should have bowed out. Would have, had he been more gracious.
I long ago learned that, in this relationship with my beloved, my only child, there was no winning, no keeping score, no battle to be won with his father. Even though it often felt like a battle. Even if I had, again and again and again, to bend and give in, that this would be the way to survive. I had to be like the willow in the wind, whose roots hold firmly in the ground, who, even after bending down to the ground, rises up again and again and again.
In times of greatest struggle, I have looked to the Tao te Ching, as translated by Stephen Mitchell. It is the best guide to life I know. Consider verse 76:
Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.
or verse 78:
Nothing in the worldI should carry the Tao around with me. I should send a copy to my son. Reverse that. Strike it.
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.
Therefore the Master remains
serene in the midst of sorrow.
Evil cannot enter her heart.
Because she has given up helping,
She is her peopl's greatest help.
True words seem paradoxical.
My therapist's words remind me: "Let go of shoulds" and "trys". When you say "I will try" or "I should" you have distancing yourself from the task, you are giving yourself permission not to do it. Say "I will; I have done" Perhaps the Tao would say, don't make any promises.
So I won't. But I did just order Ursula K. LeGuin's translation, which I am eager to read and compare to Mitchell's.
I was telling you about what happened. This is the task I have set for myself this morning.
So, B went off to school and I changed my hotel reservation to the following night. That evening I got a phone call from him.
"So at school today I got high with C and it really messed me up and my dad could tell at dinner and he yelled at me and got really mad and now everything is ruined."
"What did you take?" (First question--a question, you might be interested to know, that his father never bothered to ask him).
"Something that is supposed to stop motion sickness."
"What? Why did you do that?"
"I don't know. I was with C. and it was my birthday and I just wanted to do something that would be like escaping from responsiblity for a little while."
"What did it do to you?"
"At first it made me really awake and buzzed and it was terrible. Then it made me really, really tired. I didn't think it would this long. It ruined the entire day. At dinner, F [his 2-year old sister, adopted] kept asking, "B what's wrong? What's wrong, B?"
"Okay. so, what did your father do?"
"He just got really really mad and said I had pissed all over the table and my birthday. I went to my room and he came down and yelled some more. He said he was really embarrassed and ashamed and really angry. And now he won't talk to me."
My ex's temper is frightening, irrational, all-destroying. I had hoped that he had mellowed out over the years, but that was foolish of me. Most of the time he is a nice guy, smart, funny, caring, affectionate. But he lets things that bother him build up in him, he doesn't know how to be forthright and talk about stuff that upsets him at the time...the anger builds and builds and builds, and then it explodes. Like a Volcano. One minute he's Dr. Jekyll, witty, charming, rational, and the next minute--you never know what will set him off--he's turned into Mr. Hyde, hideous, hulking and towering even taller than his six feet five inches over your head, shouting, banging, storming, throwing. He can manage it briefly--I imagine he did as he sent B to his room--but then when it unleashes, it overwhelms him and everyone in his path. After a wild, nasty outburst of profanity and personal insults calculated to shame, to belittle, to hurt--he storms off and punishes further with the silent treatment. He'll slam the door, turn away, and refuse to acknowledge his victim. And the worst of it--he feels entirely justified in behaving this way. He believes that whatever provokes his anger deserves what comes, and that people who have crossed him have committed moral crimes that need to be punished. He is judge, jury, and executioner. He will persistently hold to this rigid position for weeks, months, years, at times. And you won't even know he's doing it--because he hides it under a mask of Dr. Jekyll-like calm, reason, and charismatic humor.
So, I told B. that I was very sorry that this had happened to him, that I thought his father had overreacted, and that his behavior was reprehensible.
What I didn't say to him was--why didn't your father bother to find out what you had taken? I got an email the next day, in which M, my ex, reported that B. was "wasted---probably on LSD or shrooms..." a complete fabrication, and not at all in keeping with the fairly rational, although very miserable B. I had spoken to just after this event. If indeed B. had looked as bad as his father reported, then, had I been there, I would have determined what he was on and taken action from there. What if it had been life-threatening? What if B. had gone into some sort of medically dangerous state? Screaming at him and refusing to speak to him seemed like the worst possible response.
And hardly the way to encourage B. to trust him, or to convince him not to experiment with drugs of any kinds.
I asked him how he was feeling now. Sleepy, he said. 'So, find a book to take your mind off painful thoughts and try to let yourself fall asleep. Tomorrow's another day. I'll come down and we'll go out for a nice dinner."
So. The next day I called while on my way down to visit him--and he told me that he was okay but that his father was still not speaking to him. Worse, his father had ripped his birthday card in half and left it on his birthday cake.
A very mature response, wouldn't you say?
I picked him up from school. He looked incredibly handsome, as so often these days. He cuts his own hair in a rather interesting, neither long nor short fashion, and today it was brownish. Sometimes it's green or blue. He's also very tall--over 6' 2'', broad-shouldered and very thin.
He wanted to go down to the local teen gathering spot--a starbuck's in a nice strip mall--to meet some friends of his. he wanted me to me them, and for them to meet me. I was flattered. So we went, and had ice cream while sitting outside. He told me the whole story--and also said that he didn't want to go home that night. That he felt so alieanated and angry with his dad that he felt like staying out all night with his friends and not telling him where he was. An understandable desire which I didn't contradict. I was in listening mode, not governing mode. When his friends arrived I remained in listening, non-judgemental mode, trying to draw them out, trying to hear them, to understand them. It was fun. I like them.
Later that evening, as we were walking around the city together, he told me that he was never going to do that again--and I said that his father, had he been rational, would not have exploded but would rather have told him that he was worried about him and that he didn't want him messing around with stupid substances because he loved him. And I also encouraged him to avoid making a bad situation worse by following through on his plan to stay out all night.
Of course I offered to let him stay with me--"You saw how cool my room is. We could sit on the couch and watch DVDs (the hotel had a huge collection, free) and eat popcorn and candy.." He was tempted, he said, but really wanted to see his friends--the ones we had met earlier. I understood. So, with some prodding from me, he called his father and said he would be coming home at around 11.30--and that he was with me...
We had a beautiful dinner at a nice restaruant===we ate outside in a part of town that neither of us had ever been to before. I let him direct the conversation. We talked about his dad, his family, his friends, the girl he loves in vain...his friends. It was one of the best conversations we've ever had. We laughed, we mused, we reminisced about our travels in Poland last year. He talked about how beautiful the girls were...it was light and healthy and clean and good. I gazed at him with love and admiration and delight in his being. I could not have been happier with anyone else, in any other place. It was perfect. Curious thing about giving to someone you love--the more you give, the more love within you seem to have. As though the well fills itself by exhausting itself.
I'm sure his father would love to have such a dinner with his son. If only he could.
That night I left him at his friend's house--they were going to watch some silly horror film they had all seen a hundred times together--and he promised to call me when he was ready to go home. I was going to come to drive him if he needed a ride. But he got one with his friend's dad. He was so happy--our conversation, our time together had so bouyed him, had so clearly shored up his faith in himself--that he was giddy on the phone, talking to his friend. He was a child again, and happy, and safe.
A few hours later he called me from his house. Still safe. At home, where he belonged. He was going to go to bed. He told me that he loved me and that it had been really good to see me. I felt very close to him.
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