Brigid Bishop on Life, Love and The Art of Living

Happy Mother's Day Weekend to all of the Mom's, Grandmom's, Stepmom's and Foster Mom's in the Keen Blog Audience.

With my twenty-second Mother's Day comes some serious soul-searching and reflection on my parenting experience and I would like to share an article with you that I have previously published regarding the unconditional love a parent feels for their children.

We all want Mother's Day to be a happy celebration where our offspring and progeny mark the occassion, but many of us also think back over our experiences and relationships with our children, this is what I pondered this year:

Loving Your Children Regardless of Their Mistakes

Copyright © 2008 Brigid Bishop

Parenting constitutes an assumption of ""unconditional love". For the normal, healthy adult it really is not difficult to continue to love your child regardless of how many mistakes, or how damaging their mistakes may be to the family as a whole, it's a natural condition.

I have two sons, currently they are ages 20 and 21. My younger son has had a very troubled transition from late puberty through his teens into adulthood, causing much pain and worry to myself and his brother and stepfather, however, my love for him has never lessened, if anything, the problems have made me love him more.

In each and every one of his failures, I have seen my contribution to that failure as a parent. During his teen years I used "tough love", I even had the court put him into a program, (he was not required to be in that program legally), that made it impossible for him to fail to complete high school. It hurt like hell to see him have his freedom taken away when the blush of youth was still so bright on his face, but it had to be done. I did not stop loving him for one second as I stood in front of the Juvenile Court Judge and asked him to please impose the stricter sentence, but I felt as if I was betraying him at the time. In retrospect, it was what had to be done to ensure his safety and his applying himself to his goals instead of drifting deeper into crime and drugs, it made me angry that my parenting skills were not good enough to stop this from happening in the first place, angry at myself, not him. I was the adult here. I was the parent. I was the failure, not him.

I loved him and wanted him to enjoy one last summer before buckling down again.

That was an error in judgment on my part.

The summer months brought a relapse. He did start school, however, during his first semester he dropped out and lied about it. I told him if he did not attend school, he must work and pay room and board to live at home. He actually got several great jobs, none of which lasted more than a month, and unfortunately, he drifted back in with the cohorts that he got in trouble with as a teenager.

By age nineteen he had begged, borrowed and stolen literally thousands of dollars from me directly and indirectly. I was angry at him, yes. I felt betrayed by him, yes. However, I at no point stopped loving him.

Even after a heated argument with him over breaking into my house while we were on vacation and cleaning out our deep freeze of all of the meats and groceries we had stored, I looked up at the photographs on the wall in our family room that document his life, (and mine), and the unconditional love I felt for him spilled out of my eyes and down my cheeks.

I was fast losing my baby to a lifestyle that would destroy him.

I had to get even tougher in my loving of him.

I cut him off entirely. I told him to not even communicate with me until he had a job, a place to live and had given up his destructive behavior.

He told me he hated me.

I loved him.

I stuck to my guns, and refused phone calls, refused to "lend" him any money, refused to give him a free meal at our home, refused to let him shower here or even enter the premises.

He hated me.

I loved him.

Three months later, he was working and trying to join the military or get back into school and living in an apartment that a relative owns, paying reduced rent, but he was growing up and realizing that he could not go on traveling the same path. He was twenty years old, and he had thrown away one year of his life as a teen, a huge university scholarship, and a job earning $40,000 per year. Opportunities were fast disappearing, and he began to realize it, mom was no longer enabling him, he had to take action.

He called me up.

He apologized for his past behavior.

He told me of his plans and his new goals.

He told me it felt good to do it for himself.

He asked if he could come and visit me.

He said "I love you".

I love him too.

Copyright © 2008 Brigid Bishop

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