Though I consider myself to be a failure as a mother, it is a vocation that I take very seriously and to heart and it is my mission to achieve the raising of my sons with these goals achieved: 1. They will be go from point A. to point B. with as little physical or emotional damage as possible. That means that NO ONE HURTS MY BABIES. Even if I have to threaten to throw down against a truck load of idiots in the middle of Burnside and Powell, on my own because some jackass shouted "Faggot" at my son, I will stomp a mudhole in someones ass to achieve it. 2. None of my children will ever be A. Arrested or go to jail for any reason. I have so far managed to achieve that by knowing my kids friends, knowing what they are up to , maintaining rules and discipline, and instilling respect in my kids and fear of just what the hell would happen to them if they ever were arrested, in them. 3. They will all graduate from high school and then college. Even my special needs child, even if that means I am sitting there right beside him in class. I dont care if its art school but they are not going to be without means.
I may be a little strict, but I have seen what becomes of kids who have overly indulgent parents or parents who dont pay attention or who just dont have the knowledge to ask the right questions. I may be nearly 42 years old, but I damn well remember being 15 years old and I remember all the fuckery I got up to running wild in East Texas, and I will be damned if my son is going to end up as much of a screw up as I am, so yesterday when he was over 2 hours late, and he didn't call or text or otherwise check in to let me know WHY? I could only assume that something bad had happened to him.
We live in a big city. A big city where we dont really know anybody. He is a very pretty boy. Yes, he is as big as a moose and fast as hell, but he is a pretty boy and not the most streetwise and hes a bit cocky. The closer to dark it got, the more times I was getting up and looking out the window, checking the door, checking my phone, looking out the window, picking up the phone to call his coach. I sat here with that sense of dread building in my gut, remembering all the times I had gone as a cop to tell parents that their sons had been in accidents or had done something stupid and had been hurt. I listened to each person going up and down the stairs outside my apartment for the familiar sound of his shoes, waiting...and just as I was telling his sister to get her coat and I was pulling my boots back on with my heart already racing and my gut twisting in fear, I heard a knock a the door. He was there, soaked to the bone wondering why I was grabbing him and yelling at him and hugging him and crying for forgetting his key.
He accused me of,"Freaking out" and yeah, I was. He is a teen boy, they live lives of alley cats. More likely to die by violence than by any other means. He is infuriating and stress making and smelly and messy, but like I explained to him,(repeatedly), he is MY BABY. He may do stupid stuff like set his pants on fire, and he may have questionable fashion choices, but it is my mission to achieve my objectives and I am a very objective driven person. He will survive to grow up, stay out of handcuffs,(at least wielded by law enforcement, and the other I dont want to know about and it better be when he is an adult)graduate hopefully with honors from both high school and college, and he will hopefully go out into the world and find someone to love who will drive him crazy.
He was afraid he was going to get grounded or punished in some way, but I told him he had the choice that I used to give quite a few of the people I stopped when I was a cop, "Citation or Lecture?" When I was a cop I missed teaching, so those that chose lecture got the 5 minute educational version of why they were a fuck up and why they shouldn't have been doing what they were doing and sent on their way, or they could simply get a ticket that took me the same amount of time to write and they had to pay a fine on top of it. Weirdly, mostly California folks took the ticket. Southerners often took the lecture, I think because we just liked to talk.He took the lecture, and it was during the lecture, it dawned on the boy that I had been scared. When he realized it he said,"Mom, you were scared?" Duh! That is the one thing that scares me. I dont care what happens to me. Its the thought that what could happen to those that I love and care about that scares me. I jumped in the middle of my psycho ex-brother in law one night in the parking lot of the Orange Blossom Ballroom because I thought he was going to hurt my sis. He was more than twice my size and 10 times the crazy and he was armed, but I didn't care, he was going to hurt my sister. To this day he still wonders if I really woulda chewed his throat out if that bouncer hadn't caught me in a bear hug and held me with my boots off the ground until he could get away, or if my daddy hadn't punched me out when I went to the house and got the pistol so I could go hunt him down and shoot him after they set me loose. I would probably still be in the pen in Texas, but my sis wouldn't have gotten hurt that night. Some folks may say that they would end someone who hurt their loved ones, I follow through. My ex knows this. he knows he was lucky to live to go to prison. He knows that my rage and my standing up in court and facing him to ensure he got the maximum was my way to put an end to him and that the only reason he exists, is because I did not want my children ending up in the system if I went to prison.
My son knows I live for them, heart and soul. There is nothing else for me, no other reason. I would be lost without them. He tried to tell me that when he was in Texas that my parents didn't care if he wandered in whenever, and I told him," I am not now, nor have I ever been, MY parents. I give a damn. I care. I love you. If you ever do that to me again, Your sister and I will be at your school, waiting on you each and every day. I will walk you to school each and every day. I will call your coach next time when you are an hour late instead of sitting here worrying. It is COURTESY to let your family and loved ones know when you are going to be late."
He is allowed freedom to a great extent, and he is indulged, but I will not have him running the streets like no one gives a damn, and I will not have him getting into all kinds of stupidity that I know boys get into when they are allowed to roam freely. He curses the day I was ever a cop, but its nothing to do with me being a cop, its everything to do with me growing up around a bunch of guys who got into all kinds of crazy shit when they were 15-19, and with me attending 6 funerals from 1984-1987,all of young guys I called my friends, and with watching a half dozen more of them end up in the State pen in Texas for everything from Oilfield theft to drug dealing and possession to attempted murder, not to mention all of the assault and minor consumption charges. How the hell I managed to avoid ever getting cuffed up still baffles the hell out of me, because I pulled a scrawny, buck toothed boy out of the back of a Trans Am one night up on a parking lot by his ears and beat the hell out of him for calling me a bitch. I then stuffed his ass back in the back of the car and proceeded to kick the quarter panels until his buddies hauled ass back to Dallas, convinced that us small town crazies just weren't worth messing with.That was observed by local cops. I think that maybe they were just too stunned to react at the time, but I do remember that later, one of the officers that was the father of a friend of mine pulled me aside and had a heart to heart talk with me about how my anger was eating me and that if I let it keep eating me, pretty soon, all that was going to be left was the anger and that they were going to have to deal with. He suggested that I leave town for a while and go see my grandma and find some peace and quiet, to see if I could lose some of the anger and maybe find what was left of me. He was right, there wasn't too much left of me, but the threads of that conversation helped me to hang on until I was able to get gone for good. Tommy was a good guy and his son was a good friend as well.
My son may not have father that gave him anything beyond genetic code, but he has me and I am to blame for everything that is wrong or right with him. I try really hard to lead him properly and if nothing else to be a good cautionary tale. I dont expect him to act totally sane, after all he is young and male and hes musically inclined and dramatic and artistic and scary freaking intelligent, but I expect him to be a good man,and so far, from what I have been hearing, I may have succeeded there. I hear stories about him from people who I bump into around town or when I call the school and they tell me things," He is such a well-mannered and kind young man", "He is so polite and sweet and good-hearted".Hearing these things makes me feel that I may have succeeded. My neighbors and my apartment manager have stopped me to compliment me on my son, because he has done things like stopped and offered to help them when they needed it, or he is unfailingly polite and says,"Ma'am and Sir". I cant help but to feel smug when people compliment me on that, that snooty prep school principal told my kids in front of me,"You dont have to say,"Ma'am and Sir here, this isn't the South." I said, "I told them they have to say it because its the mark of good home training and good manners and I say they have to say it." We may not be rich, but honor, integrity, dignity and pride, cost nothing to instill and I think I may be succeeding.
As for his lack of courtesy yesterday, the crushing guilt that he felt and the amount of apologizing he did, left me no doubt that he got the point I was making. It was a learning moment for both of us. We sat up pretty late last night talking about things, and Rog, we even talked about you for quite a while. He saw the raw pain I feel from missing you, and no boy likes to see their momma cry like that. I told him, that is how I feel over losing my uncle, who was like my father, imagine what losing my child would do to me? He got it.
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