April 28, 2024
Dear Rod,
I hope you are doing well! I love watching your travels, reading your posts. I am curious if you could touch on one topic for me. It can be a post so others who are struggling can also read it.
Will you please put into perspective why someone my son’s personality and challenges tends to stay to himself and struggle with anxiety. He has lost 5 schoolmates to gun violence since 2020. One was a best friend (since they were 3) who lived across the street from us until his death. Since that death, my son has been more angry, sad, irritated with me and one of his brothers. He is not hateful, just different. He also gave up competitive sport after his friend’s death. He still hugs, loves, smiles, but something is gone from inside him. You know my son and that’s why I am asking you. As a mom, I am so sad.
This is the first time I am sharing this.
Thanks.
Name withheld
Dear Mother
Yes. I know your son. And, I know you.
I grieve reading about the extent of your loss; your family’s loss, and specifically your son’s multiple losses.
I can only imagine the impact this has had on all of your caring, lovely family.
By nature, your now-adult son was/is a very private person, even though his athleticism placed him front and center of large crowds. I could be wrong but I think he was/is naturally shy despite the bravado required of his sport.
I recall his quest for academic successes and sports successes seemed to “push” him into arenas my hunch suggested he’d have rather avoided. You may also recall he was sometimes anxious about belonging and wanting really good grades.
I do.
That your son is not hateful after all he has witnessed and endured and has had to accept does not surprise me.
He very easily, readily, openly often expressed his love for his parents and brothers and extended family and is most unlikely to turn to hate.
There is not a hateful bone in his body.
Yet, I am not at all surprised he is sometimes “angry, sad, irritated” with those who are close to him. Youth funerals leave me the same way even when I read about them, let alone know the victims and he knew the multiple victims of gun violence well.
Loss has robbed all of you but he was/is closer to the young men – I think they are all male – now gone.
I know you embody the ultimate loving and caring mom and so I also know you give him a lot of room for his varying emotions, much privacy, and encouragement to engage about these deep matters on his terms.
Your son is a quiet fighter, one who loves his friends very deeply.
Although he never expressed this to me, or if he did I have forgotten, I think he was one to feel as if he was wanting and loving his friends more than his friends were seeking him.
The boy we all knew (usually loving and warm and full of life and humor and joy) will soon be the fully present grown-man-version of himself.
Nothing is gone or lost.
It is resting. Recovering. Re-juvinating.
Re-routing.
Like Jem, in the book your son read with me word-for-word in the classroom, despite all the trauma, his former and full self will return.
Ask him about that reference. I am sure he will remember.
By the way, I will meet with him at the drop of a hat if he’d find that useful.
Offer him my number.
By the way, thank you for being mom and present for so many, many young people as I know you are as you fulfill your role in your chosen career.
Rod