“My son is 37. He is not in a life threatening surgery and yet when I got the text this morning that he was in the operating room I wanted to cry.  I didn’t. But for some reason I wanted to.”

Your note illustrates that the umbilical cord is infinitely elastic! He is your son. You have been with him from “the beginning.” You have seen him through every phase of his life. You are going to “feel it” whenever he faces trials and difficulties. 

While you need no permission I’d suggest you go ahead and cry all you want and all you need. 

While I do not know this to be true  – how could I? – I will suggest your emotions and wanting to express them is only partially due to the immediate surgery that he is undergoing. The immediate surgery triggers your memory to hundreds of other times over the years of things you have faced together as he was going through every phase of his life thus far. 

Our challenge as parents of adult sons and daughters is to function as highly and healthily as possible given that our role and work as parents is complete, despite the emotional responses we will have when our “children”  – they are no longer children but fellow adults –  are challenged.

The benefits of knowing and defining what you want — desire, aspire to, what you’re “cut out” for — and setting yourself in the direction of achieving it: 

— You’ll be focused on your strengths and your future and not on your weaknesses and your past failures. 

— You’ll be single-minded as you explore and enjoy your strengths and talents and you’ll be a whole lot nicer to be around than you are likely to be if you’re scrambling around trying to settle your confused and uncertain soul. 

— You’ll get more and more comfortable with the idea that who and what you are will undergo shifts and changes in expression but the core of who you are and what you want will be as set as your finger prints. 

— You will see and understand over time that no one gets everything he or she wants in exactly the way it’s wanted. Life is too kind to give anyone an enduring rose garden. 

— You’ll identify what you don’t want and therefore resist seduction down wasteful and often very expensive rabbit holes. You’ll learn the skill and reap the benefits of being able to say a credible “yes” and “no” and be respected for both. 

— You’ll discover others are less inclined to mess with you as they dectect you’re on a purposeful mission.

******

My sons and me some years back!

It may be the person who….

Initiates meetings and facilitates conversations where there has been an ongoing conflict or a falling out. He or she is the peacemaker (one who understands some conflict may be necessary for long-term healing) and not the peacemaker (one who avoids conflict at all costs). . 

Empowers family members to take a hard and loving stand against cruel or harsh treatment at the hands of another member of the family or even someone outside of it.

Goes first. The one who is first in the family to travel or to go to university or to branch off into an area of interest or study that no one in the family has done before.

Goes back and visits childhood places and engages long-lost relatives and to hear the family stories that may have never been heard.

Demonstrates grace, generosity, and forgiveness in a family that may have traded in selfishness, resentment, and judgment for many years.

Speaks well and kindly of family members who for whatever reasons have been rejected by some members of the same family. It is the person who is willing to reach out to the marginalized in order to draw them back into the fold.

I am I

You and You

We are We

Let Us not ConFuse 

The Three 

*****

If I lose Me loving You

 And You lose You loving Me

Before too long,

You, Me, and We,

Will no longer Be

Rod Smith 4/13/2023

If you are living with children and living and living with an addiction (here’s an inconclusive but  quick way to tell: you have lost a job, an important relationship, or status in a community, because of it – if one of the three is true you are most likely an addict) please get the treatment you need for the disease. Your addiction not only impacts and impairs you and your behaviors but it will do its damage also on your children, no matter how skilled you may think you are at hiding your disease or habit from them.

Your children are “soaking up” the atmosphere in your home. The tensions and the anxieties that come to the family with your addiction, your disease, but it is provoking severe dis-ease (lack of ease) for your children. A sad part of this ramification – and there are many – is that to the children living and growing in this environment, it is their normal. One day they are highly likely to repeat the addictive cycle with their own families. 

Help is near and available to all who seek it. Being clean, finding sobriety, kicking the habit, always involves a series of tough and painful choices but the results can be transforming to say the least, for you and for all who love you, especially your children.

“Are you what you wanted to be when you grew up?” one of my sons asked me once. 

I recall playfully telling him the question was both kind and cruel. 

The question offered me time to reflect with deep gratitude for an incredible life of amazing contrasts and joys and explorations.

And, jaw-dropping regret. 

The truth is I am nothing of what I wanted to be or planned to be as a child, yet I am also far, far more than I had the capacity to imagine. My response was tough to try and explain but I think my son understood since I have repeatedly told both boys that life is simultaneously beautiful and brutal,  

You may have gathered I think a lot and write much about contrasts and paradoxes and I see them everyday. 

Perhaps you feel something rather similar or perhaps life has been a bed of roses for you – but I doubt it. 

Who plans to be divorced? Alone? In debt? Ill?

Adults often ask children what they want to be when they grow up and perhaps we should suggest our children respond with, “I’ll tell you if you tell me if your childhood ambitions have come to fruition.”

What I mean by giving you a “high five.”

I will endeavor to seek your Highest Good in my actions toward you. This may result in moments that you doubt my decisions but I’ll always be ready to discuss the counter-intuitive Nature of Love.

I will speak about you and to you offering you the Highest Praise and Affirmations as I see them. I shall endeavor to be accurate when talking to and about you. 

As best as I am able I will think Highest Thoughts about you and give you the benefit of any doubts. If given reason or cause to question your honesty or integrity I shall speak to you face-to-face and to none other unless it is absolutely necessary. Even then, I’ll keep you appropriately informed.

While it is your divine right and no gift from me I will endorse and support your Highest Degree of Personal  Freedoms to live as fully and powerfully as possible with or without my involvement.

In the hurly-burly and busyness of daily life rest assured that I have the Highest Desire a Parent (a spouse, an in-law, a grandparent, an Uncle, an Aunt – no connection intentionally omitted) can know for your success and greatness, which, counter-intuitively may look nothing at all like what is commonly believed to be success and greatness.

An almost perfect capturing of Bowen Theory in a very readable and entertaining and challenging work!

Easter challenge remains

Buy it or not, the New Testament’s account of what occurred over what we call Easter, two millennia ago, is dramatic. It is at least as dramatic as the Christmas story with the baby, the crib and the procession of worshippers who came to greet the Christ child. 

Easter places the baby – now a guileless but powerful miracle-performing 33-year-old man – on the executioner’s cross, the the electric chair, the hangman’s noose of the day.

There’s every element of drama in the brutal saga that unfolds. Love, betrayal and denial. Unprecedented cooperation between superpowers of government and temple.

This man, who says he is God’s son, is paraded before the rich and powerful, then mocked and scorned. At the zenith of his need, a friend walks away, claiming Jesus to be a stranger to him. 

Then, he who healed the masses and raised the dead is himself dragged through the city for public humiliation and execution.

His death on “Good” Friday is grueling and gruesome. 

Yet, at the moment of his greatest pain, he considers his mother and makes plans for her care. He provides comfort to a common criminal also facing public execution. While fixed to the cross with nails through his limbs, he prays forgiveness upon his executioners, then yells out in pain because the God and Father he has loved since before the beginning of time is absent, has abandoned him. He breathes a final breath, and it is finished.

On the Saturday, his followers confront the reality of his death, the death of their dream and the end of a shared vision. Men and women who had ventured all on his behalf are now abandoned, leaderless. They have lost all. They who had forsaken all are now the forsaken. The leader of the sometimes unruly and diverse mob is dead, entombed with the door to the tomb sealed shut with a rock of considerable size.

Sunday comes and the tomb is open and empty. 

A crucified man is up and walking. 

He appears suddenly here and there presenting himself, sometimes in private to individuals and also to masses of people. Within days, he’s making breakfast on a beach, calling the one who ran away from him and denied him to join him for a meal that he has already prepared, having made the fire himself.

What landed Jesus in trouble was that he lived a life that supported and endorsed his claims. 

His life, not only his words and his teaching, challenged the ruling religious order. Few religions enjoy being challenged, let alone do they tolerate when a person making the challenge so completely “walks the talk.”

My faith doesn’t land me in hot water like Jesus’ faith did for him. This is not because I am not sometimes zealous about my faith, but because I am a hypocrite. I am not always who I say I am. I’m often not myself. I often fail to display integrity. 

Jesus was always who he claimed to be. 

He was thoroughly authentic, and it was this authenticity, this integrity, that angered people and upset governing powers. It rocked the status quo at places of worship and made him a sufficient threat so that his critics would take his life in the most barbaric manner their righteous minds could conceive.

The world can deal with my claims about myself. 

They are as fragile and empty as most people’s claims about themselves. 

Most of us, zealous or not, can tolerate the dreams of the guy next door. 

But it was not empty claims that got Jesus in trouble. Many had come claiming to know, be, or represent God. 

His life, his deeds gave profound evidence to the fact that he was who he said he was. It was this that authorities could not stomach.

At every Easter, we are each challenged to take the time to answer the question posed by Jesus to his outspoken friend: “Who do you say that I am?”

Mutuality, equality, and respect are the litmus tests for all healthy relationships. 

I am enjoying watching each of these values be challenged within my family as my sons transition from boys to full and grown men. 

Among us – the three of us – there are shifting power dynamics. There are changing degrees expectations. There are movements in responsibilities. These things are not always easy for each of us to see or understand as individuals. These changes can be even more difficult for us to accept and embrace as a family unit.

Perhaps you have been aware of similar changes in your own family.

Both boys are earning good salaries and so when we eat out I sometimes suggest one of them picks up the bill for our dinners rather than my sons assuming it’s my responsibility. The response is usually quite amusing but the point is made and one or both usually treat me to dinner.

I have been traveling significantly more lately than I have done in the last few years. When I arrive home the house is in reasonably good condition. My younger son picked up responsibilities that would usually fall to me and I see a healthy shift has occurred even though little or nothing was said or expected.

“We are three men now,” I tell them, “one of us just happens to also be dad.”