I didn’t believe in tough love until…I had to

For most of us, we can’t even understand the concept of tough love unless you have had to use it.  It is the most grueling experience I have ever had to endure and one that I never believed I would have to use until I received a call that changed my life.  I recall sitting with my husband on our front porch swing enjoying a beautiful and peaceful sunset when the phone rang.  I cheerfully answered the phone to hear my Ex-husband’s voice say “we need to talk”.  As you know, good news never follows those four words.

He proceeded to tell me that he had caught our fifteen year old son smoking marijuana and had found paraphernalia in his room a few weeks back.   He stated that he was going to try to handle the situation himself until he had caught him again. I just sat there, holding the phone in disbelief. My son?  My precious little boy that plays baseball, rides horses with his grandparents, opens doors for little old ladies?  It can’t be!  Not my son!  But then I start thinking back a month, two months, three month ago; his grades had started declining and I related that the end of school;  He had quit the baseball team and I related that to burn-out; New friends that I didn’t know and naïve me, I felt like he was just branching out.  My head was spinning out of control.  I was hurt and angry and felt like a failure as a parent.  Obviously, my ex-husband had not been firm enough or somehow had not put the fear of the Lord in him when he was caught.  I just thought, “Wait until I get him home tomorrow, I will straighten this out”.  I wish it had been that easy.

The next day when my son came home, my husband and I sat him down at the kitchen table to discuss his recent choices and what his consequences would be.  He was about three weeks away from his sixteenth birthday and us handing him over the keys to his new truck.  No one could have ever prepared me for what would happen next.  As I began to explain to him that he was grounded from his phone, computer, friends, going anywhere and that I would randomly drug test him before his birthday to determine whether or not he would even get his truck, he just replied “keep it all, I am not going to stop” and he stomped off to his room.  I had thought I had the upper-hand.  I thought that I held his life-lines in my hands and that all I had to do would be threaten to take these away and he would apologize, beg for our forgiveness and tell me that he would never do it again.  I wish it had just been my head spinning out of control but now it was my life spinning out of control.  In a matter of milliseconds, I began questioning my parenting for the past fifteen years.  I had given him everything that he ever wanted.  I had waited on him hand and foot.  I dropped my plans to ensure he made his.  He didn’t even have chores to do.  I wanted him to have more than I did and so I gave, gave, gave and I never asked him for anything.  World still spinning, what did I do wrong?  WAIT A MINUTE!   I had never asked him for anything.  I had never told him no.  I had never followed through with his punishments and now he didn’t believe that I would do anything that I had just told him I would do!  I had never allowed him to experience accountability or have to earn my trust.  I had never taught him to respect me or my authority as his mother.  I had failed.

He returned to his dad’s house the next day and I decided to do a search of his room at my house.  I still honestly had in my mind that I was not going to find a thing.  “Not in my house”.  Why do we as parents believe that our children would not do things under our noses?  I went through drawers, backpacks, suitcases, pockets and closets.  The FBI would have been so proud of my search that they would have wanted me on their team.  I thought it was a little odd when I pulled his curtains back to check his window seals to find that the screens were off his windows but it didn’t worry me too much because we all know that they could have just “fell off”.  That is how naïve I continued to be until I flipped his mattress over.  I wasn’t even sure what I had found.  There were little baggies with seed and leaf residue, homemade bongs and bottles of my missing ZZZ-quil.  I just sat there crying hysterically.  It just hit me, he has a problem that mom can’t fix or control.

Five days before his sixteenth birthday, he tests positive for marijuana and I realize I cannot give him the keys to a vehicle that could very well kill him or an innocent person if he ever chose to drive while high.   He knew he was going to be tested and he still chose to continue his use of marijuana.  A week after his birthday and after school has started; he calls me to tell me that he has decided to walk the line.  He is going back to playing baseball, he has started a guitar class and he is going to stop smoking weed.  He proceeds to TELL me that he is going to run by my house to pick up his guitar and he would just pick up his truck while he is there.  Here is where the Tough Love begins.  It isn’t your child’s choice to make the terms of what they are or they are not going to do.  As a parent it is our responsibility to lead them and teach them.  So, I tell him how much I love him and how proud I am off him for making that choice but he still isn’t getting his truck until he has went for months of passing random drug tests; until he has shown regret for his actions and he earns our trust again.  He begins to cry.  Tears coming from a sixteen year old boy that for the past few months I had only seen anger began to break my heart but I realize that I only have a short time left before he becomes a man to teach him about working for things that you want, respecting others and authority and earning trust that comes with being a teenager.  I silently began to cry on the other end of the phone as I listened to him tell me how much he hated me.  I have had several of those phone calls now but the hate sounds less and less.  He has chosen not to stay at my house for a few weeks now and that is hard for a mom to accept but I do.

There would have been nothing I would have loved more than to hand him over the keys to his new truck and watch him drive down the road with a sense of pride in my heart but I can’t knowing that he is still abusing an illegal drug at sixteen.  He is a young boy who believes he can make the decision of a man and as a teenager he believes that he is untouchable and unstoppable which scares me even more.  I wish that I had a do-over and all those times that I didn’t want to be a mean-mom, I would be the meanest mom ever because the kind of mom that I was hasn’t taught my son the lessons that he needs to become a good man.  I am not giving up though!  I just wish that I had used my tough love differently.

Tough love can be given at different stages.  I wish I had used it to TEACH my son rather than having to CORRECT my son~

And that my friends is the Sweet Southern Truth by LoriAnn~