Doing the wrong things for the right reasons!

Blog 18th of January Well the co-dependent parents have struck again, off with our pants over our trousers on a mission of mercy to Tonypandy. We have been so good, so focused so strong, how quickly we forgot, how simple is it to unlearn all we have learnt and see it unravel in our hands. The text came: Desperate, pleading horrible, this time there is an added complication, his girlfriend is pregnant, eight weeks and in hospital with morning sickness, the hospital is 7 miles from his house, he’s being evicted, they haven’t paid their rent, their benefits have been stopped and on and on it goes the catalogue of disaster’s in my mini me’s life. All achingly familiar. What did we do? Yet again all the wrong things for the right reasons. We sat and talked it through before hand Me, “What do we do? We need a plan” Owen, “I don’t know” Me, (getting angry) just wanting someone to tell me what to do, “What do you want to do?” Owen, “I don’t know” Me, “I know what I want to do, but I know I we shouldn’t do it” Owen “Trouble is if we do it once it will happen again and again” And so it went on and on, discussing, getting nowhere apart from angry with each other. Then at last a decision that I made: we would help, we would get him food a train ticket and some electricity but no money. That vow went out of the window as soon as we clapped eyes on him. It was the first time we had been there, a tiny terraced house on top of a hill that seemed to go on for ever, in Clydach Vale AKA the arse end of beyond. This is where he had escaped to! With his pregnant girlfriend in tow, it was all very hopeless and unmanageable and again all of his own making. We were in the same hamster’s wheel as we were a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, and so on and so forth. This time with the responsibility for a soon-to-be born child looming over him. We did what we shouldn’t have done, we should have stood back. We didn’t, we listened to this long garbled speech about what had happened, what plan they had, how all he needed was a job and to get back to Cardiff, and how he needed to change. When my son is up and running like this he doesn’t draw breath. He wanted to come back to Cardiff to sort himself out; he would go to the Living Room for help. He knows the right things to say the right buttons to press and we listen patiently, hoping, wishing that this time it would be true. Her parents had been helping out a lot this, meant added pressure and guilt, he could offer nothing. So, yet again, we extended the arm of enablement and did the following: Took him shopping to Asda Paid eighty quid in to his bank, to clear his overdraft and buy him a weekly train ticket, and bought him a pouch of tobacco. Was this the right thing? Probably not. Did it change anything? Definitely not. Did we feel better? No we didn’t, we have entered the arena again. The game has resumed. We know a whole lot more than we once did and yet it’s happened again. We both feel shitty, but would we have felt better if we hadn’t helped? Would we have felt worse? Doing the wrong things for the right reasons. Julie