Guest Post: Pam Lang
There is a tremendously thin tightrope parents struggle to walk. You work to be omniscient in order to protect them from evil that is lurking. You strive to see their vulnerabilities and train them to overcome… to be strong when temptation raises its ugly head. This is what I desperately wanted to do for my children. I had seen the absolutely devastating effects of drug abuse and alcoholism in my husband’s family—how it took lives, how it destroyed relationships, how it left family members poverty-stricken.
My husband had nursed his father (with whom he had never lived) as he lay dying in a nursing home with an acid-eroded esophagus from decades of alcohol abuse. We had seen so many divorces it was hard to remember in-laws’ names. We experienced family members going from owning businesses and living in nice homes to begging us for money.
It was ugly, and I wanted my children to see alcoholism and drug abuse for what it truly was.
As a parent, I tried to live out the principles of scripture as laid out in Deuteronomy 6 where it says, “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your house and on your gate.”
When bad choices cost people or took people’s lives…it was the lesson I taught. When people made good choices and God blessed them, I gloriously set their example as a trophy in front of my children. My husband made sure they were surrounded by godly, Christian men and women. We had missionaries, evangelists, pastors, and denominational leaders intentionally in our home for them to learn from and hopefully emulate. I talked to them about how important it was to never take that first drink or experiment with that first drug due to the rampancy of abuse in our family. At the breakfast table each morning I prayed with them and for them. I searched for age-appropriate devotional books for us to read together, we memorized scripture… I strove to fully arm them as they left my nest.
Yet, it got my son.
Did I see it coming? Lance was strong-willed, incredibly capable, always the leader, always out front, always first… always pushing the boundaries, so did I see it coming? I guess I worried he would get into some situations where he would try stuff and we would have to discipline and pull back the reins, but I never thought bad choices would totally alter the whole course of his life. I had been too proactive for that to happen… but yet it did.
In the course of a few months he went from being a high school graduate enrolled for college in the fall, to being a teenage husband and father. I find out a decade later that he had begun to dabble with weed his senior year of high school which led to a whole pattern of bad behavior.
Was I blind? How did I not catch this? How did this happen under my watch, under my roof… am I the worst parent in the world? Did I not do enough to prepare him for temptations, did I not pray enough, was I not strict enough or was I too strict, did I not check out his friends and activities closely enough? If I allow them, these questions continue today to eat me alive, to suck the very life right out of me. Why…
Because, it still got my son.
Since we became pros in the addiction/recovery world over the last few years, I have discovered a new word…the word is enabling. Evidently, many times alcohol or drug addiction is the result of one or both parents enabling their child not to grow up, to remain dependent, to not accept responsibility…in other words, to do too much for them. So I have self-examined. I have searched myself; I have pondered and I have scoured my soul. My conclusion: I guess I did.
What I thought was empowering maybe was enabling; what I thought was giving good gifts to my children maybe was spoiling; what was pushing them to popularity and success in a lot of activities maybe was imposing my life upon them. All I do know is this: I wanted them to have the very best life possible and be thankful; I wanted them to be godly, holy Christians that made a difference in their world; I wanted them to respect authority and above all fear their God, for this truly is the beginning of wisdom. I tried my best, I failed a lot, I have regrets, I would do things differently today, but unfortunately we don’t have mulligans in raising our children. My intentions were good…
Yet, it still got my son.
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Check back next week for Part 2 of “It Got My Son”.
To read more amazing content from my mother pick up my new book, Finding Hope.
You can find all of my books here: www.LanceLang.com/books
