Beautiful packages

It's Wednesday morning and I am sitting quietly alone, except for my kitten Simba who thinks she can blog too. This time alone does give me the time and frame of mind needed to concentrate on anything. The Chaos of the day can be so overwhelming. The days I keep my grand kids leaves me with paradoxical feelings. I love so much to have the children near me. It gives leave to any fears I have concerning their well being. I hope this is a normal feeling for a grandmother, for if it is not I have one more thing in my life to resolve.
I have been called co-dependant, enabling and plain old crazy when it comes to my children and grandchildren. The attitude of many people still upholds the therapeutic belief of tough love. My grandchildren are still too young to apply it to there lives, but I know that there are many adults who have survived by the skin of their teeth because of the application of tough Love in their upbringing. Which leaves them venerable to using the same method of parenting on their own children. I am somewhat relieved that the mode of dealing with troubled teens has taken a different avenue. The 20 years or so that has past has brought some of the professionals to the belief that Love and Acceptance along with responsibility is far more effective that Tough Love ever was. I grieve today for my son who was caught up in the decades of putting all responsibility for acting out and bad behavior solely on the shoulders of the teen. We as parents have been given the gift and the responsibility of raising our children with a balance of proper discipline and an abundance of praise and acceptance. There came a time in my life where I laid aside all my guilt that I had been carrying for Jason's death. I had to accept my part of . responsibility of being a the parent. My failure to come along side my son by telling others that he needed all the support and love that they could give. That the responsibility to care for my son until he was of age to care for himself was ours. The pain I felt when all input and say to Jason's care was taken away from me cannot be put into words. It put me into a tailspin which caused a 3 week stay in a lock down behavioral Health facility, There I learned some of the tools that would later help me face my sons death(God is Good). I had shutdown to the point I did not know how to function. I had hidden my emotions in beautifully wrapped packages and set them up out of my reach. I had fooled myself into believing in the social and politically correct answer to every problem. It was so freeing and frightening when I started opening each package. They held pain, inadequacies, frustration, fear, and one very big package of anger. Opening these packages has been a long difficult journey, but I have had the support of many people and most assuredly My Lord. The journey is not over, but I can rest in knowing there is nothing in any package or any circumstance that can take away my love for my son and my passion to help others who are now or have been suffering in the same way I do.
I hope that you can see through the sorrow in this blog and see the hope that is not just there for me but for anyone willing to reach out and grab hold of it. Hope and Faith can not be seen but believed.