I have a 28-year-old brother who simply cannot function in the real world on his own. He cannot hold a job, he seems to be unable to take car of himself or his children, and when he did have a job, would always be broke come the Monday after payday. Why? He would go out and party with his boys on the weekend, renting cars and playing like he’s Big Willie and footing the bill for all the stash and his dudes would clean his ass out. Then he would have to borrow money from my mother, who he lived with at the time, to get back and forth to work for the next two weeks. Or, even better, drive my mother’s car. But then, she would have to put the gas in it for him to drive it.
I can only compare him to myself. I left my mother’s house at 18. When I went to college and came home, I was told there was no way in hell I was laying around the house without a job. Things were so unbearable for me in my mother’s house that I left and lived with my aunt until I got married. I’ve been on my own since then, married then divorced, and I’ve had to learn to deal with what life has dealt my way. I’ve struggled with choosing between putting gas in the car and eating, and coming home to the heat being turned off. Add to that equation a child that I was responsible for and I immediately realized that I had to step my game up…that I now had a life beside my own that was put into my hands for safekeeping. Failure was not an option. I worked my ass off at that company to secure a position that would pay me better money. I took classes and learned whatever it was that I could to advance myself. And I reaped the rewards of that.
My brother has none of that mobilization. Because my mother has taken care of him his whole life and has never told him the same things she told me about living in her house without a job, he never mentally made it to manhood. He is still a 16-year-old boy wrapped in a 28-year-old man’s body. And throughout this all, my mother complains to me about her desire for him to man-up, but at this point what can she do to get him to do that now?
I bring this up because another mother is brought to mind when I think of an enabler. There is one thing to love your child, as I do mine…there is another to defend him, when in your heart you are denying the truth that you know who he is. Michelle Balfour was on CNN’s Nancy Grace defending her son, William Balfour, in the Hudson case recently and her words struck me. Now my brother has never committed anything other than petty crimes of shoplifting (that’s more than enough…and I’m ashamed to even admit that…but that is his burden, not mine) and he has been to jail, but to deny that your son has a history of violent crimes and to try to diminish the severity of them in order to explain away the possibility of his involvement in this crime says more about the mother than it does the son. What it says about the mother is that she loves her son, yes…but what it also says is that she is in serious denial about the criminal her son is. Whether her son is innocent or guilty of this crime, her going on TV and making noise about her son being demonized and treated like “Attila the Hun” is not helping anything. Partly because she did not make any sense.
Don’t misunderstand me…if this were my son, I would want to do the same thing. I would want to scream from the mountaintops that he was innocent. And it would kill a little part of me everytime I saw his picture on television being labeled as a “person of interest.” But I can’t say that I would take my case to the media…and end up looking like the enabler that she appears to be in front of millions of people. Ms. Balfour’s arguments and discussion on Nancy Grace left a bad taste in my mouth…because I recognized the spot she was coming from. It was one of “I don’t know what to do, so I’m going to take it out on everyone else.”
For years, my mother took her helplessness feelings about my brother out on me…we went a whole two years without speaking during one of these episodes. I was somehow to blame for his inadequecies. It was somehow my fault that he didn’t own up to his failures, and it was my fault that he was turning into something other than what she had hoped he would be.
I used to be angry and bitter with my mother at enabling my brother like she does…but then I realized that I was holding myself back. And that she would eventually have to deal with all of that (which she is doing now). I have come to terms with the way that I was treated as a teenager and young adult; the things that were said and done to me…and have even begun to consider them a blessing. As for my brother, I just continue to pray that one day he will realize that he needs to be his own person, and stop hiding behind my mother’s legs. I have often told him that I will never be the mother to him that my mother is and if she leaves us, he will be in a dire situation. I love my brother, but I will not take care of him…I only have one child. And because I love that child, I am trying to teach him to be his own person. I do not do his laundry, I do not clean his room, he has chores and responsibilities…I know that is all common for a 13-year-old. But maybe the one thing that is most important is that he has a father that will teach him that being a man means standing up. And that is one thing a mother, no matter how hard she tries, can never teach a boy how to do. My child’s father/ex-husband/baby daddy is the main reason that I will not be an enabler to my child…and for that, I am and always will be eternally grateful.
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Vivrant Thang
