What's in your toolbox?

One of the most typical attitudes that most teenagers share is based on their perception that their parents do not possess the ability to understand what they are going through at a particular stage in their lives. Once the child begins to believe that their relationship with their parents is unsympathetic, a barrier is built and raised one brick at a time until eventually neither one is able to look into each other's side of the fence to be able to reach any understanding on some of the most simplistic day to day situations. It does not help that this perception is so common among teenagers that between themselves it becomes part of the bond that reinforces itself daily making the wall between parent and child even harder to breach.

I hear it all the time, "you cannot understand what I am going through," my oldest son will say when I ask him to explain what he is feeling. Is he denying my request to learn how he is feeling because he truly does not think I can understand him? Could it be that he, himself does not understand what he is feeling and is not able to explain it? Maybe he simply uses those words to find a way to avoid having to share his emotions at that particular moment. These are questions that probably need to be answered in order for me as a parent to be able to find the common ground needed to bridge our communication gap.

Interestingly enough, as I have mentioned in several other posts, it is not that he does not want to tell me the truth. This has become more evident over and over again when I have challenged him to tell me something that I really want to know about his use of drugs. Repeatedly he has given me much more information than I ever thought him capable of sharing when I make the request in a non threatening manner. However, the answers to my inquiries are so complete and many times complicated, that I find myself having very little to say in rebuttal of what I have found to be some very dangerous behaviour of his part. This is not to say that I simply shut up and don't try to impart some parental wisdom. On the contrary, what happens is that I then find myself having to dig deep into my mind and find as much reasonable information to share with him that might at some point end up being the only seed that could grow in the overgrown forest of his mind. If I were to try to describe to you with a mental picture what it is like to share with my son when he opens up to answer my questions, this is what I would say:

It is like opening the sliding door of my home and walking outside to my not perfect but beautiful in its own way back yard. I can hear my son's voice coming from one of the neighbors side talking to me, so I find an appropriate size ladder to be able to reach the rim of our common fence and look over. As I take that final step and lean on the block wall I stare in wonder at his back yard. First I am not able to see him, the reason being because the place even though amazingly beautiful is overcrowded with so many bushes and trees that it is hard to find the voice that is calling out for me. My mind has peeked in here before and I know that I have only been successful in finding him on the other side when I systematically scan the place a little bit at a time. A quick scan would probably prove fruitless because he has become like a chameleon and everything there blends itself around him. Like a Where's Waldo child book, I decide to try to remember what he typically wears in order to eliminate much of the background noise that makes him so hard to find. Finally, as my already fatigued eyes are getting to the end of their searching process, I make the connection between voice and body and find him. Amazingly, once I have found him it becomes so obvious where he is at that I find it hard to believe it took me so long to find him. Beautiful black long hair, thick eyebrows, dark brown eyes, and so many more wonderful qualities are contained in his person. But the message he is delivering is confusing. It is almost like watching a dubbed over Godzilla movie where the voices most of the time don't match the lips of the actors. I choose to then close my eyes and just listen to the words instead, this way I might find some sense or logic behind the statements that my mind refuses to connect with my son. There, most of the time it is in this moment that I realize that what makes the whole interaction so confusing is that the words in themselves mean absolutely nothing. It is the tone, the emotion that these words contain from where I am able to find meaning. Anger, frustration, pain, and a great deal of confusion are the words that describe best the message that is filling the empty spaces in his beautiful yet overgrown back yard. I reach into my tool belt and find the appropriate gadget and start my descent into his side of the fence in hopes that I might be able to get closer and truly help the child man. Unfortunately, once I am on the ground I realize that only from above am I able to see the whole picture and locate him to be able to interact. The closer I try to get, the more distant his voice becomes as if I was actually walking in the opposite direction to his true location. It is obvious that I have to return to my side of the fence, only there as a parent am I truly able to maintain a clear picture of where he is at.

I honestly have no choice but to ignore so much of what he tells me because otherwise I would live in a constant state of being hurt. Instead, as I tried to describe to you above, I pick and choose what I need to hear in order to communicate with him. As parents throughout the years we all have built a parenting toolbox to deal with our children. It is common though that some of the tools are so specialized that they only fit one child and not any other. In other words, what works on one child sometimes has the opposite effect on another. One of the most powerful tools I have in my parenting box is a huge ass adjustable wrench of love. Depending on the circumstances I carefully take it out and adjust it's power to accommodate the most sensitive aspects of our relationship. I have learned that if I use it incorrectly I am taken advantage of, so I am careful to apply it's magic to each circumstance based on its need and merit. Like stripping a screw's head by using the wrong size screwdriver, I find myself making sure that I am careful on how I apply it to every situation I encounter with my son in order to not make things worse. This is obviously just one of many tools, but under the right conditions, I have been much more successful with it than with any other of my tools. I would like to encourage all of you to please share any tool that you have found to work well for you so that we can all benefit from your knowledge.

Dad