The Same Medicine

Lately I’ve been wrestling with something I thought I understood.

How to help the people I love.

As a therapist, I spend my days asking people to slow down.

To listen.

To see through another person’s eyes.

To respond instead of react.

Most days, I do that well.

Then I come home.

And discover how much harder it is when your own heart is involved.

Recently my son moved back in with us.

He’ll soon be thirty-four.

He didn’t come alone.

He came with his wife and their two children.

Our house is small.

Both of them are unemployed.

And Mickey has struggled for years with severe diabetes.

He still doesn’t have it under control.

Ever since Brian passed, another loss feels unimaginable.

That reality lives with us every single day.

Some mornings I wake up filled with compassion.

Other mornings I wake up frustrated.

Sometimes I feel both within the same breath.

Part of me wants to comfort him.

Another part wants to demand more from him.

To insist.

To draw a hard line.

To tell him it’s time to grow up.

Every time those thoughts come, they take me somewhere I don’t want to go.

Back to the years when force became our language.

Back to the arguments.

The anger.

The violence.

The night Mickey put his hands on me while under the influence.

The arrest.

The 5150.

Those weren’t our finest moments.

Neither of us was at our best.

He’s been sober for six years now.

And when I look at him today, I don’t see an angry man.

I see a tired one.

A sweet one.

A sensitive one.

A father trying to find his footing.

For years I kept wondering why what worked for me wasn’t working for him.

Tough love changed my life.

It probably saved it.

So why wasn’t it saving my son?

Then an old memory quietly found me.

I was fifteen years old.

Locked up in juvenile hall.

My mother came to visit.

Until then, I thought I was the one paying the price.

Then she walked into the room.

I don’t remember what she was wearing.

I don’t remember what we talked about.

What I remember is her face.

We sat there in silence.

Our eyes filled with tears.

Neither of us knew what to say.

She could no longer protect me.

She could no longer bring her little boy home.

I wanted to tell her how sorry I was.

Sorry for my choices.

But even more...

sorry for breaking her heart.

Then she looked at me.

Not with disappointment.

Not with shame.

Not with anger.

She looked at me as though I was still the best thing that had ever happened to her.

There was so much tenderness in her eyes.

So much love.

I had done nothing to deserve that look.

And somehow...

that was exactly why it changed me.

The bars were still there.

The sentence hadn’t changed.

Nothing about my circumstances was different.

But something inside me broke free.

For the first time in my life, I knew what unconditional love felt like.

Not because someone explained it.

Because someone looked at me that way.

Then I understood something.

I had been trying to give Mickey the medicine that healed me.

Not the medicine he needed.

Perhaps that’s why, when I look at my son, I sometimes catch myself looking through my mother’s eyes.

Not because I forget his mistakes.

But because, for a moment...

I can still see the little boy she saw in me.

The same medicine my mother gave me.

A gaze that said...

before anything changed...

before anything was earned...

before anything was forgiven...

“You are still my son.”

That gaze freed me long before I knew how to free myself.

It still does.

Alextotle ❤️‍🔥