Life support

Well, I have taken a while to think about it. Thanks, Wini, for your suggestion. I am a list-maker by nature and writing everything down really helped!

I know that I did a lot of wrong things, but I also know that I was not the ORIGINATOR of these bad ideas. My fault lies in the fact that I went along with it. But for the great majority of the time, I sincerely tried to direct this guy and our relationship into good territory. I almost always countered his bad suggestions with reasons why they weren’t a good idea, and with the fact that he was trying to corrupt me and commit sin and hurt others.

I told him point-blank, “You are like a drug to me,” and “I admit I have a weakness here, please don’t exploit that,” hoping he would take pity and stop trying to get me to do something I really didn’t want to do but that I felt helpless to fight against. Any protests I made he either ignored, or told me I “always take everything way too serious.” He obviously was going to exploit me if he could – to him, if you found a $20 bill in the street, you’d pick it up, right? Well, there I stood, lonely and needy, so … it was a no-brainer to him.

I could give him a whole dissertation on how to live right, how to be a good person, why he shouldn’t look at things so selfishly, etc., but nothing ever sunk in. In fact, he would sometimes look at me and say, “Are you done yet?” (semi-jokingly) so he could continue as he pleased.

I did see a pattern in my own behavior that I do feel bad about. I first became aware of evil (through his stories of his life), then tolerant of evil (after all, he can’t change overnight, can he?), then curious about evil (through his urging and my wanting to understand him), then eventually a participant in it.

But, another revelation was the fact that whether I did 10% wrong or 50% wrong, God forgives me 100%! All this guilt and blame and percentages just don’t matter. I have to forgive myself and accept God’s forgiveness. Otherwise the guilt is keeping me tied to him, by me trying to fix what “I did wrong.” And believe me, he uses that.

So although I did not do everything right, that is different than actively setting out to corrupt him. He was already corrupted, I wasn’t. “Bad company corrupts good character.” He used to joke to me, “Come to the dark side, we have cookies!” I thought that his being able to joke about it meant he was becoming self-aware of his badness and need to change, now I think it meant just what he said! In fact, I know he has talked two of his girlfriends into using drugs, although they both were very much against it. He has told me in seriousness that he has a “black soul”, and similar things, but I only tried to talk him out of that.

Re-reading my post above I see that I am almost making excuses for why I can’t kick him out. The addiction is the main reason, period. I feel like I have to break free first. You guys are exactly right about No Contact, it helps tremendously to clear your head. I only occasionally run into him very briefly now.

The main problem with moving forward is that he cannot understand why I don’t let everything be in the past. He says he’s sorry for anything he did (although he cannot or will not name anything specific he did). He says I “make way too big a deal out of everything”. He says he is going to live right, that he has an appropriate girlfriend, and is getting his life together. I say, this is all fine and good, but what about what you have put me through up until this point? His only answer is that I’m just being mean. And, after all, if someone says they are going to straighten up, and if they do show some signs of it, shouldn’t I just forgive and forget?

On the other hand, I say to him, why should I have to watch you conduct your new relationship with your girlfriend right here in our “family”? (Even though I don’t want him back, it is very hurtful to see her. Maybe I am too sensitive?) And he doesn’t understand why he can’t just start calling me Mom again and I do the mom-like things again and all is well. He makes me feel very unforgiving and unloving.

I believe I have been everything I know how to be to him, trying to help him, but it has never been enough. “You give him an inch, he takes a mile.” I was his tutor and mentor, but he wanted a family relationship. So we treated him like family, but he wanted more from me. He lured me into an inappropriate relationship although I clearly said many times I didn’t want it. Now that he is through with that, he wants me to be “Mom” again, and can’t understand why I am holding a grudge.

I think it’s sick, because my Real Son (whom I am extremely proud of) would never do ANY of these things to me, wouldn’t even dream of it. I don’t see how I can go back to the family relationship, except maybe from guilt, and to cover up the horrible things that have happened. It’s sad, though, because the “happy family” scenario is what I always wanted in all of this, now it is ME that is going to keep that from happening. Or so it seems.