Strong Mothers, Strong Sons: Lessons Mothers Need to Raise Extraordinary Men

334 Pages·2014·1.68 MB·English

by  Meg Meeker

While the stories presented in this book did in fact happen, some of the names and personal
characteristics of the individuals involved have been changed in order to disguise their identities.
Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Copyright © 2014 by Meg Meeker All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of
Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
ISBN 978-0-345-51809-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-34551811-8
www.ballantinebooks.com
Jacket design: Victoria Allen
Jacket photograph: Charlie Bennet/ImageBrief
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter One: You Are His First Love (But Never Tell Him That)
Chapter Two: Give Him an Emotional Vocabulary
Chapter Three: He’s Got a Bow and Arrow (and the Target’s on Your Back)
Chapter Four: You Are His Home
Chapter Five: If God Wore Lipstick, He’d Wear Your Shade
Chapter Six: Give Him an Ax
Chapter Seven: You Are His Connection to Dad
Chapter Eight: Sex on the Brain and What My Mom Says
Chapter Nine: Wisdom and Responsibility: Two Great Assets He Gets from You
Chapter Ten: Letting Go (So You Can Get Him Back)
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter Citations
Bibliography
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Introduction
Janie was, to the outside world, the perfect mother. As an imperfect one,
I envied her calm demeanor, her unflappable personality, and her
devotion to her two children. She was the kind of mother who baked
chocolate zucchini cake for her boys, boys who loved it because she’d
taught them to eat and enjoy healthy foods. She packed their lunches
every day, with organic snacks. She worked part-time in a bookstore, but
got home each afternoon before school let out so she would be there
when her sons Jason, thirteen, and Drew, eleven, arrived home. She
volunteered at her sons’ school for recess duty and as room mother, and
even canned her own vegetables. She was the kind of mom the rest of us
love to hate.
I will never forget the tormented expression on Janie’s face that early
January morning in 2005. She came alone to my office to talk about her
son Jason, despite the heavy snow, which always made driving in
northern Michigan a harrowing experience. But she was desperate.
When I opened the exam room door, I was startled by her ashen face.
She looked exhausted. Not the usual “I just had a terrible night’s sleep”
exhaustion, but a fatigue that had set in over many months. Something
was clearly terribly wrong at home.
“What’s going on?” I immediately asked.
“It’s Jason,” she said apologetically. “He’s out of control. Jim can’t
handle him and neither can I. I just don’t know what to do.”
He was thirteen at the time. I had known Jason since he was two and
he had always been a handful—spirited, curious, and volatile. Janie and
Jim had adopted him through an open adoption from his young birth
mother, and had graciously cared for her during the first three months of
his life. Even as an infant, Jason was one of those boys who just seemed
to be wired a bit differently. He was cute, cuddly, and affectionate but
also slightly unpredictable, prone to occasional explosions of his temper.
At eight, a psychiatrist and education specialist diagnosed him with
ADHD and I reluctantly went along with medicating him with a small
dose of a stimulant. I wasn’t quite convinced that ADHD was the reason
for his behavior problems, but I thought that a trial of a stimulant might
not hurt. He took the medication and it seemed to help—at least for
several years.
“I just don’t understand his behavior,” Janie told me. “One minute
he’ll be joking with us at dinner, then the next minute he erupts! He’ll
jump up from the table and start yelling at me or his dad for no reason.
We’ve tried grounding him and taking privileges away from him but
nothing seems to work. Two nights ago, he snuck out of the house in the
middle of the night and got caught by the police drinking beer with
some guys in the Walmart parking lot.”
Janie began to cry. Her son—the apple of her and his father’s eye—
was suddenly a “troubled kid,” like the sullen, angry teenage boys
depicted on highway billboard ads for drug and alcohol rehabilitation
centers. The trouble was, Jason didn’t look like that kid on the outside.
He was clean-cut, always nicely dressed (no tattoos or piercings), and he
addressed his parents’ friends politely. He was an outstanding hockey
player. He went to church regularly, even attended a few youth groups,
and once went on a trip with a local church to help families in New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit. His parents loved him, spent a lot of
time with him, and seemingly attended to all of his needs.
“Where did I go wrong?” Janie wailed. “Tell me and I’ll fix it. Please,
tell me. I need to know because I can’t go on like this any longer. How
could this little boy who I’ve poured my heart into for thirteen years
suddenly hate his father and me so much? I’ve tried, but there’s nothing
left. And the worst part is he scares me. When his dad’s not around and
he flies off the handle, he gets physical. One time he pushed me hard up
against the kitchen wall! I think it was an accident, but who knows; all I
know is that I was really scared. He’s twice my size.”
We sat together for many minutes and I wondered whom or what
Janie was crying harder for: Jason, herself, or the loss of the beautiful
thirteen-year-old boy she had always envisioned that her son would
become, but hadn’t.
That day, I tried to help her sort through the gnarled complexity of
Jason’s emotions and hers so that, while she couldn’t fully understand
them as yet, she (we) could at least devise a plan. She needed to have a
plan so that she could move forward. She needed to be able to find hope
in the midst of this anguish, which was making her feel as though her
life was collapsing around her. And I do believe that I helped Janie find
hope. After all, helping her was the best way I could help my patient,
her son.
Janie would tell you that particular day in January was a turning point
in her life. It was the day she realized that Jason wasn’t who she really
wanted him to be; but even more important, that she wasn’t the mother
she wanted to be. It was a day that began a significant new freedom for
her. It was the day that Janie recognized that she not only had one
problem on her hands—whatever was driving her son’s out-of-control
behavior—but equally important, that she had her own issues to face,
the demons within her, that had festered for over thirteen years, the
ones that were embryonic even as she finished college. But where would
she start, with his pain or hers? Her new freedom felt exhilarating, but
also overwhelming. I suggested that if she were to understand her son,
she would have to start by understanding herself. And as it turned out,
she had a lot of emotional baggage she brought to her role as mother.
Shortly after that visit, she began seeing a counselor who meticulously
unraveled the hidden anger Janie harbored toward men, anger that she’d
been carrying around for years. When she was in her early teens, she
had been assaulted by a male neighbor and told no one—not her
parents, her husband, or even her best friend. She hated the man for
what he did and, for a number of complex reasons, she blamed herself
for what happened. When Jason hit puberty, something triggered that
pent-up rage in her and she subconsciously took her hurt out on him. In
hindsight, she realized her own behavior had changed. She’d become
sarcastic and demeaning and secretly felt a sense of disgust toward her
own son. She was aware of that disgust, but was so appalled by it that
she persisted in pushing it away and trying to ignore it, neither of which
stopped the feeling from persisting.
Jason was not immune to the secret war his mother was having with
herself. While he didn’t know the cause, he understood enough to
assume it had something to do with him. What he felt coming from his
mother was anger toward him. At times, he felt she was ashamed of him.
In response to these feelings, he fought back verbally, determined to
prove to his mother that he didn’t need her and that he could make her
life as miserable as she seemed to be making his. Until Janie sought
some answers, this vicious cycle just kept escalating until she found
herself scared of her own son.
Both Jason and Janie received the help they each needed in order to
restore the sanity and joy to their relationship. When both were schooled
about their feelings and their behaviors and how the two intertwined,
only then were they able to begin changing. But the process took a lot of
time. Janie, in particular, was determined to revive her relationship with
Jason because she never once wavered in the intensity of her love and
adoration for him.
She learned to interact with him differently. She changed her
language, her tone of voice, and even guarded her body language. And
then, by continually putting these changes into practice, her feelings
toward her son began to evolve. She peeled the hatred she felt toward
her old neighbor off her young son and the stranglehold those feelings
had on her relationship with Jason broke. Both mother and son felt a
new warmth and intimacy. And Jason began getting along better with
his younger brother.
Jason is currently finishing his senior year at a very good college. He
is excelling at school and he no longer lashes out at his mother and dad.
Shortly after her initial visit with me in which we first addressed Jason’s
problems, his parents enrolled him in a local residential school for
troubled kids. He spent eighteen months there learning to live in a very
tightly scheduled and demanding environment. Jason and his parents
spent hundreds of hours counseling with the school’s psychologist and
Jason learned to understand himself, his emotions, and their power—but
most important, he learned how to take responsibility for his feelings
and his behaviors. And Janie learned to understand how she projected
her own suppressed anger onto her young son. More important, she
learned how to keep her long-hidden anger toward her past abuser out
of her relationship with him.
Janie and Jason are the lucky ones. How many other mother-son dyads
exist, fraught with untold pressures and tensions, that don’t get enough
help? That is why I felt compelled to write this book, for all the mothers
of boys who love their sons but are confused about how to be good
mothers to their sons. And for sons who face inordinate pressures to be
the embodiment of the mother’s greatest hopes, something they can
neither envision nor understand, and who end up enduring a vortex of
internal tensions that can lead to an explosion.
The mother-son dyad is complicated by the opposition of gender.
Neither mother nor son can fully understand what it is like to be the
other half of the equation. Boys face challenges because, as males, they
feel responsible in many ways for their mothers’ welfare, which can lead
to tension and anger within the relationship. Furthermore, mothers can
too often subconsciously rely on sons for the kind of support they might
look for from an adult. And the reality is that boys, simply because they
are male, face trials in our culture that can easily overwhelm them,
while mothers face stresses and place expectations on themselves that
can become equally overwhelming. Put the two together and disaster
can ensue.
But here’s the good news. Disaster is not an ordained outcome. Yes,
young men today are experiencing what some professionals like myself
call a “boy crisis.” As psychologist and author Dr. James Dobson writes
in Bringing Up Boys, “Boys, when compared to girls, are six times more
likely to have learning disabilities, three times more likely to be
registered drug addicts, and four times more likely to be diagnosed as
emotionally disturbed. They are at greater risk for schizophrenia, autism,
sexual addiction, alcoholism, bed-wetting and all forms of antisocial and
criminal behavior. They are twelve times more likely to murder
someone, and their rate of death in car accidents is greater by fifty
percent. Seventy-seven percent of delinquency-related court cases
involve males.”1
In discussing Dr. Michael Gurian’s The Wonder of Boys, Dobson
describes the academic troubles that many boys face. He cites that boys
receive lower grades than girls from elementary through high school. He
tells us that eighth-grade boys are held back 50 percent more frequently
than girls, and that two-thirds of the students in special education classes
in high school are boys. Finally, he says that boys are ten times more
likely to suffer from “hyperactivity” than girls and that boys account for
71 percent of all school suspensions.2
There are more troubling numbers to cite regarding the current crisis
that boys in America face, but the point here is that the means to
resolving this crisis often lie in the mother’s hands. We are the ones who
can help reverse these trends for our sons. And I believe that we mothers
can not only enjoy raising our sons in the process, but also help them
thrive amid the pressures they face. We can teach them to rise above the
problems and flourish. I know this because I’ve seen great mothers
parent their sons through difficulties over and over in my twenty-five
years of pediatric practice. I’ve seen single mothers duke it out with their
sons and become closer than ever. I’ve watched married mothers with
stable home lives struggle with sons who have become involved with
drugs and alcohol and pull them through to healthy adulthood. With
help and encouragement mothers and sons can find a way to survive and
thrive.
If we tease apart the unique dynamics of this most wonderful
relationship, we see that mothers have their own set of pressures,
separate from those their sons experience. It is critical that we
understand both sets: the pressures unique to boys and the pressures
unique to mothers. Sometimes the two intertwine, sometimes they don’t.
I will explore these sets in detail. First, I will attend to the issues mothers
face, because research shows that the surest way to help a boy is to help
whoever has the greatest influence over him. For millions of boys, that
means mom.
What are the specific stresses mothers contend with? First, there is the
common triad, which every mother in America feels at some point: guilt,
fear, and anger. Mothers in the postfeminist culture feel internal pressure
to be everything to everyone. In fact, I have yet to meet a mother who
feels that she is good enough at the job. Working women feel that they
must perform equally well both in the office and in caring for their
home, husband, and children. Mothers feel that they must counsel their
boys, cook for them, pay for college tuition, provide opportunities
commensurate with their sons’ friends’ opportunities, and, on top of all
that, they must be calm and upbeat at all times. They think they must be