Awareness of what is to come...

August - now comes the slow long shadows of the end of summer. Like so many times of life when we know what to expect it helps us to get prepared for the changes about to happen in our lives.

~school~ I mean I have been out of school for a very long time and I still love 3:00!, I still get excited for Friday! and I still LOVE when school is over for the summer.

There will be those people that will try to convince me that they are looking forward to the cooler weather, or looking forward to a little routine in their lives again. I think they are doing their best to accept the future they KNOW is coming. What do we do about the events in our lives that we don't know what to expect and we KNOW are coming?

My most dreaded moments through most of my sons teenage - young adult, ok hell, presently; phone calls. The phone often seemed to ring differently and my "mother gut" would tell me something was about to happen and it could be bad, real bad. Voices of police, friends, or even their own, to tell us there was trouble. It started to really mess with my psyche and pulled up familiar emotions.

Some how in my grandest imagination as a young mother I thought I could steer the kids way far away from behavior that was destructive to themselves and others. I had not lived at home for a very long time and yet the protective gear was readily available as our sons began to bring in the things that I had worked to avoid.

Materialism, sure I wanted them to be happy with life no matter their economic state. Some how I wanted to press upon them that doing what brought them "reason" was more important than money. Charitable, who doesn't want a child of theirs to be gentle hearted but safe. I even expected the drinking but wanted to press upon them the dangers, the limits, the complete and total truth that addiction was inherited, and they had a very very full gene pool of addicts.

So looking for my niche of wisdom, I found over the past summer that my experience as a child of addiction and the parent of addiction, that my acceptance of my own experience could be shared with others. I realized how many deal with addiction of loved ones and they believe they are lost not the addict! and that they do end up so lost and broken hearted.

My next few reflections~unless of course there is reason to turn the course~ will be on this. Survival for the self. Because just as we can look out in the August sun and see the shadows are getting longer and know what is about to come, we can see the shadows of our lives and what we are about to lose. I hope to share with others, acceptance of being only responsible for ourselves is what brings the peace.