Here is it Saturday and I haven’t posted a thing since Monday. I suck. This week was brutal. I didn’t feel all the way normal again till Wednesday and then on Thursday my oldest son decided to make life interesting.

At the risk of sounding like a mommy blogger, I have to say that if I had known how my misbehavior as a child affected my parents, I would have been a saint. My oldest is 11, and he’s a pretty good kid, but every few months he seems to need to something really bad. And each time it gets a little worse. I won’t get into what he did, maybe someday he’ll have a blog of his and he can write remorse filled posts about his behavior (or more likely posts about how much his dad sucked when he was a kid.)

What I will get into how this shit makes me feel. I feel powerless, I feel responsible, I feel angry. I can’t make him be good. It simply isn’t possible. I can explain right and wrong. I can set limits and enforce them. But at the end of the day, its up to him to choose. And I am powerless to do anything about it. I’m terrified too. I read stories about Middle School kids doing drugs and having sex and other disturbing things. What if he does? What will I do? I feel guilty as hell every time something like this happens. I want to go to the Principal and say, “I swear I explained that this was bad, he just doesn’t seem to care. We are not bad people. I promise!”

All this made me remember something from when I was 7 or 8. My family had driven from home outside of Philadelphia to Allentown to visit some friends of my parents. They must have been close friends, because we called the aunt and uncle so and so. I can’t remember their names, but I remember the name of their oldest son. His name was Eddie. There was another kid there who was younger. My brothers and I played with Eddie and his brother. I really liked Eddie. We were best friends in an instant, in the way that only young children can be. His brother on the other hand was a pain, like little brothers can be. His little brother kept bragging about all this change, pennies, which were stacked up in their bedroom. For some reason, at the end of the night, I loaded my pockets with these pennies. I think maybe it was my way at lashing out at the younger brother.

When we got home my mom noticed the pennies and questioned me about them. Maybe they had called and asked, I can’t remember. I do remember that I had to write a letter saying I was sorry and taping each penny to that letter. My mom was so mad. She told me that I had embarrassed her and that maybe they would never invite us back, because I was such a bad kid. I also think that I found out that the pennies belonged to Eddie, his little brother was just bragging on them cause little brothers are like that. I was overwhelmed with guilt. We never did visit them again. That is probably because we moved to Virginia not too long after that. Probably. But I still bore a lot of guilt over it.

To this day I am a very honest person. I think that this incident; along with a few others along the way; have something to do with that. I have a whole new sense of guilt as I think of it now. I have a clue how my parents must have felt. And I feel terrible for doing that to them. That was far from the only time I disappointed them, but its one of the first big ones that I remember. Is there a moral to this story? No. I’m not good at those kinds of stories I guess. The point, I suppose, is either that I built up a whole lot of bad behavior karma as a kid and I better hold on tight s a parent. Or that life goes on, and that these things pop up from time to time but life goes on anyway.