Dear Steve:

You shared that you and your wife have a close family friend, Tracy. Tracy has children and so do you.   Tracy has “some emotional baggage from her childhood (don’t we all)”, you shared. Her emotional baggage manifests itself in “manic depressive episodes, as well as heavy drinking.. multiple DUI’s… get belligerently drunk in front of her kids”, and when you, your wife and your kids visit Tracy’s home, “the evening never fails to devolve into a drunken shouting contest of obscenities and inappropriate conduct”.

In the past, you felt it was wrong to expose the children to this adult behavior, but you thought: “Hell with it, this is my life, I can do what I want. Just because I have kids doesn’t mean I have to shut down my life for them..”, but last Saturday night, at Tracy’s home, you noticed “a look of dismay.. turned to horror and disappointment” on your son’s face, and you had an epiphany:

“Of course to everyone else the child is a blip on the radar, a passerby to be easily overlooked. But to me.. this was not right. I have felt this feeling before, but it is extremely rare and usually only manifests itself in life-threatening situations”. You then “put down the drink, switched to water, and got out of there as soon as I was able”.

You wrote: “Just wondering what everyone else thinks of my situation”- I think that when Tracy was a child, she was just “a blip on the radar, a passerby to be easily overlooked”, and that’s why she is now a mother who overlooks her own children’s mental/ emotional well-being. I think that you and your wife were not much bigger than blips on your respective parents’ radars, and this is why you overlooked your own children’s emotional well-being. Unless your children are no longer overlooked, they too will continue the tradition of overlooking their own children, a tradition that has brought our world as a whole to the sad situation it is in.

It is sadly very common, as you noted, that parents overlook their children except for life-threatening situations. For example, a parent will spring into action if she/he sees her child about to cross a busy street about to be hit by a fast-moving truck. But the same parent will overlook the look of horror on her child’s face multiple times, seeing that look of horror as a blip, nothing of consequence.

But the horror of a child, repeated, unattended to, results in massive lifetime pain and dysfunction for the child and for the next generation.. and the next.

To be a healthy individual and a good parent, you need a combination of personal responsibility (ex., having fun from time to time), and social responsibility (ex., the adults gather at Tracy’s home to watch football and drink,  while your kids and Tracy’s kids are supervised by a responsible, caring and attentive babysitter in your home).

anita

Hi Steve,

I’m a few days later than others here but your post resonated. I am a parent of one child, now a 23 yr old. While he was growing up I had to make some difficult – at times complicated – choices on his behalf. There are things that sometimes we just do have to give up on behalf of children, no matter how much we like them. You have chosen to give up heavy drinking w/ the family friend. You were right to see and ‘listen’ to your son’s reaction to this. If I were in  your situation now I would 1) tell my wife that you are no longer going to ‘party hard’ with “Tracy” and others,  2) tell your wife that you and she need a united front that your sons will not go to the friend’s house unsupervised and not be with that friend at all when she is drinking heavily. 3) You and  your wife can go see the friend and talk with her unaccusingly about your concerns. 4) Regardless of the friend’s reaction, you maintain your decision that your sons will not witness that behavior at your home or anywhere else you allow them to go.

I don’t have all the answers…sometimes not even the right ones for me. But that is how I would handle things. You didn’t mention how old your sons are, but I had a #5 of things to do to fix a situation in my own life years ago. After a verbal incident with my exhusband at home that shocked my 16 year old son,  who I did not know was nearby, I did go to my son and apologize, and commit to not repeating that. I told him that adults to should not behave that way. So my situation was different, but you son(s) may appreciate knowing that you saw that they are uncomfortable and that you will prevent that in the future. Wishing you the best.

-Mountain Lady