Would you walk down any road?

 The other day, I was giving a support call to a new member or parent group.  We've started an Online Saturday chapter which is going to stay online even when the other chapters go back to in-person.  Which doesn't seem like anytime soon.  That way, the members can live anywhere!

Anyway, back to the new parent.  She was an experienced parent having fostered and adopted many children.  She was relating her difficulties with her young adult daughter who was dropping college classes, would not work, sometimes suicidal.

I was talking with her about how some of her conversations were enabling the very behavior she wanted to stop.  Long conversations which exhausted and upset the parent.

I said "Are you willing to walk down any road?"

I stopped myself short.  Where had that come from?  It wasn't Changes but it fit.  Later I remembered that I had gotten that line from my friend Mary Ann D. who had died tragically too early from aggressive breast cancer.   When was that?  She worked with me at WACAP.  She had a few children by adoption including a teenage boy who was VERY difficult.  As she struggled with her diagnosis and health, she realized that she could not cope with him.  She said "I had to ask myself, am I willing to walk down any road with him?"  And she realized that she was not willing to do that.  This is after many interventions, treatments etc.  It's about setting difficult boundaries.  Sometimes, you have to realize that you are not willing to go down that road.

I've been with Changes twenty years.  This was somewhere in the 1990s.  I was not too friendly with her husband so I lost touch with the family.