Hope Springs Eternal

It is March 20, 2014 and if you are reading this after 12:57 EDT (US), Mother Earth has progressed in her tilt toward the Sun to present the Northern Hemisphere with just a bit more of its fair share of the Sun's rays than its Southern half. Sorry my Argentine friends. It's our turn for a while. And its been a really long winter here.

Spring with all its potential, has Sprung!

I have a lot of plans for Spring. Our long Winter season has revealed some small chinks in the armor of our roof near the chimney, our pool may need a somewhat major overhaul and a portion of our cedar fence requires replacement. These are all acute maladies, each requiring a day or two of treatment to affect a cure.

I have also been putting off the treatment of a more chronic issue that has been begging for my attention for at least two years. My front and back lawns, once lush and fertile have through intermittent attention on my part, thinned like the scalp of a candidate for hair replacement. My front lawn is the worse of the two owing to the work of two evil chipmunks that have built a network of tunnels rivaling London's "Tube" and a not-so-great idea I stumbled upon a couple of seasons ago that if a little weed killer is good, a little more must be better.

All these hiccups to my exterior world order are minor, and fixable with a bit of know how, muscle and capital. This is what adults do. We identify areas of our lives that require our attention and we attend to these shortcomings. We fix what needs fixing. It is what society, our parents, literature, cinema and history have taught us.

It is Spring, and Hope springs eternal for my projects.

We all have our projects that require attention. Most are fixable, or not. It is through the guidance of the Universe that helps us to sort out which is, well, which.

At some point as parents of children who have succumbed to addiction we are confronted by a challenge that cannot be fixed, a project that cannot even be engaged, a battle that cannot be won. It goes against everything we have been taught to believe about our role as adults, as parents. This is what is so maddening about the first realizations of an addiction problem with our babies, our little boys, our little princesses.

Try as we may - and we will try -  there is no fix we can apply, no roof repair, no over seeding that will bring glory back from devastation. There is nothing we can do to pull our children out of their mire. This is what makes OUR recovery so difficult. The most effective behavior we can exhibit as parents of addicted children is to work on our recovery and at the same time love our children. It is, once again, a counterintuitive gift of the Universe, God, the Great Creator we are shown that through our recovery our children might just find their own way out, their own triumph out of and over addiction.

And as long as we know our children are living and breathing, there is Hope. We can let our children know in our own way that we love them. We can support them without enabling, even if it is only through a simple prayer in the morning. We can allow our children their victories and their consequences.

There is Hope for our kids. There is Hope for us.

And Hope Springs Eternal!

… keep coming back