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Dear James,
I’m a stepdad who wants nothing more than to be a good father to my stepson. He is 14 years old and many years past the divorce trauma involving his mom and his biological dad. His dad is, from my vantage point, a terrible human being in every way you can imagine. He has rarely paid child support. He is an addict and a drunk, and has exposed his kid to legions of drugs and debaucheries.
Although this biological dad’s older kids avoid him like the plague, the 14-year-old still strives to be his “favorite.” Bio-dad has done everything he can to pull my stepson into his rotten orbit, exposing him to his life and sending him home with retrograde ideas about women.
My question is: Do we tell the 14-year-old what a bad human his biological dad is?
Dear Reader,
One of the ways in which the great psychiatrist and teacher Elvin Semrad communicated with his pupils was via the Zen-like homemade proverb. “The only time people leave their mothers is when they’re ready to go,” he would say. Or: “It’s hard to look at the bottom of a well and see what’s there.”
And then there’s my favorite: “Who can tell anybody anything?” I’ve been pondering that one for years, rolling it around in my brain-orifice like an Everlasting Gobstopper.
What I get from it is this: Everyone has to learn their own lessons. Hints, counsels, warnings, remonstrations, even encouragements are, in the end, of limited value. We’re human, and we have to do it ourselves. “Tell me what to do!” I remember demanding of my first therapist. “Can’t you just tell me what to do?!” He made noises of ethical-clinical demurral. His ginger eyebrows wobbled. Had he zinged me with that Semrad line, I might have calmed down.
You can see where I’m going with this, I’m sure. Your stepson is a teenage boy, the definition of volatility and impressionability. By running down his biological father—even if the guy’s as much of a waste of space as you say he is—you will only be (temporarily) substituting one set of impressions for another. And that’s if your stepson listens to you. The other possible outcome is that you and your stepson get in a fight. His father exists in the world, floundering about and getting high, but the larger and more potent existence that this man has, in your case, is in your stepson’s psyche. In there, he’s a giant. Mess with the father image and you’re asking for trouble.
And here’s another thing, a lesson I learned rather late in the day: Parenting is 2 percent what you say, and 98 percent what you do. How you carry yourself, how you react, how you balance your selfhood against the pressures of reality—this is what a child watches and (God help all parents) learns from. It will take patience and biting-your-tongue forbearance, but you need to be the bigger man here. By modeling love, tolerance, grown-upness, dependability, sobriety—all the non-waste-of-space virtues—you’ll be telling-without-telling your stepson everything he needs to know.
In dadly fellowship,
James
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