“…landed him in jail more than once.”

Nope. Unless he’s the best safecracker in the world and he was extorted into his second time in jail because the crime boss was holding you hostage…

Yeah no. You land in jail, you made some bad decisions, maybe you were influenced by your friends. You land in jail more than once… you know the consequences. You made the choice. Your son is an adult. And a criminal. And an addict. Why would any mother want to allow their child to have contact with an addict and felon?

You are the most narcissistic selfish person I’ve encountered in a while. You have been bashing the mother and enabling your son and now you want to literally use a baby as a tool to get your son on the straight and narrow. Let me repeat that… you want to use a child, regardless of the potential harm, emotional damage, whatever, to manipulate your son to be a better person.

I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. I would not want to have two drug addicted sons. I am sorry that your other son committed suicide. But this child, this innocent child, is not responsible for making your living son better. The only person who is responsible is your son. You see this child only as a tool, you don’t like this child. You don’t want contact with this child. You want this child to solve problems that you can’t and your son can’t.

You are a foolish selfish person.

If you raised your sons to be better people, why is one dead and the other an unemployed drug addict with a lengthy criminal record? Take some fucking responsibility for yourself and stop using this child as a pawn in your twisted game to make your remaining son love you.

RT — I think that gets at LW’s problems more than grief and points to the therapy she needs. Her problem is mainly guilt for the way both of her sons turned out. If she can shift blame to the mother of her grandchild, for willfully withholding the magic bullet which would have saved both of her sons, then she hopes to feel better about herself and her performance as a mother. There must be a villain, because she believes her sons are good at the core and wants to believe that she was a good mother or at least the best mother possible. ‘Followed friends’ is too amorphous to be satisfying, but in this one mother of a small child, she can create a living, breathing villain upon who to focus all her anger and upset about her sons’ lives.

Of course this assigns an impossible responsibility to an infant and her mom. If these young men couldn’t fix themselves, and there mother couldn’t steer them in the right direction or fix them after the fact, and two times in jail and drug rehab hasn’t fixed living son, then he may well be past the point of being fixable and at least is not going to be fixed by being presented with the new responsibility of a child.

We are at full employment. Full employment plus. Tattoos won’t prevent son from getting a job, if he wants one. There are jobs which don’t require passing a drug test, which he probably could not pass, but doesn’t need to pass to find some job. He does have to want a job. He does have to be able to show up on time and complete a full work day. That is what mom should be pushing.

It’s just so much easier to blame all your problems and yours and your families failings on a young mother who was doing her best to protect her baby, now infant, from addicted, criminal, drug dealers. Young mother has done nothing wrong.

Interesting. Very.