The Boy Who Cried Wolf and the Unfit Mom

The worst feeling ever as a child is when your parents don’t believe you. You don’t think about the times they’ve had to deal with the repercussions of your irresponsible actions, and that’s maybe why they can’t believe anything coming out of your lying mouth anymore.

It’s a replay of the fable, “Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Every parent must face the repercussions of their actions, valid or not.

When I look back on my childhood, I know now that I was far from ideal.

I took what wasn’t mine when no one was looking. I talked back. I gave dirty looks. I shut down in social situations. I lied to cover my ass. I hit my younger brother. I chased boys, went off with two of them (nothing happened) when I was 12.

I was a horrible kid.

My own paternal grandmother thought she was speaking with her husband in confidence one night taking care of us when my father went to the hospital after his first heart attack. But I overheard every word. She called me a sneaky good for nothing, like my mom.

My own father would follow suit several years later, putting my mom’s entire life on my shoulders, accusing me of being a lying whore just like her.

Maybe I deserved it, I don’t know.

But when a bunch of neighborhood bullies cornered me in the woods above the playground — and I pissed my pants, running away to a random house for safety, screaming and crying…that time, I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t do anything wrong.

I was seven.

The problem with “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” however, is that if you do one thing wrong early on, you’re kind of labeled for life, and the cycle repeats itself. If that’s all you’ve ever known, and you’re actually confronted with a real wolf, nobody believes you, least of all the people who had to put up with your bullshit 10 times before.

They can’t differentiate between one situation where you shoplifted a gold necklace at a San Francisco airport, and clearly another, where you needed their help.

But to a kid, it makes all the difference in the world. To that kid, being believed, supported, protected, valued, means she doesn’t have to keep acting up or lying or conniving or generally being a handful.

Imagine if my parents rushed over, embraced me, and made sure the bullies’ parents knew what they had done. Instead, they rushed over, pretended to care about me, and then, when it was safe and they were alone with me in their house, proceeded to rip me apart, screaming and beating me, accusing me of running around with boys I didn’t know and doing god knows what else, and DESERVING WHAT I GOT.

Another time, again, I was seven or eight, I remember walking out of Ft. Shafter bowling alley, happy as a clam because I scored higher than my brother. A bunch of soldiers took one look, and started calling me every racial name in the book — in front of our dad.

He let them.

And when they were done publicly humiliating me, he apologized, to them. As they walked away, laughing and making slant eyes at his child, my own dad blamed me for their attacks, violating my trust deeply to the point of no return.

Obviously, I never wanted to get married or have children then, and repeat their mistakes. I never wanted to do that to a child.

In both of those instances I mentioned, I did not deserve my parents’ disbelief. Because of them, I struggle to believe in myself, which has led to some self-destructive choices in relationships, as well as some lingering psychological issues, like self-harm, sleep disorders, social anxiety, hyper-vigilance around groups, and an inability to process information.

The last person who should’ve become a mom was me.

Yet, on Jan. 21, 2002, I did, to a beautiful baby boy I named James Scott.

I raised him mostly on my own. I almost lost custody of him when someone on a soap opera message board reported my sleep-deprived, postpartum ramblings to CPS. Except for a handful of special people, most of whom I barely knew…my therapist, Cynthia, a receptionist at the last full-time job I held before I gave birth, the psychiatrist who agreed to see me and vouched for me to CPS, saving my life…I was on my own.

Everyone I loved abandoned me and left me to deal with being a mom on my own. I didn’t have Brooke Shields and her book. I didn’t have self-help groups who went through the same shit I did and still have their kids. I didn’t have friends who pitched in, my own mom kept refusing (she was dealing with breast cancer) until I had to beg so I could get follow-up surgery to remove uterine fibroids.

Other moms, for the most part, especially during those early, formative years, made it worse. Again, maybe because I didn’t have the tools to reach out and attract the right, caring people in my life. I didn’t know how to break through their cliques and their walls for them to like me enough to —

My therapist Gary once told me in a session that I was never modeled love growing up and had to figure it out on my own. He added, with empathy my parents never gave me, that that was horrible for a kid to have to endure.

The times when I tried to fit in were a disaster. They could’ve helped me, but — and it still hurts and it still makes me cry for myself — they chose to turn their back and think the worst, or they simply didn’t seem to care.

To me, they had their shit together and I was never good enough to be a part of that holy club.

When my son was older, in middle school maybe, another mom I’d been close to, called to say that her son accused him of stealing money from another boy. I asked my son what happened. He insisted he never stole money, that it was over a transaction, that her son misunderstood or maybe assumed wrong. Whatever the case, I made him go to that mom’s house and explain his side of the story, which he did. The mom told me she listened to him, didn’t understand, got a headache and sent him away.

I never spoke to that mom again.

That mom’s best friend reached out after the incident and let me pour my heart out. She seemed to sympathize, sharing her own stories. One of her own sons was accused of pretty much the same thing by that woman’s son.

For the first time in a long time, I was happy. I thought I found my person, my ride-or-die best friend. It didn’t take long before I found out what happens to “The Boy Who Cried Wolf and the Unfit Mom.”

My son was a sophomore in high school. It was the day after Christmas and he went over to my best friend’s house to show off his video games to one of her sons. Everything seemed fine that first night. Then, he went back, I took a nap, and all hell broke loose.

I did everything wrong, of course. No one in my family ever gave me half a chance to be a normal human being.

Besides, I was the Unfit Mom and my son, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, so what did any of it matter?

I was half-asleep from a long nap, shades of my sleep-deprived postpartum, when I got a cryptic text from my son about leaving her basement in a shambles that morning. By the time I saw the text, it was late afternoon and I honestly didn’t know what was going on, my son was sound asleep in his own room.

This woman I adored and would never hurt made a lot of assumptions about me and my son that New Year’s weekend, as if we were strangers who’d just met and not new best friends.

She assumed my son came home early and told me what he’d done, and I was okay with shrugging it off, not bothering to contact her right then and there, and when I did respond, hours and hours later, I made a joke of it, disregarding her feelings…things I’d never do, things I thought she knew I’d never do, because she’d touched my soul, and if you touch someone’s soul like that, how could you ever think the worst?

I woke my son up, saw he was very frightened. He only gave me minimal information, as teenaged boys do, that he was in big trouble, something along the lines of, she’s gonna be real mad.

I used his phone to text her some kind of apology, which was my way of acknowledging that we were aware of the situation, a give me a little time to think straight text until I could get more details out of him and make him apologize properly to her in person.

But I didn’t have time and I was in a rush and I had to do the right thing, fast. The story of my life.

The text poured salt on an already gaping wound.

She thought my son was not taking the matter seriously enough when it was me pretending to be him using his phone, with some lame apology, way after the fact. At this point, I tried to get the whole story, my heart sinking the entire time, as he said he threw up in her basement, all over her basement, and ran home to sleep.

It became a he said, she said situation, as my best friend grew angrier with the both of us.

Accusations were made, something about him drinking and vomiting on the couch, on the way to the bathroom, then in one of her son’s bedrooms, on his bed, on the walls.

I confronted my son, again. He swore he never drank, that the vomit was from drinking raw eggs in a blender on a dare, but admitted that he did run off without owning up or cleaning up, because he was afraid of telling her.

As soon as I heard what he’d done, all of it, I sent him over to her house right away, with all I had on me — about $20, I don’t carry cash — to make things right, expecting him back much later, with the bill for the cost of replacing a bed, a couch, and some rugs.

He came back immediately, looking ashamed, and told me she didn’t want to see him, and she was really, really mad, and rightly so.

But instead of letting my son have it for destroying her basement and making him clean it up, she chose to say horrible things to him without me present, things I would never say to her children, no matter what they did.

According to my son, she said that she saw right through him, that he may have fooled his parents but he didn’t fool her with his nice-kid act, and that she knew he was drinking behind our backs every chance he got. That last bit didn’t make sense, since I’d ask her to keep an eye on him now and then when I went out on errands, and she never told me about the drinking.

The nice-kid act devastated me. She knew I’d just gotten over a Narcissist break-up with a church friend who did exactly that, put on a nice-mom act.

I didn’t understand why she would say that to my kid at all, when we were best friends. When we cared for each other. When I thought she cared for my child.

If she’d admonished him for being an irresponsible jerk, leaving a mess, whether he drank or not, I’d be fine with it. But why bring up the other shit?

My son and I knew this incident put me in a terrible bind. I’d finally found a best friend who made me laugh, who seemed to get me, who supported me. Instead of letting her have it, I chose to be polite and simply say via text something to the effect of, I wish she handled this differently, I wish she’d seen me.

My husband went over there and made it worse, throwing her own kids in her face, which I’d never do. It had nothing to do with the situation, and it was so unfair of him. I didn’t put him up to any of it.

But she emailed me after his visit and assumed I sent him there and whatever he said was what I wanted him to say. She doubled down on what she told our son, and sdaid she could never be friends with me again. She never gave me the chance to tell my side of the story.

My son cried and begged me not to choose him over her. He knew how much his thoughtless antics cost us both. “I’m nothing, but…she’s your only friend, mom, you can’t lose her!”

I already did…

I could’ve been just like my parents and lit into him. I could’ve put words in his mouth, made all the wrong assumptions about him, torn him apart, not seen him — the real him, shattered his self-esteem…called him a lying sneaky good for nothing drunk. Believed my best friend over my own son.

I could’ve been the unfit mom everybody saw me as.

I didn’t, I couldn’t. Not after what I went through when I was his age.

I said, “But you’re my son, and I believe you.”

I wish I could say that was that. “Mother of the Year” goes to me.

But life isn’t a sitcom or a movie of the week.

I put my son, my only child, through three days of hell, making him go over every detail of that night, over and over again, to make sure he wasn’t indeed lying to me. I repeatedly told him I’m okay with him drinking, it happens, we all did it, but DON’T LIE to me. He never faltered from his original story.

After going back and forth, fuming once several months later when he told me to get over it and I yelled at him, “easy for you to say, you didn’t lose a best friend!,” like that would make him feel what I felt, and secretly through the years, wondering what really happened, I let it go. Everything. I chose him.

There is no neat and tidy moral to this story.

I have a greater appreciation for my parents and what I put them through. It was their first time raising children at a time when raising children wasn’t easy. They did the best they could with what they knew and the lousy parenting they received from their parents.

So did I.

I still don’t know if my son drank that night, and I don’t care anymore. It doesn’t matter. A year or so later, when he did vomit after drinking with friends, he owned up to it.

Despite what I’ve been accused of, I’m not uptight about drinking, I don’t think my child’s perfect, I didn’t raise him to be a thief, lush, or conman, either.

Kids lie, though. I did. God knows my son did. I used to call him the “Boy Who Cried Wolf,” actually, when he was very little. He had such an active imagination gone wild. So did I.

In pre-K, he told his class I was a farmer and he was dancing in “The Nutcracker.”

At some point, we grow up and grow out of it, and learn that that kind of behavior doesn’t fly in society.

At some point, as parents, we have to let our children figure it out, through trial and error, and trust that they will.

We have to trust them…believe in them — even if we’re made fools of later (although, he never did, he’s never disappointed me since)…love them unconditionally, so they can be the best they can be, in order to navigate this messed-up world, where there are a lot of people who were left twisting in the wind when all they needed was one kind word, to be chosen, seen, understood.

That’s all I’m trying to say…