I think your advice is a bit extreme former Catholic. What mom would really do this? I wouldn’t. I don;t think this nice woman would either.
You think doing volunteer work for 8 hours a day is just too much to demand of a son who parties and drinks and sleeps with his girlfriend and waves condoms at his younger brother and laughs and tells the younger brother that *he’s *not a man?
Well then, how about 4 hours? Just the mornings, with afternoons off… or just the afternoons, so he can sleep in or polish his nails, if 8 hours is just too much for him and he can’t handle it.
Volunteer work at a shelter would be extremely educational. It also benefits the community. Times are hard and the shelters and food banks are in need of help. What else is he doing with his life that’s so all important?
100 years ago you were a man if you could
build a house to live in, not open a refrigerator.
Perhaps he has such skills, and 8 hours a day working down at
Habitat For Humanity would enable him to demonstrate those skills to the world.
The point is that he needs to be doing something extremely public and extremely VISIBLE and in which he has to interact daily with the real world, real time, and in his face, and make his mark on the world… like a man…
beyond playing around with leaving it an unplanned and unwanted child with… whomever…
as he has laughably fallen into the habit of thinking that clinging to and depending on mommie (and/or girlfriend!) constitutes manhood.
Ha! When the girlfriend dumped his sorry a… he went running right back to
mommie, and he calls himself a *man?! *HA!
OK… so he thinks he’s
a man… Well then, let’s see what he’s really got. Manhood is not a body part. Manhood is his ability to make his mark on the world. Let him show this community what he has got.
What kind of mother would demand such a thing? I would. It’s called fulfilling one’s duty as a mother to educate one’s children.
Leo Buscaglia, Ph.D., (1924 – 1998) , USC professor of education, master teacher, and bestselling educational and inspirational author published in 18 languages, wrote in Living, Loving & Learning that his own mother did exactly that same thing:
"Mama says, ‘OK, you go, but if you do, you’re declaring yourself an adult and don’t ask me for anything after that. You’re an adult. You’re free. go’…
Oh, it was fantastic! I didn’t have a lot of money, but I had a little bit and I went there (Paris) and I lived everybody’s dream… but I remember getting to the point where I really had very little money- almost none. I thought I’d just wire home, that’s all. I went to the telegraph office in Paris, and, to save money, just wrote, “Starving…”…
24 hours later I had a telegram from Mama and it said, ‘Starve! Mama.’
The moment of truth! At long last I was an adult. What was I going to do now?
I’m going to tell you what that taught me. It taught me about hunger, it taught me about how cold a place can be, not only physically, but when you don’t have the bottles of wine to share, the people who called themselves your ‘friends’ don’t come around anymore. It taught me a lot and I never would have learned it if Mama had relented and sent me a check. And I stayed there and stayed there, just to show her I could do it. When I went home many months later, she said to me one evening, ‘That was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but if I hadn’t done it, you would never have grown…’
His mama’s highest priority in life wasn’t being a
nice mother… his mother’s highest priority in life was being a
competent one.
