Here’s what I find disturbing about this.
I DO know parents that have cut their kids out of their lives because of drugs.
I happens after the 10th or 12th or 20th time they’ve stolen money from their parents. It happens after the 4th overdose. It happens after they financed 5 expensive rehabs, only to see the kid relapse after 2 days. It happen after their kids have assaulted them in order to steal stuff to buy drugs. And even then, even after all that, parents (especially mothers ) find it difficult.
They find it difficult because they truly love their children. They feel their pain and suffer with them. It usually takes counseling to even convince the parents to cut the kid off. Most parents find it really difficult to give up on their kids, even when, to the outside observer, there’s no hope left. And even then, they still love them.
You caught your kid once. You had no inkling of a problem at the time, IIRC. Which seems to indicate that he is holding his own at school and socially. And, because of this one incident, you’ve decided your child is irredeemably broken and not be worthy of your love.
Your shocked that we think you should still love him as much as he did before.
This isnt about our disparate position on marijuana. I’m not getting on you for overreacting. If you had told me you were grounding him for a year and cutting off his internet and making him take a drug test every week and sniffing his hair every time you hugged him - yes I’d think you were overreacting and I might try to convince you to lighten up. But I wouldn’t be in the Pit.
I’m pitting your emotional reaction - the fact that your maternal bond was so tenuous that this incident seems to have affected your ability to love your child, and that you somehow think this is OK.
See, I once had to cut a kid out of my life. He wasn’t even my biological child, I fostered him for several years. And I had to cut him out because he developed a psychiatric problem and thought I was poisoning him and spying on him online and all sorts of crazy stuff. And I still needed a therapist to help me cut him off and I slipped up a lot, because he had good days sometimes. And then my therapist had to remind me that the next time he might try to kill me.
And it still fucking hurts, I’m crying as I type this. Because I still love him.
You’re saving yourself a lot of pain, I guess, but you are missing out on so much. I just have no more words.