To Nag or Not to Nag? To Blog or Not to Blog?

   Recently Boom was involved in something - well, very typical of today. There were
serious consequences, and i have no idea how much blame should be assigned to him.

  i don't want to know.

  i do know that i've experienced enough near misses of this type that blame can go both ways, and /or paradoxically nowhere, at the same time .

  It's just one of those frustrating Signs of the Times.

Boom:

"I lost my job very suddenly due to a couple of small but very expensive collisions a month apart. The first was as much not my fault as is possible for the car in the back of a rear-end collision, but the result is the same."

  MyGuy & i made sympathetic noises, and tried to help point him to the needed documents.

  However, my guilt instinct kicked in. i haven't chastised him about it, but somehow it seems i should.

  Isn't that what a good mom would do?

  However, i won't, for these reasons:

• He's a grown man.
• He's lived on his own, self-supporting, halfway across the country, for several years now.
• And, the main reason i'll restrain myself, i would be quite surprised if he wasn't already beating himself up a lot worse than i could do.

So i won't. But that doesn't do anything about the guilt.

Boom:

You remember how you said that when you were a young adult and frustrated with your mother's nagging, you'd get in the car and scream along with Billy Joel, "I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life/Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone"?

There's a more recent song by Blink-182 that has angrier-sounding music, but I think its meaning to me is not as angry. The chorus says "don't waste your time on me, you're already/the voice inside my head". It reminds me of how you used to say that you didn't need to lecture me anymore because "the tapes are working". I think it's a sign of better parenting that you can expect that I'm already lecturing myself about what I did wrong.

For a different take on not scolding,

see Grace and Paste and Pepsi

on my other blog, Living in Judges 2.