JustAdvice

The girl was about six­teen and was in Court for a num­ber of offenses, not the least of which was using her par­ents’ credit card to run up a bill of over one thou­sand dol­lars. Of course she had noth­ing to show for the money, since it had all been spent on friends and “hav­ing fun.”

Both Mom and Dad were present for the hear­ing. They were not only the par­ents of a way­ward child, but also the vic­tims of her crimes. It was a dif­fi­cult role for them, and they were clearly not doing well. She knew they were dis­traught, and she refused to look at them when she was brought into the court­room from Juve­nile Hall.

Yes, she was sorry she was in a mess, and she was sorry she got caught. She was also unhappy that there was so much money to pay back, but she was not par­tic­u­larly remorse­ful. She did not seem to care that she had wronged her par­ents and she cer­tainly was not pre­pared for what they said to the Judge.

“Your honor,” the father began. “We love our daugh­ter, but this is only one in a long list of seri­ous crimes and, frankly, we don’t know how to help her.” His wife cried as he recounted how the girl had begun by cut­ting class, esca­lated to shoplift­ing, started stay­ing away all night, and even­tu­ally ran away for days at a time. She was now exper­i­ment­ing with drugs, which she insisted was not a prob­lem. She was adamant that her par­ents were impos­si­ble and she just wanted to be left alone, to man­age her life as she saw fit. Never mind that she was doing a lousy job of it.

Con­sid­er­ing her prior record, her atti­tude and her treat­ment needs, the pro­ba­tion offi­cer had rec­om­mended that this girl be removed from her home. When her par­ents agreed that was best, she couldn’t believe it. She burst into tears and began wail­ing, impro­vis­ing empty promises and shal­low apologies.

Nei­ther they nor the Judge wavered, and after a cou­ple of min­utes her ersatz halo top­pled with a thud. Before she was led back to the hold­ing cell she show­ered her par­ents, the Judge and every­one in the room with lan­guage hot enough to sear their ear­lobes. There had been no real change of heart, only a tweak of method.

Some­how she com­pleted her place­ment but, fol­low­ing her release, this girl’s fam­ily saw lit­tle of her for sev­eral years as she con­tin­ued in her destruc­tive lifestyle. Then, when her mother died, her per­spec­tive began to change.  She real­ized that look­ing only at her­self had made her severely short-sighted.  Armed with a new atti­tude, she re-established a rela­tion­ship with her father, fin­ished school and got mar­ried. The only thing she couldn’t do was go back and mend the bro­ken rela­tion­ship with her mother. She would have given any­thing, at that point, to have been able to do so. 

It took a few more years, but she even­tu­ally for­gave her­self and finally real­ized, with true relief, that her mother had for­given her long ago.