- Messages
- 12,009
- Location
- East of Los Angeles
I lost the first of these people in my life when my older brother died in 1984, and the last when Mom died in 2004. I was always aware of and appreciative of the guidance they had all provided over the years, but it was shortly after Mom was gone that I truly realized she was the last of those responsible for shaping me during those "formative" years and that little voice in my head said, "Figure it out for yourself, ****head."Pretty much every important authority figure of my childhood is gone now...
With regards to "mentoring", it's a long story but back in the mid-1990s my wife and I became surrogate co-parents to two young boys. My wife had become friends with a divorced co-worker who had a daughter and two sons, and I had apparently managed to somehow gain the boys' trust during the time we all spent together because one day the younger of the two (they were 9 and 12 years old at the time) asked me if he could call me "dad", and when his brother found out he requested the same thing. Fortunately their mother had alerted my wife and I that this might happen, so we had an opportunity to consider and discuss it before it actually happened. When it did, I sat down with the boys and explained to them how it was going to work--if they were going to call me dad, for all intents and purposes I was going to be their dad (and that my wife was going to be "Mom II"). I wanted them to know I took it seriously, and would not abandon them the way their real father had after the divorce. Initially they put this arrangement to the test and we--their mother, my wife, and I--would issue the necessary discipline by committee when they misbehaved. But I also proved I'd be there for them when they needed me by attending meetings with the school staff when they each had problems keeping their grades up, and showing up at the E.R. when the younger one dislocated his knee playing football at school. I, of course, had no legal rights to make decisions on their behalf because this was nothing more than an informal agreement within the family, but there was a physical resemblance between me and the boys so no one in a "position of authority" ever really questioned it and accepted me as their dad. They're both adults now, off living their lives and I haven't directly spoken to either of them for a long time. I don't know if I had any real, lasting effect on them, but I'd like to think I did at least in some small way and I believe they know they can still count on me if the need arises.