I worked with a really terrific woman who was our office secretary. She and her husband and Most Precious Baby were scraping by in an oil town. Her parents had torn up their finances and stripmined their retirement to send her brother to rehab, again and again. She and her husband were to like this, and receive nothing for a house downpayment or help with their child's education, and expect to have to take the parents in owing to their self-induced, late-life poverty, because "You're so responsible. We know you'll understand." I watched and listened.
Then it happened in our family, when my father remarried a woman with one great son, one son of whom Dylan could have written "People don't live or die, people just float," and one drug addict son. At one point, the druggie son conned my father:
"I know how disappointed you are in me, and you can't be any more disappointed in me than I am myself. I just need to rent a truck and move my stuff into storage while I go into the rehab center, and start my New Beginning. Just that, a little help to begin my new life."
He and the truck disappeared; it was found a week later in Vegas, as was he, in jail again for drug use and vagrancy.
My father was out $750 for the truck. I asked, "So. How many times has he gone into rehab?" and was told, "Five. This is the fifth time."
I snapped at him, saying, "Well. Dad. If you can't learn this in 5 tries for $750, how about you give him a credit card like his grandfather did, and see if you can learn it for $15000?"
Dorothy Sayers observed of a character that she suffered under one of the most disagreeable human characteristics: she became unpleasant under stress. All due respect, but there are at couple other human characteristics that are a lot worse to live under, to be. For instance, to be one of those people whose tongue is so vicious and uncontrolled, that at any moment they can blurt out something venomous enough that they lose forever and irretrievably a friendship that had lasted for decades. Another is to be a meta-Madoff, someone under the compulsion to con, not just strangers, but the people most obliged and likely to love you.
So my half-brother. He's at the $5 level for us all. No "loans" for more than $5. I think he's been clean and sober for a while, but there is no one left to care whether he is or isn't. He was trained to con those who loved him and no one but a daughter (maybe) is left who does. This is an outcome, a way to be, so terrible it is hard to believe the parents didn't know they were setting him up for it.
As to what I took from it, any time one of my kids needs something (wedding dinner, engine rebuild) I check the finances, because if I can't put the same amount against principal on the 2 other kids home loans, I can't do it.
If your kids are pretty much normal, I recommend making a fetish of keeping it balanced to the penny. What you do for a kid who chooses their destruction is one thing, what you do when you have two and one of them will never be able to make it (say, severely developmentally disabled) I don't know, and am very grateful I have never faced the test.
