my nephew, child of my heart

My nephew is 19. I love him dearly - he is the child I chose not to have and yet somehow ended up in my life anyway. Karma is that way - you think you squeak by and miss something and it ends up in your lap anyway.

Poor kid - he's got his grandfather's genes, his aunt's genes, and his father's genes. It's going to take a  while for him to grow up. Gods know that it took me and his grandfather long enough.

I had to do something that confuses me: take a side WITH my parents (and my sister, his mom) against him. Why? He's not doing a very good job of living up to his responsibilities which include complying with terms of probation and paying his fines and restitution. I have my own issues with my parents (they have theirs with me) yet we are united in caring for this punky kid who can be soooo annoying.

I can't begin to mention how weird it was to walk up my parent's sidewalk and into their house after five years. And seeing the look of disbelief on my nephew's face was difficult. I saw how on a fundamental level I betrayed him and yet I know that what I did was for his best interest. Cold comfort when you're sitting with a mad, rebellious kid trying to explain that his family cares about him enough to want to sit on him and help him, whether he thinks he wants it or not. And that's what we did.

He lost his cell phone, he lost internet access, he moved from my house to his grandparent's house. In return, his grandparents lost a huge portion of their privacy, had to rearrange their life to include him (e.g. make a room for sleep in), money to pay his fines & fees, and put up with his bad attitude. It took three "conferences" for him to understand why we did what we did. Turned out that I was rather helpful since it seems I speak his language and no one else does. However, he seems to understand that part of what we did was put him on a path to help himself.  He's re-enrolled in a program to get his high-school diploma (and is actually succeeding at that), he's working around the house helping out (even me - I got to "borrow" him to do lifting for me while I was getting household supplies), and will work on getting a job.

I got something else out of this, too. I got a chance to present myself as an adult to my parents. Maybe for the first time they saw who I am, not who I was (the 18 year old who moved out and was equally as annoying as the nephew). I got to let old crap go and see them as people, not parents or authoritarian figures. Somehow we got a chance to erase some old perceptions and maybe, just maybe, move forward in a relationship of adults not parents and children.