Helps a little bit.
We have access to M's emails and accounts so that we can try to cover his bills etc. His emails have all of his correspondence with the lawyers, which he had more of then we knew. He is such a well read person!
When he was little we had him and his older brother in private Christian school. We thought we were doing the right thing. But then we found out that the teachers could not handle M. He was a social kid. He would walk into his 1st grade classroom and all the kids would yell his name, kinda like Cheers. But because he was so social he was a talker, so she put his desk in the corner and faced him to the wall. When we found out we pulled the boys from the school and put them in public school. He entered 2nd grade and did not know how to read and was pretty uncontrollable because he was used to running the classroom. His 2nd grade teacher was a saint! By the time he left 2nd grade he was reading well and was a great kid in the classroom. By the time he was in 6th grade he was reading at college grade level, as was his older brother.
His emails are well written and thought out. We found the one with his confession and initial letter to the lawyer. He had NOT gone looking for CP. He had been surfing Tumbler looking for legal porn (He was a single 22 year old man!) when he started receiving messages offering him pictures of younger girls. He ignored the messages for awhile until he became curious. Being much like his mother he is very trusting and naïve.
His trusting nature and curiosity is what got him in trouble.
Yes, he should have known better. But it helps in my heart to know that he was not searching it out.
I've learned that almost nothing is black or white. There's always a story and nuances. But there will always be people that are more comfortable just labeling somebody with that kind of charges as a monster, and moving on.
ReplyDeleteYou know your son. All humans have weaknesses, and there are many slippery slopes in the world, but that doesn't mean the goodness is not real.
I have always felt that labels were wrong. Some are more painful than others. I just hope and pray he can work past this one.
DeleteIt must be very hard to read his e-mails, but glad you found something reassuring.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I have learned through my experience, and I hope to raise awareness with others, is that whenever you see a criminal conviction or label, it is never the whole story, and is rarely even an accurate depiction of the story. Reality could be either better or worse, and always has more dimensions than a 2-D label. Rather than just dismiss someone with a criminal label, ask them to tell more of their story (and verify if you can, if you're discerning whether to trust).
I was thinking about your previous post too, about a "new normal". I read a memoir by a man who spent many years on death row on a false conviction (The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton) where he made the observation, "It's strange what you can get used to." No matter what kind of awfulness you have to adjust to in life, often it's the adjusting part that is the most painful. Especially when it's something like this that is absolutely, totally, unexpected. And with your son having been in the military which values honor so much, and where moms have to get used to sons in danger but in return get a lot of pride (from what I've seen of my sister-in-law as a military mom), it must be an especially long way to fall, an especially big adjustment. I know I felt like I had a long way to fall in going from an honor student who everyone said was just a great kid, to defending him from a class B felony. I'm getting used to knowing what he did and being able to see that as just one part of him, that he seems to be turning away from. So while my pride in him is nowhere near as high as it was before, it's at a manageable equilibrium. However, the only way to where I am now was to go through the very painful process of wrapping my mind around the reality of what he'd done--what I can know of it anyway. And I don't think there's any shortcut to that or any way to make it hurt any less.
I have learned that people do not move past a label often. The vile attacks I have seen towards people with the SO label make me sick that that is what he will have to go through now.
DeleteI am just sick knowing what he did, the shock is still right at the surface. I have not cried for a few days but I don't expect that to last long.