Terry Real

And then you have a sweet, smart, sensitive little boy.

And that boy feels his mother's pain.

She doesn't have to do anything to, quote, enmesh him.

He feels that.

And he moves into caretaking her.

And then his template for relationship is, I'm a caretaker.

It's not mutual.

And then he has a very ambivalent relationship to being close to somebody because close means nobody cares about me.

I'm taking care of them.

That is endemic in our culture.

Yes, of course.

And there's also a difference between I'm a single mom raising my son.

We'll keep it to boys.

So I have a community of people around that boy to love him, and it's not all me.

that doesn't necessarily mean I need a surrogate father to bring him in to teach me how to be a man.

Anybody in the community, this is good, but not just one person.

Agreed.

The other thing I want to say is there's a difference between I'm being raised by a single parent and I'm being raised by two parents, one of whom doesn't pay any attention to me.

There's a difference between somebody who's really gone and someone who's physically there and emotionally gone.

And that is a wound.