Yep, you’ve read it right. Grief certainly isn’t for sissies, if you’ve lost a child and let alone when you’ve lost two barely a year apart.

That’s my story and this is what I will be sharing with you in the pages to follow. I want to say upfront that if you are the type of person who takes offense easily, please don’t bother to read further because if it wasn’t for my sense of humor, I wouldn’t be here today to write and share this story of mine with you and if I had to stop and worry about those who may be offended in me finding the humor in the darkest of situations I wouldn’t be who I am.

Having said that, I understand that if you’re reading this you have most likely lost a loved one and that’s exactly why I say that grief isn’t for sissies as it’s a painful, very lonely and sad journey at best and absolutely no-one can take your pain away or help you deal with it as even if they walked in your shoes, no two people will experience it in exactly the same way.

So, with that I hope this book brings you inspiration and some closure or at the very least acceptance as one consolation I can give you today is to tell you that your pain of missing them will never go away, however it is true that in time you do learn to manage it better, or rather you learn how to manage life without them better if you so choose.

Much love to you all,

MEL

                       BRENDON (MY EVERYTHING) 

From the moment I felt that first feisty movement in my womb, I was madly in love with this little baby and that never changed to this day.

Brendon was simply my everything. He was born by Cesarean section in Cape Town, South Africa and the most beautiful, perfect baby I had ever seen. Let’s call it “love at first sight”, because that’s certainly what it was for me.

If I look back on Brendon’s path, one thing that stands out is that this son of mine certainly had numerous near death experiences, yet in hindsight it is as though he chose again and again that he’d rather stay a bit long and to be honest I feel that way about both my sons – almost as though they postponed and postponed leaving until they could not postpone any longer and had to leave.

This boy lit up my life and to this day, even without closing my eyes, I can see him when he was about age seven, walking on the football field at school. He was fiercely proud and walked with immense confidence and his mom was super proud of him. Brendon was an enigma. I doted on him and was fiercely protective of him, so much so that when I discovered I was pregnant with Zandré, I almost feared that I wouldn’t be able to love him the same.

I also remember the first time I gave Brendon a hiding, I lay on my bed crying for about half an hour afterwards until he came into my room and asked me if I was "ok" (he was about three years old). As most parents do, I raised my children based on how I was raised, so I believed not to spare the rod to spoil the child. And quite honestly, because I received numerous hidings as a child, it broke my heart to give my children physical punishment when they were little and even the use of a wooden spoon was a terrible idea to me as I received beatings with a belt that left me with purple and blue marks on my legs and body.

Nonetheless, it was a last resort and it worked as back then we didn’t quite raise children as psychologically orientated as we do today.

As a two-year old toddler, Brendon was the king of tantrums and would throw himself down on the floor, no matter where we were if he couldn’t get what he wanted. This happened one afternoon when his dad and I went Christmas shopping. I was about seven months pregnant with Zandré and we were at the Hyper Market with Brendon. The trolley was stacked with sweets and chocolates for him, yet as we approached the endless lines of people at the cashiers, Brendon spotted a bin filled with chocolate shaped tools and wanted one. I refused as he had plenty of chocolates in the trolley already.

He wouldn’t relent to compromise either and threw himself down on the ground, kicking and screaming while demanding the chocolate tool set. Everyone around us were staring from him to us and very calmly, I took my handbag from my shoulder and handed it to my then husband, bent down and removed my shoe and started counting to three. I gave him a warning twice that if he didn’t stop his tantrum immediately, that I would give him good reason for a tantrum. Needless to say, he didn’t even register a single word of that, so when I reached three, I bent down and gave him a good hiding using my shoe. Everyone in our immediate surrounds went quiet as mice and then one woman audibly whispered to her partner:” Did you see that? She actually just hit her child!” Well, I gave her a dead stare and announced equally audibly that anyone who had a problem with me disciplining my child could come forward to have the same as he just had. The couple removed themselves from that line and promptly moved into the crowd. I placed Brendon in the seat of the trolley and we proceeded through the checkout. My husband didn’t utter a single word through all of this.

March the following year, Zandré was born and in all honesty, Brendon was the most amazing older brother and welcomed the new baby into our home. He took on the role of older brother very seriously from the start and was super protective of his little brother. This didn’t mean that when they were toddlers they didn’t fight, but where it counted, Brendon always looked out for Zandré.

One of the most significant memories I have of Brendon is when he was four years old. I was on my way to the beach with them one morning and he was sitting behind me when suddenly he asked me:” Mommy, where exactly do babies come from?” I looked at him in the rear view mirror and that turned out to be one of the most humorous trips to the beach we ever had as this is how I explained it:

“When two people love each other, they have sex. This is when a man puts his penis in a woman’s vagina, and they reach what we call an orgasm. That is the moment when all these little tadpoles rush out of the penis (and people call them sperm) and race into the womb, because you see, the fastest of the swimmers get to develop into an embryo that in turn becomes a baby as it grows in the mommy’s womb.” With this explanation, after arriving at the beach I demonstrated dramatically with hand gestures how these tadpoles raced up the womb and further explained that the womb is just below the tummy.

He was satisfied and when we returned back to the farm after our day at the beach, I saw all the little farm laborers’ kids walk in a line behind Brendon, animatedly copying the gestures I had demonstrated earlier that day in explaining “exactly where babies came from”. I had to smile as it was clear to me that now all the children on that farm received sex ed for sure. And that’s how it was with my boys and I throughout their lives. If they wanted to know something on any topic, especially intimacy and relationships, they’d ask me and I would answer as openly and honestly as I could.

Then when Brendon was five years of age, I had a terrible car accident one night while their dad was playing action cricket. A family friend, Hein, the two boys and I were driving along a remote road late on a June winter’s night, when a Rottweiler unexpectedly ran in front of the pickup truck we were driving in, got stuck under the steering rod, causing the vehicle to swerve sharply to the left and nose-dive into the soil on the side of the road, flip back over front, roll twice and hit a tree.

I remember not only praying while this was all happening, but screaming out to God to take me, but to spare my boys. Brendon had been sleeping on Hein’s lap and Zandré was nestled on the seat between us in the cabin when the accident happened. When it finally came to a stop, it had landed on the driver’s side of the vehicle. My knee was caught under the steering wheel and a heavy weight was pushing down on me. It was only moments later that I realized it was Hein. I called out to my boys and from the semi-darkness heard a little voice replying: “I’m here Mommy!” It was Brendon and thank God, he’d fallen off Hein’s lap with the impact and was cocooned and protected by his legs in the space under the dashboard on the passenger side during the time that the vehicle rolled. He had a bruise on each knee and was in a state of shock.

Zandré wasn’t as fortunate. I started searching for him. The windscreen was shattered. In fact, it was no longer there as the entire cab was dented in and yet astonishingly the lights were still shining into the darkness. And there in the light I saw a little bundle lying in the dirt – it was my baby. He was lying on his side, with his back towards me. He wasn’t moving and I started screaming and crying all at once as I raged at God: “Give me back my boy! You give me back my boy! Don’t you take him!” In that moment, I’m sure I went mad with sheer panic and fear.

So, I started hitting and pushing at Hein to move and get off me. Brendon crawled down to me and I pushed him through the hole where the windscreen used to be. I smelt petrol and knew we had to get out of the wreck. Miraculously, I managed to pry my leg loose from under the steering wheel and crawled out. I knelt down next to Zandré and saw that his eyes were wide open and his pupils dilated, but they looked glazed and as I touched him, he gave the slightest little groan.  "Oh, God!  Oh, God!!" the sobs racked through me and I reckon for the first time in my life, I met "Despair".

It’s the strangest thing how the mind works in moments like those as I scanned the wreck and did a quick mental checklist - Brendon was standing there crying (check), Hein, though dazed was ok (check).  Then, in that moment, without thinking, I scooped my baby up in my arms and started running. Although we were kilometres outside of the closest town, in my crazed mind I thought that I could run to the nearest hospital.

Afterwards, it was so funny as Hein had run the Comrades marathon a couple of times, yet that night I outran him with Zandré huddled in my arms. A few meters down the road, I saw the lights of a farmhouse in the distance. I veered towards it and started running in that direction. No sooner had I done that than I heard a man’s voice calling out in the dark. It was coming from the direction of the wreckage and as I glanced over my shoulder in that direction, I saw bright flashlights searching through the sea of blackness.

I changed direction once again, with Hein now shortly on my heels, Brendon cradled in his arms. That night I ran through a barbed wire perimeter fence, scaled ditches and stumbled through tall grass with my only objective being to get my sons help and especially Zandré.  Somehow, it registered in my mind that he was seriously injured and close to dying.

We reached two men in the darkness and the one asked me to hand him the baby. Shaking, I refused until he told me that he was a military doctor and could help, holding out his arms to receive my baby. It turned out that his brother (the second guy) was a well-known rally driver at the time, so I handed Zandré to the military doctor as the rest of us bundled into the car.  Brendon, huddled between Hein and I, whimpered:" Mommy, why did you run away from me?"  In a complete state of shock myself, I never realized how severely that situation impacted him that night and just how extremely traumatized he was by it.  I did have him see a psychologist after the accident and he maintained to her that I had ran away with his little brother in my arms and left him in the veld after I tried to kill all of us.  It was only in later years that we discussed circumstances of that night and the accident in detail that I was able to clarify matters for my son.

I literally have no idea how long we had run down the road and through the veld, but that guy got us to the hospital within less than ten minutes from the time that the accident happened. Doctors later told us that it was an absolute miracle and this was mainly what saved Zandré's life that night.

That was a night filled with miracles. I was covered in cuts, abrasions and had a severely swollen and bruised knee as well as being in a complete state of shock. Brendon had bruises on both knees and was severely shocked and traumatized and Hein had a piece of glass from the windscreen wedged into his eyebrow, literally inches from his eye other than the cuts and bruises he’d suffered, but we were all alive and in one piece, yet Zandré had broken his skull and left arm, clinging to life as we were admitted to the ER.  However, none of us retained any permanent damage from the accident as it became clear later.

Hein was focused on contacting my husband at the time and the moment he was allowed to do so and ended the call, he collapsed to the floor in the ER. He ended up having fifty-seven stitches yet sustained no lasting damage to his eye. Brendon and I were admitted to a ward where we huddled in a hospital bed together as Zandré was wheeled to the ICU – he was in a coma.

My husband walked in and told me that should my son die, he would divorce me and take Brendon from me as well. He didn’t want to speak to me whatsoever. Yes, I understand now that he too was in shock, but in that moment, it was completely devastating, and I felt the biggest degree of fear and despair I’d thought I could possibly feel.

Brendon and I were released to go home the following morning and when we drove to the accident scene and the police thereafter, it was almost impossible to think that all of us had survived the accident when looking at what was left of that pickup truck. The policemen reiterated this.

My husband didn’t share this sentiment exactly, despite not having all the facts of what exactly happened the night before, and as we drove home he told me that I was not to see Zandré in ICU as apparently the doctors told him that “it was too upsetting for the baby to hear my voice as his blood pressure increased each time he did”. So, for the following couple of days I was stranded at home and focusing on Brendon, while I was tormented by the thoughts of not being able to see my baby, the threat of losing Brendon as well and getting divorced. Then, one morning I did go to the hospital and there was my baby looking so frail and tiny in that hospital bed. He had bleeding and swelling on the brain and his little arm was taped to his body as his head injury was the first and foremost priority. I was informed by the neurologist that if he didn’t wake from the coma, they would fly him to a hospital equipped for pediatric neurosurgery the following day and he’d have to undergo neurosurgery to drain the fluid and ease the swelling on his brain.

I sat down next to his bed and started reading him the children's book Noddy and at one point I looked up at him and there he was with those big green eyes staring back at me. Zandré had this thing where his laughter reached his eyes, like little sparkling stars, even before it touched his lips and that day was no different. So, he smiled at me and said:” Coke.” I jumped up, kissed him and ran to the hospital cafeteria where I bought a can of Coke. Back in the ward, to the protest of the nursing staff, I held the straw to his mouth, and he drank thirstily and deeply.

The nursing staff were amazed and then asked me to try feed him as until that point he was receiving tube feeding. I remained at the hospital day and night from that point forward and soon after he was transferred from the ICU and sent to the children’s ward. His little arm had a clean fracture and was put in a cast. He sustained no permanent damage from his injuries and healed in record timing. This was certainly a near death experience for both my boys and I am so grateful that they didn’t leave me at that time. Brendon was five years old then and Zandré only three.

That was also the year when their father and I decided to get divorced. Well, in all honesty, I was the one who wanted a divorce as even though he was a good father and husband in many ways, I simply couldn’t live with being controlled the way he felt the need to have to control me.

The hardest part of that decision was to tell the boys, especially Brendon. And yes, he didn’t take it well and it broke my heart each time he cried and looking back, I realize that we could have handled it so differently in many ways, but we did the best we knew how at the time. I recall people saying that we had a "picket fence divorce" since it was so amicable to all appearances, but unless you've actually lived someone's experiences, you can never know the real truth behind the final outcome.  I’ve learned so much from my mistakes and one of the things that I’ve learnt is that there is no such thing as a mistake – it’s all part of our learning on this soul journey of ours (but more about this later).

I am a free spirit and I wanted to be free to be me. He was rigid and set in his ways and together we simply couldn’t find the harmony that we both craved. However, we were both clear and determined about one thing and that was that the boys came first, no matter what or where our future paths were destined to take us. We were in agreement on that.

After our divorce I enrolled Brendon in an English school as this was one of our bones of contention since I felt the boys would do much better with an English education and foundation, with the consideration of their future, whereas he felt they should have an Afrikaans foundation. Of course, at that time I envisioned my boys travelling abroad and possibly even having a future in another country, if they so chose. He felt they could do that with Afrikaans being their main language. He is a well-traveled man himself, but back then he hadn’t traveled abroad yet, so again it makes sense in hindsight that he wouldn’t budge from his roots at the time. This was the point where our home language changed from Afrikaans to English mainly or at the very least a bilingual one at best.

My husband and I remained good friends after our divorce and the boys grew to understand that simply because you choose to divorce someone doesn’t mean you can’t be their friend or at least be nice to them.

Throughout Brendon’s formative years, it was clear that he was a free spirit like his mom, yet he did tend to struggle with the black and white, rigid thinking of his dad at the best of times. He was my Aries boy in Western Astrology and a Horse in Eastern Astrology, and both resembled his nature thoroughly. I would have definitely associated him with a well-bred thoroughbred racehorse for sure. And on many levels, he was as full of shit as a typical Aries can be too, but he always knew his mom loved him unconditionally and regardless. There is so much more I can tell you about this child, but to write about every incident in his life, how it affected him and what it entailed will take me a lifetime and keep you busy reading for most of your lifetime. Like I said, from the day he was born, he was an enigma. His friends later called him Legend, and that’s certainly exactly what he grew up to be.

To say Brendon’s teens were tumultuous would be a complete understatement. Like his mom, he never did anything half-measure and I mean anything.

He was a “mommy’s boy” (and take note that I was the only person that was ever allowed to call him this and be rewarded by that beautiful wide grin of his) in many aspects, yet fiercely independent and proud. But what made him extremely unique is that bundled in with this was a humbleness of note.

I recall when he was seven years old, he cut his foot on our automated gate one day. I rushed him to the doctors’ rooms where they asked me to assist the nurse in holding him down so that the doctor could apply local unaesthetic and stitch up the wound. Well, Brendon went ballistic and threatened the doctor and nurse that if they touched him, he would get his father to sue them. We all had to laugh at this ranting and raving little boy who tried to apply great authority in his moment of distress and pain.

By the time he turned twelve, he told me that he was ready to learn to drive and at this age he was as tall as I was, so I started giving him driving lessons within the safety of the walls of the estate we lived in. It wasn’t until years later that I started driving an automatic transmission car, so he learned how to drive in a manual transmission car from the start and fared very well at it.

One afternoon he casually informed me that he was now old enough and ready to watch nudity on television. Not sex, but boobs and nudity. Even though I’ve always considered myself to be very open-minded, I booked us in to see a pediatric psychologist and posed this information to him. His response was that yes, a child knows when they are ready so it’s all good for me to go with it. I felt much better about the decision now that I had the input of an expert.  So with great delight, he now felt confident that he was free to explore nudity, whereas Zandré still had to close his eyes when a scene with nudity was displayed on television.

Brendon also went through that typical adolescent dilemma of developing acne around this age. This was his biggest challenge by far at that point in his life and left him feeling very self-conscious and even insecure to a degree. I did my best to help him in taking him to a dermatologist and eventually putting him on Roaccutane. It was quite a severe medication and costly at that, but since his father refused to contribute to this medication, I made sure I got it for him, and it certainly helped. That’s another thing that stood out throughout my boys’ life span after my divorce from their father. He paid the absolute minimum in terms of their life costs and I made a promise to myself that I would maintain their standard of living equal to what they were accustomed to when I was married to their father, which by the Grace of God I managed to do through sheer hard work, a will of steel and perseverance. Like I said, Brendon was age seven and Zandré five years old when we divorced and up until when they turned eighteen years old, he only ever paid R500 in maintenance (roughly $50 Australian dollars).  He also made it clear that he only set aside R500 each for them for Christmas, so I was the one they presented their wish lists to before Christmas. It was not like he couldn’t afford more. He simply felt I didn’t need more and I never chose to act on it by going to court to ask for more money as a good relationship with him (at the very least on surface level) and them maintaining a good bond with their father was more important to me than more money.  Also, I wanted him to be able to establish a new life and find his own happiness.

But we’ll talk about this subject in more detail later. My sons were happy and free and so was I. They visited their father every alternate weekend and two of the school holidays each year. He respected my decisions, although he mostly didn’t always agree with them and often threatened me with taking my boys away from me. However, as they grew older, they chose to be with me when given the choice.

In fact, of the two of them, Brendon was fiercely loyal to me and went through a stage in his early teens where he refused to go to his dad even on the visitation weekends. His father then threatened him as well in that he would get a court order for them to come live with him. One of these incidents happened one particular weekend when Brendon was about fourteen. He stubbornly refused and told his father:” Fine. You do that and you’ll wish you’d never taken me from my mom, because I’ll smash your windscreen with a brick and become your worst nightmare as I’ll start using drugs and cause havoc in your life!” As usual his father turned to me, expecting me to “force” Brendon to go, however I shrugged and backed Brendon up by telling his dad that if he didn’t want to go, he didn’t have to and that perhaps he should respect his son's feelings and choices.

Brendon refused to visit him for quite some time after that, but eventually resumed his visits to his dad.

It was around this time that Brendon and I sat down, and he informed me that he was drinking with his friends and didn’t want to keep that secret from me anymore. One thing I’ve learnt about teens is that the best you can hope for is for them to be honest with you and even when they are, they are still not telling you everything, so I agreed that he could have beer at home when chilling out with friends. You see, I feel we as parents reach a stage (and usually it’s around the time when our kids turn fourteen – at least that’s what was true for me) where we cannot control them or tell them what to do anymore and from this point forward, we can only trust the foundation we have given them up until that point and guide them as best we are able to from thereon. So, that’s exactly what I did. Personally, I don’t believe any human-being should ever feel the need or desire to control another anyway. It’s not our job. We are purely here on this earth to guide others and preferably through our own actions, whether that next person is a child, partner, friend, etc.

It was also at this time when I decided to make a change in career from running my own IT company providing hardware and software sales and support to working with people as people dynamics are what I love most. So I completed courses in life coaching and started working full time as a medium (a gift I had from as far back as I can remember, but tried to get away from – I’ll tell you more about this in my next book about me).

Quite honestly, from Brendon’s fourteenth year the shit literally started hitting the fan. Nothing could have prepared me for the path that he dragged me on, but in as much as he had vehemently stood by me through thick and thin, I never gave up on him. You see, Brendon was that kind of guy who hardly ever provoked a fight or started it, but he was dead set on protecting his friends and the underdog. So, whenever a friend or someone who couldn’t fend for themselves got into trouble, you can bet that Brendon jumped in and fought on that person’s behalf.

This started a series of events that would last for the next four to six years of his life. It is definitely a period I wouldn’t wish over again, but I am grateful that I learnt from it and that I “always had his back” as he put it. He started mixed martial arts at this time of his life and that skill was considered a lethal weapon, so Brendon inevitably got arrested for assault GBH on numerous occasions when he did  get involved in a fight as he had the skills to do someone grievous bodily harm.

One of these occasions was when he went out one Friday evening while I was at a “braai” with friends. The next moment my friend received a call from her brother saying a pip-squeak of about fourteen had broken his nose. Unknown to me, she had intended to introduce me to her brother that evening, however had asked him to pick the kids up from the diner where they were hanging out before coming over. When he arrived at the diner however, he apparently walked in on a fight where his nephew was getting picked on and needless to say Brendon was among those throwing punches, defending this youngster. However, when he tried to intervene, he received a blow from my son on the nose and from what I heard a few more as well.

He brought all the boys back to her house (including Brendon) and I finally got to meet him. Brendon showed humility and apologized, and we went home. Fortunately, he didn’t press charges and only gave both of us a stern talking to before we left - not exactly the best foundation for a new friendship, I'd say. The fact of the matter is that this was pretty much where Brendon started shaping his reputation as a fighter and it didn’t matter what the intention behind it was, he was labelled as a troublemaker, even in the local media eventually.

We had endless conversations about being labelled and I told him to walk away when it’s not his problem, however his stock standard response was that he wouldn’t leave his friends in a situation where they were in trouble, nor the underdog in a fight, and no matter what the consequences, he would have his friends’ backs as he trusted that they would have his if ever it was needed.

It was also around this time when Brendon got into the car one afternoon when I picked him up from school with a very perturbed look on his face and much quieter than his usual self. When I asked him what the matter was, he explained that a girl he’d been friends with for a while came running towards him on the hockey field earlier on and that his stomach did this strange thing. “It was like thousands of bubbles, Mom and flipped upside down at the same time in this strange way”, he said to me. I burst out laughing and told him that he was in love. Her name was Tracy and it turned out that she was the love of Brendon’s life.

I loved her instantaneously from the very first moment I met her and could fully understand why she had captured my son’s heart. Despite circumstances that tried to keep them apart, they were high school sweethearts throughout their high school careers and everyone who knew Brendon knew that Tracy was his girl and his heart belonged to her. It was a magical, beautiful young love. Of course, with Brendon’s reputation at that time, her parents initially accepted the relationship and budding young love, however as Brendon eventually made front page news in the local newspaper for assaulting an adult male who crashed a teenage party and hit his friend with a baseball bat, her parents refused the two of them to see each other anymore.

But these two teenagers refused to give up on each other and even engaged me to support them in continuing to meet up, which I did. And the more her mom resisted the relationship, the more they were drawn to each other. Eventually her mom came to my home one day and confronted me, telling me that I should be ashamed of myself and that she found me despicable. I remember feeling sorry for her in that moment, understanding that she was just being a mom wanting to protect her daughter, yet sad at the same time at how little she appeared to trust this beautiful daughter of hers. And of course, I felt a degree of anger and hurt as she insulted my Brendon in the process as well.

Oh, believe me, I wasn’t blind to my son’s shortcomings and at the time none of us would have imagined that both Tracy, her family and I would end up living in Australia years later. What I understood then was that this was young love and no matter what anyone did, they would find a way of being together and the more anyone resisted and opposed it, the more they would be drawn to each other and I recognized too that aside from this, theirs was a very unique love – call it a soul connection if you like.

I certainly didn’t always agree with how Brendon treated Tracy, yet at the same time understood that it was due to his own insecurities. There were numerous occasions where I would get a call from her late at night when they had an argument whilst out and he’d told her to get out of his car, so I would go pick her up wherever she was; there were times when they had arguments in my home and even though I never interfered, I would try to offer a resolution after the heat of the argument was over. And always, always I would sit my son down and talk to him about his behavior and give advise on how he could have handled the situation differently, but all this was done with much love and no judgment of him.  My approach to intervention was to have them attempt to resolve it themselves first and then offer guidance on how they could perhaps consider approaching the situation differently going forward, thereby respecting their personal boundaries and space.

Meanwhile, Brendon continued to get involved in fights and I also received a call from his principal one morning to inform me that my ex-husband and I had to come see him. I rushed off to the school and as I walked into the reception area of the principal's office, my ex-husband muttered that I had no control over this boy and should remember that whatever the reason for us being there, it is my fault and that he wanted no part in it.  (It's funny, but in situations like these where my boy was in trouble, his father always referred to him as "your son". Brendon and I sat down next to each other and I took his hand into mine as the principal told us that he had heard from a parent that my son was drinking on the weekend. I politely asked him where this parent had seen Brendon drinking and was told that he didn’t have that information, but that he wanted to know if I was aware of the fact that this was the case. My reply was: “ Sir, yes I am aware that my son drinks beer and in fact, I buy it for him to have at my home because my philosophy is that I’d rather have him experiment with whatever he feels inclined to experiment with in the safety of my home and in my presence where I can supervise and even come to his aid if need be, than have him sneak off and go do it out in public or feel the need to hide things from me. So, first of all from what you’ve told me, he didn’t drink on school premises and neither did he do it in his school uniform, right? He also didn’t do it out in public where this parent or anyone else could have seen him. Am I correct in my understanding?” The principle confirmed the above (my ex-husband didn’t utter a word), so I promptly got up and told him to mind his own business and not waste my time.  I emphatically told him:" If I as the parent choose to buy my son a six-pack of beer and he chooses to have some of that in the safety of his home on a weekend, then it is none of the school or anyone else’s business!" And with that Brendon and I promptly left his office. I can tell you hundreds of stories of how my reasoning and application of what I allowed got me into trouble those years, and you can believe me if I tell you that I certainly was judged by his father and many other people too - I really didn't give a shit then and I don't give much of a shit now. Very few people agreed with my parenting style, yet most of his friends sought my help when they were in trouble or found they weren’t coping in every-day life.

I suppose the one person who did understand and more specifically, who understood Brendon, was my friend by the name of Warren back then. Warren and his wife were amazing friends and he almost took on the role of godfather to Brendon. There were numerous times that Brendon got into fights resulting in him being injured, when Warren would pick him up and take him straight to hospital and only when he was cleared to go home, would phone me and give me the details of what took place. He also took on the role of mentor to Brendon and supported me in having endless chats with my son about not fighting and how a single moment in time could change your entire life for the worst. By the time he turned sixteen, I used to face each weekend with a lump in my throat and a heaviness in my heart as almost as regular as clockwork, the police would come knocking on my door each Friday evening. In fact, I started calling Fridays “Black Fridays” back then (and it had nothing to do with any flash sales!).