My previous theories have been proven correct.  I see Nick as a neglected boy.  When he was young and in LA with his mother, she was too busy with work to give him much time.  The stepfather was too busy looking at women and telling a young boy about his sex life.  These adults were like children themselves.

Nick goes to parties with his dad where people get high and he’s treated like an adult.  Nick, as a recovering drug addict says, “I never really had a childhood.”  His dad does a lot of things with him, but Nick says he treated him more like a friend.  I remember Stephen once telling me when he was still a teenager that the problem with a lot of parents was they try to be a friend instead of a parent.  This is the mistake Nick’s dad made.

I’m not sure why there is always a move to take blame away from the parent for what their kids do.  I agree that you can’t blame a parent for what a kid does after they are an adult, but you can blame them for what happens when they’re children.  If parents have nothing do to with how their children turn out, then we just as well raise them in institutions.  Of course there are always exceptions to the rule.  In the end, Nick’s dad admits his error.  He said he should have stepped in as soon as he found Nick was using drugs at 12.  There’s nothing a parent can legally do after a son or daughter turns 18.  He exerted no control.  He is right.  He had the ability to step in and better mold Nick’s life between the ages of 12 & 17 than he ever did after he was 18.   So while the dad tried hard later in Nick’s life.  It was really too late.  

I paraphrased Lord Acton in a previous blog.  He said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”  I say that the price of being a good parent and raising good kids is eternal vigilance."  It’s a 24/7 job. There was a family in a town where I lived.  The parents had seven boys.  Every one became an Eagle Scout.  The seventh boy was in my Boy Scout troop when I was a scoutmaster and he was bright, cheerful, and centered.  He showed no signs of unwanted expectations.   I met him again as an adult and he was much the same.  I felt his parents had done a great job.  Archie Manning and his wife are another good example. 

If we take the view that parents are not responsible for what children become, then we are doing a disservice to the parents who raise their children by being  good parents rather than a friend or nothing but a place holder in their children’s lives.

I’m painting with a broad brush, but what we see of families is only observed at a distance.  It’s not intimate.  We don’t see all that is going on.  The beauty of reading a book by the father as well as the son is the reader gets great insight into their lives and why things went the way they did.

While listening to the father tell his story, I remember thinking, “If I lived in that house, I’d be depressed too.”  The rationalization and intellectualization that went on would have driven me crazy.

Nick said he always had need of a girlfriend.  He felt incomplete as early as 12 if he didn’t have one.  He either had one or was looking for one.  It sounds like he was lonely.  And in that family I think I can understand why.

Steinbeck in East of Eden has one of his characters say, “I don’t very much believe in blood.  I think when a man finds good or bad in his children, he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.”  I believe this is true in 99% of the cases.  One always has to allow for exceptions.