Is there a Peter Pan in Your Life?

Disclaimer: if you are not an enabling woman these comments are not directed at you. If you are not a man child, or a man child in the making, these comments are not directed at you. Those are my life observations and I am entitled to write about what I see and you are entitled to disagree.

If you want to date a man, then you have to raise a boy to be a man. Too often as women we allow the males in our lives to stay in a perpetual state of childhood, and then we wonder where all the good men are. Some of us need to look no further than the image in the mirror.

 I ran across this story recently and I had to shake my head as I read about the three men who fathered 78 children with 46 different women. How did that happen? What knocked me upside the head was the 46 women? How do you not know that you’re dealing with a man with other WOMEN and a boat load of kids? It reinforced for me a thought pattern that I’ve been running away from, but can’t escape: a lot of what’s wrong with men is women. Some of us are ruining men from the cradle to the grave.

As mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, wives, baby mamas and whatever other roles we find ourselves in, it’s time for us take responsibility and stop coddling the boys and men in our lives; it’s time to cut the cord. How can we complain when we’re co-contributors to the madness that is men?

 We cook, clean and care for them when they can do it for themselves. We fill in the gaps again and again when they come up short—begging teachers for make-up work, cursing people out when they get in trouble, making up excuses for their shortcomings, co-signing for car loans, letting them live off us, giving them everything we can without asking for anything in return. And when this spoiled man child becomes an adult (in the legal sense), he still expects someone to cater, to him. And if he works his charms on the ladies just as he did on the women who raised him, he can pick up where he left off without missing a beat. Is there a man-child still holding your hand?

•  He needs you to co-sign for a car loan, but only if he can get the car he wants.
•  Her ran out of money because_______ (fill in the blank) and he needs you to help him out.
•  Women keep getting pregnant by him, and it’s their fault. 
•  He changes job frequently, if he has one at all.
•  As long as someone else can help, they should help him.
•  He thinks he’s the man of the house but doesn't contribute to the household. 

 Some of us rationalize that it’s hard out here for a man; it is. And it’s hard out here for a woman as well. We are natural nurturers, but we have to know when nurturing becomes smothering and we’re stunting male growth.

We have to let them grow up, even if it means watching them fall and get back up again. If we want good men, we have to raise good boys.