Why do I feel like I failed, and why does it hurt so badly?

He’s an individual, he can do what he wants. Like @gailcalled said, just like you did.

He is becoming his own man, independent of you.

You were free to make your oath to your god; your father didn’t snarl things up for you.

So now it is his turn.

@majorrich You raised him a Christian and he is living his Christian faith as he chooses as an adult.

I’m missing the problem here.

I think you did wonderfully!
You raised a child that has developed into an autonome person that is capable of making life-changing/-altering choices.
You can be proud.

It can be painful when we see our children reject practices we hold dear. But the main thing to remember is that you have raised a thinking, caring individual who is finding his or her own way through life. The foundation you provided is there.

Whoa…you need to seriously examine your criteria of what ” going wrong” means!

Your son is his own man now, and he is free to worship the faith of his choice.

If you are willing to forsake your son due to his choice of worship you need to ask yourself if you are behaving in a “godly” way.

This is my problem with organized religion, how can you possibly claim to have the monopoly on “right” worship?

Evidently to you Catholicism and Christianity are not the same at all?

@Coloma It’s not necessarily anything going wrong. We were always very close and he and I would always talk about these things. We studied the Bible together, he never made any mention of anything of our style of worship that didn’t fulfill any of his needs. I found out about his intentions on his Facebook page. He didn’t even trust me enough to ask what I thought. Going wrong is what did I do? I would not, not could not forsake my son, I find that comment hurtful. I am sorry to say that, but it really makes me feel worse that someone would think that.

I suppose because you are under some impression that the ‘Catholic way’ is drastically different from ‘Protestant way’. There are differences but they aren’t drastic and you can look them up. Doesn’t seem like you failed but of course you can feel that way if you want, it’s hard to tell a person to just stop feeling one way or another.

@majorrich Have you discussed this with him yet? Does he know you read his Facebook page?

It seems to me if he “announced” this on FB he was telling friends. Are you taking this as a slight? Or is it the lack of direct communication you are bothered with?

@SpatzieLover I don’t know. As I said, I am pretty ignorant about Catholicism. I dont understad why this hurts so bad.

@majorrich It’s possible you’re transferring your pain of having a child go off to college onto this one thing which is the first time you saw him differ from that which you put into him. Have you not dealt with him thinking on his own yet?

I suspect that my mother felt the exact same way when I took leave of the religion she had raised me in. Even now, 30 years later, I still catch glimpses of the scars that separation left. She still sees it as a failure on her part. I couldn’t disagree more.

I knew at the time how painful my decision would be for her, and I actually handled it quite clumsily, as I now see. We recently had a little heart-to-heart correspondence about that time and I told her how for years before that time I had felt insincere, just trying to keep up appearances so as not to hurt her. My move to break away had been absolutely necessary for the sake of my own integrity and maturation. This surprised her very much; she had really been convinced of the sincerity that I was trying so hard to project.

There was absolutely nothing she could or should have done to prevent my owning my own convictions. I wish I had handled it differently, perhaps, but what happened could really not have been otherwise.

@majorrich

I think you should be celebrating your sons, obvious, and very healthy and age appropriate questioning and desire to discover his own spiritual truths! This is a GOOD thing!

Would you wish for him to blindly follow any path in life without investigating on his own instead of going off heresay?

Congratulate yourself…I’d be far more concerned if he was NOT questioning his faith and your teachings!

Ask yourself this….if you truly believe that God is all encompassing love and forgiving of the worst “sins”, that God is EVERYWHERE and in EVERYTHING and that there is no separation…can you allow yourself to create separation from loving your son based on his personal and very healthy self investigation?

You have raised a man that is his own free agent and not afraid to explore, how can you possibly think you have failed!

It’s the kids that don’t rebel, question, go forth to seek their own answers that constitute parental failure to launch a psychologically healthy young adult.

This too shall pass, and your job as a father NOW is to not shame and guilt your son and lay a trip on him for not blindly following in daddys footsteps!

Congratulations…you have hardly failed!

I think that, as parents, we invest a lot in teaching our children to follow a path we believe will make them the happiest. We give them or try to give them what we truly believe in. Often, we become very zealous about it and in our zeal, we may stop paying attention to the signs that our children are doing something merely to please us or get us off their backs, rather than because they really enjoy it or believe in it.

We put our hearts and souls into this and so, in a way, we believe we have become our children or at least placed a part of ourselves in our children.

However, when the children move out, they may finally feel free to be who they see themselves as. They want to experiment with other ways of being or they know themselves to be something different than what it was possible to be while living with their parents. Think about people who are gay, for example.

So when you see them change, it is as if they threw away the part of themselves that was you; the part you identified with most strongly. It is that rejection that hurts so much and it is that rejection that you consider a failure. Had you done your job right, you may be telling yourself, they would not have rejected you. Had you been a good parent, you would have noticed what was happening, and you would have changed.

Depending on how seriously you take your specific brand of religion, this could be a serious rejection and it could drive a wedge between you for years, if not decades. I hope it doesn’t go that way. I wonder what you would feel if he rejected religion entirely?

The first thing to remind you of is that he will always be your son. I hope it is ok with you that he holds different ideas. They may or may not be a rejection of you, but I hope you will examine yourself closely and openly in case it is a rejection. Let me tell you why.

I rejected my father in some very important ways because of the pains he put me through as a child. To this day, I don’t even know if he knows I have rejected him. He never asked. He never acts as if he notices. I do not let him spend time alone with my children because they don’t like the way he treats them. He treats them as he treated me. No one should have to go through that. It was subtle but very significant and painful.

What I would have wanted from him is for him to come, very humbly, to me to ask if he had hurt me somehow? I would want him to listen without defending himself. Without even defending his opinions. I would have wanted him to be interested in who I was, not in who he wanted me to be. I would have wanted his support in me being who I wanted to be, no matter what he thought of it. Of course, his support was always conditional, and that was and is the problem. I never, ever matched his idea of who I should be, and I never ever could.

I don’t know if my story bears any similarity to yours, so it may be of little interest. But if you see something here, then I hope my story about what I would have wanted my father to do will be of help.

I would also like to say that I am not a very good example of who I want to be. I badly want my son to learn the discipline of music. I know he enjoys music, but he does not enjoy learning some of the skills he needs to become a musician. He is very reluctant to learn to read music and that is a big problem. Lately, I have been putting a lot of pressure on him to learn this and not goof off. It hurts him, I think, and I should back off, but I get so frustrated, I don’t know what to do. I hope I figure it out before I turn him off from music.

@majorrich

I apologize if it seemed as if I was questioning your love. Not at all. I think that instead of feeling your son does not trust you to discuss his spiritual transistion to another faith is about not wanting to disappoint you.

Again, your job now is to let him know you are open and supportive of his spiritual journey and even if he decides to become a Buddhist monk and live in a monastary that you will still sit next to him and in-joy, being “indivisable” under “God.” :-D

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Could be. He is an only child. It was very hard when he left for school. This is coming right on the heels of that. I had always encouraged him to think for himself. Especially during my illness. I didn’t think I would live to see him go to college.

As others have stated, Catholicism and Protestantism aren’t that different. Both hold the same core beliefs. Your son is still a Christian. Like a lot of other parents in similar situations, you’re probably disappointed that he hasn’t kept to all of your beliefs, but he’s a man now, with a mind of his own. You got to choose your belief system. Now that he’s an adult, it’s his turn to do the same.

@majorrich, My husband was a “Catholic” and eloped with me—- a non believing/practicing anything at the time. He went home a day later and told his parents that we had eloped – of course that meant a non recognized marriage by them, spiritually speaking. But the response was still “At least you are married.” Within a week my mother-in-law called and invited us to dinner at their home and this became the start of the humbling of smilingheart1, and it was her ways of acceptance and not judging (although the family was all a-buzz) which over a period of time melted my heart and she became one of my all time favourite people I have loved in my lifetime. And I came to believe.

I am not in any way trying to dismiss your concerns, but he 1) may prefer the ritual, 2) may prefer the music, and/or 3) may want to date/propose to a Catholic girl.

I was brought up in the Anglican Catholic church and find that I feel really “let down” when I attend other church services (other than Roman Catholic) because they all feel so casual by comparison. I love the ritual and sung services that both Roman and Anglican Catholic churches offer. If this is what it takes for me to feel connected to God, would you take that away from me?

The same may well be true for your son. We each need to find our own way to connect to the Divine and it isn’t the same for everyone. I think it is terrific that your son has actually made a commitment to faith such that he is choosing to share it on Facebook. I think you raised him right!

Probably met a girl. A Catholic one, that is.

He still believes in God, right? So you haven’t failed in that respect, you’ve won one for God.

And it’s easy to update your fb page with a life-changing affirmation, it’s much harder to sit down and explain your decision to a father you love and respect. I’m sure your son needs time to craft his arguments before he sits across a table from you, that’s all.

@Rheto_Ric “you’ve won one for God”

What does that mean?

It means that as long as he believes in the whole Jesus thing, he’s going to the same place that she’s going, regardless what color robes each of their pastors wear or what language their sermons are in :-p

Exactly. And I personally believe that guardians (parents, close family members) and personal tragedies are generally the two things that point people to a belief in God. It seems to me that he won the battle at an early age. At least the kid hasn’t denounced his faith in God. I really can’t see any failure on his part here. From his perspective, I hasten to add, not from an atheist stand point.

“I am ignorant as to the ins and outs of the Catholic faith, but at least he is not abandoning Christianity completely.”

He’s not abandoning Christianity at all. The first Christians were Catholic. (Actually, strictly speaking, the first Christians were Jews.) I suggest that you look into learning more about the Catholic faith before you beat yourself up for no reason.

I understand your pain in hearing something significant to you in this way – facebook is not the medium for significant announcements. I always feel it should be more like the national news when there’s a tragedy involving indivuals, where they have to say “their family has been informed” and wait for a period before being allowed to name names.

He’s becoming an adult. He’s out and about in the real world, where there are people of other faiths and people of no faith (like myself). Think about it, on the other side of the world are millions of other people who have either never heard of any type of Christian God or if they have, they don’t believe in it, because they have their own belief system that was likely handed down to them by their parents and their ancestors, just like yours did with you. But until you get out in the world and start thinking for youself and considering that your way may not be the only way, or may not even be correct at all, most people just do whatever their parents and their church tell them to do, without ever even thinking about the ramifications or the truth or about any other possibilities that might be out there.

Take a look at the news, there’s a whole bunch of people over there in the Middle East that think Christianity is a whole lot of hooey, but they’ve been raised generation, by generation (just like you have) to believe in what their parents and their clergy members have told them is right.

Don’t you think it’s kind of ironic that no one on earth can really agree on whether or not there’s a God, or who’s religion or God is the right one, or the best one? If we all knew the truth, things would be different. But if or until we all learn the truth, it’s in everyone’s best interest to question long held beliefs, to seek out the truth, to find out why a whole bunch of other people believe in something completely different, to see if there’s any common ground, or to see if other people have found a better way, or a belief system that’s closer to the truth, or if some other belief system makes life better for everyone.

He may have slowly (or very quickly) come to the conclusion that the faith he was brought up in doesn’t make a lot of sense. Faith, by it’s definition, doesn’t leave room for questions or pondering other ideas. He’s an adult, so he has access to all sorts of information that he can get from all around the world from all sorts of people that have different, or conflicting, or nebulous, or fasinating, or helpful, or complementary, or completely new (to him, and maybe to you) ideas about right and wrong, how things are, how we came into being, why we are here, whether we have a purpose. He’s probably met a number of people out in the real world that are very different in their beliefs and outlook than you and your family and friends back home and in your church.

The only way you could wrong him is to make him feel ashamed for looking for and seeking out the truth and what is best and right for him. It doesn’t sound like he blatantly came out and made a big snarky announcement that he was denouncing you or your faith, simply that he’s trying out something different that seems like a better fit for him. Because he was somewhat sheltered (I’m guessing that, because you said that you were somewhat ignorant of Catholicism, so I’m figuring that you probably haven’t given much thought towards Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Agnosticism, Atheism, Wiccans, Mormonism, Jehova’s Witness’s beliefs, Shintoism, Hinduism, Seventh Day Adventist’s beliefs, or Quaker’s beliefs, or American Indian or African or South American tribal or Inuit spiritual beliefs etc. etc.) which is pretty normal for most folks in the US. Most folks are given a belief system by their parents and their church, and if most of the other people around them believe the same thing and they’re not presented with any other ideas, and they’re not challenged by other people with different beliefs and their belief system doesn’t cause them a lot of grief, then it’s pretty easy to just go with the flow.

Your son, probably just went with the flow, until he met some folks at school or in his new town that showed him that their is a whole wide world of different belief systems out there. And then he probably started asking himself a few questions about his own belief system. That is how we learn, that is how we grow, that is how we evolve and develop. Hopefully, while questioning his old faith, he is also learning all about tolerance, and how you have to accomodate other people with different belief systems, so far as those other belief systems don’t cause harm.

And by harm I don’t mean people conjuring up icky images of gay fellows having sex in their minds, or having someone wish them “Happy Holidays.” That’s not harm. Harm is when people of supposed faith show up at the funerals of service people because they don’t like the idea of gays being allowed to serve in the military. Harm is when a group of people with supposed faith fly a plane into a building. Harm is when people of supposed faith throw bombs into the basement of a church and kill innocent children. Harm is when people of supposed faith set fire to a synagogue. Harm is when people of supposed faith put on white sheets and lynch people, who’s skin is a different color.

So as long as you taught your son to be a kind person, a tolerant person and someone who seeks truth and knowledge, which it sounds like you did, then I think you shouldn’t beat yourself up or feel guilty or feel anything other than pride in the fact that you’ve got a good kid. Good kids come in all shapes and sizes and with all sorts of different faiths, or even a lack of faith. Embrace him and love him, that’s all you have to do.

Lonelydragon, Catholics pray to Mary and Protestants do not. How can their core values be the same?

Catholicism is considered a part of Christianity.
Yes, there are differences. Ex-nazi popes and child-molesting priests are a stain on them, but so are these assholes on mine.

Your only failure concerning him or yourself for that matter… is in failing to realize how your only job concerning your children is to guide them safely and happily to where they need to be FOR THEMSELVES.

Thinking like this, is how religion spreads in the first place…Tradition.

Your son has grown into a man who is capable of making his own choices. In that regard, you’ve succeeded.

There’s no rule saying that you’re not a good parent unless you manage to brainwash your child into believing all the exact same things you do. You’ve succeeded as a parent if your child made it to adulthood as a reasonably balanced and capable person, and it sounds like he has. Try not to feel too upset.

@john65pennington if you drew a Venn Diagram of Protestant and Catholic “flavors” of Christianity, with an exhaustive list of the beliefs of each faith I think you’d find that they share nearly everything. People tend to focus on the differences, instead of the similarities which leads to unnecessary division, tension and conflict. If God does exist, I doubt he’s all that picky about those kinds of details (although he might frown upon people who allowed those small differences to interfere with their relationships).