Thanks guys, all good advice...
HOP, I'll look into that. My thing about Elvis and Hughes is that true we all have individual tracks we've taken, it just that my early history closely matches those guys. In all my searching of male biographies (100's, presidents, movie stars, business leaders, teachers, etc.) I can't find one single man with no siblings, no father, doting mother who survived and thrived to ANY degree. Surely there is nothing new under the sun and if there were just a handful of men I would've found them.
An interesting aside, that may even help women on the board. My mom came over to see if she could help after my wife told her I was going to the inpatient center (my mistake there for not telling my wife that she was not to do that) and immediately went to the tears, I mean within 10 seconds. Now some of you are saying, 'her sons going to the hospital, of course she would get emotional and want to help'. But it's not like that, she's just too close and smothering. It didn't start till I told her I would rather have my wife, basically rejecting her help and setting a boundary.
When I told her that if she 'really' wanted to help me that she was going to have to start looking inside herself and stop saying 'once a mother always a mother'. I told her she was going to have to back off and let my wife help me with this issue. I even told her, as absolutely as nice as I could muster, that if she 'really, really' wanted to help her depressed and suicidal son, to go see a therapist, take an extensive psychological evaluation and let professionals share with her what her part in this whole mess was, and suggest behaviours that would allow her to have a better relationship with her son. Well, you can imagine what happened when that type of 'help' for her only son was suggested.
This morning, my first thoughts were something like this. From birth to now, my mom has had 4 male relationships, my father until my age 2, second husband from my age 10-12, current husband from my age 18 till now, and me for all years. That is the oddity, the abnormality. Between those relationships, there were no dating I was aware of, no efforts by her to be social with female friends to give her a chance to meet someone. I became her surrogate husband, the child she could lean on and not have to go out and experience the big bad world and all those mean men that just want one thing. Men that were boys that were faced with that type of pressure are going to grow up messed up.
I think my preaching message after all this would be, if your a mother of a boy (and girls too but really damaging to boys), please don't use emotion to control. Yes you feel like crying, its your nature, but its an unfair fight. Your boy has no choice in the matter. He must come to your rescue and will put on a face to take away your pain. He will then take this face into the world and it will cause him soooo much pain and suffering later. And also, big time important, is don't bail him out of trouble, no matter how much he works you. He must be made to face his problems. A good father will run interference between the two of you so if he's not around you have to do it, be strong.