Family

Dark and Bright

By / May 12, 2015

Is it the end of the school year yet? No. Two and a half long weeks remain. It feels like an endurance slog. Which is strange since in theory we’ve reached the part of the year where things are becoming complete. Yet Patch has melted into a big pile of stress instead of gaining energy as we near the end. It is the opposite of what I’d hoped for in the month of May. The quantity of things that I am behind on, and the quantity of extra tasks that get dumped on me at a moments notice are enough to crush me. I can hardly believe we’re only on Tuesday. So much has been crammed into the hours since Sunday morning.

Yet things are bright as well. Kiki is home, following me around and taking jobs away from me to do them herself. The weather has been lovely. My front flowerbeds are so beautiful that my neighbors have thanked me for the beauty they enjoy seeing when they come home. (I credit the flowerbeds to the hours Kiki and I put in last year. We will also not mention the beds around the trees which are mostly waist high grass.) The Kickstarter will close in less than a week and it has done very well. We’re going to have the resources we need to make lots of very cool stuff. I’m going to get to go to GenCon with Howard in July and I’m very much looking forward to that trip.

I have to remember the bright things because some of the hard stuff has nearly overwhelmed me in the past weeks. It is hard for me to find a hopeful perspective. At some point I need to write a post about how parenting depression is different from being married to it. I don’t have the energy for that post right now. Not on four hours of sleep and the careful management that will be necessary to land my kids in bed without any further emotional upheavals today.

Memories of a Room

By / June 24, 2023 / 2 Comments

The end goal for the construction we endured a week ago was to create a room large enough for my two boys to share. They’ve been sharing a room for twelve years, ever since Patch was born, and it worked reasonably well when they had a bunk bed. But a few years ago they felt done with bunk beds. The result was a room that had an aisle for walking, two beds and two dressers. There really wasn’t any space for playing or hanging out. It was where they slept and where they stored their stuff. And they kept getting bigger until we had the largest person in our house and the rapidly growing one crammed together in the smallest bedroom. So I wiggled the finances around and we finished the basement room which used to be my shipping room. When we learned that the carpet would not arrive until mid-May, the boys decided to move into the new room and live with a concrete floor for a few weeks. We moved the essentials and boxed the rest in order to minimize the amount of stuff we’ll have to move back out for carpet install. By noon the furniture was in and the boys were already enjoying their new space.

A strange thing happened as the upstairs room began to empty out, I traveled back in time. The last time I saw the room so empty was when it held a crib and a mattress on the floor for my two little boys. I stood among the boxes and read the history writ on the walls. There were the circles Link drew on the wall and ceiling when he had the top bunk and planned out orbits for his glow-in-the-dark solar system. Next to them was the shadow of a Blues Clues wall sticker, beloved for years and then removed when it became embarrassing. The spot where Link decided to keep score in a game by writing it on the wall. A hundred pin holes because the boy’s default mechanism for hanging things was to steal push pins from my corkboard. My flow of memory was only enhanced by the fact that we dug into the very back corners of their closet. It was an archeological dig back to Link’s much younger years. I had him sort things he wanted to keep into boxes and the rest we discarded or gave away.

I kept it together until Link left his jar of eraser buddies for me to get rid of. I held it up and said “what about these.” He shook his head and said “nah.” I held the little jar in my hand. It had been so important to him eight years ago. I wrote a blog post about the games he played with them during homework time. That was half his lifetime ago and he has become someone else. I sat in the room after Link had gone downstairs. I looked around the room where my little boy used to live. I held one of his treasures in my hands and a wave of sadness rolled over me. I grieve sometimes for the children that are gone. They transformed and became new people. I like who they are. I certainly don’t want them to stop. But sometimes, like today, I cry for a while. And I keep the eraser buddies, even though I know that is a little bit silly.

The new room is so much better for the boys. They have space to be teenagers together. They’ve made plans to acquire a small couch and a monitor so that they can play video games with friends in their room. Link walked with me through IKEA and I could see him thinking about an adult living space. He’s getting excited about chairs they way he used to get excited about toys. Time marches onward. We change and we change our spaces to match our new selves. Next week Kiki will come home and move into the room that was vacated by the boys. She will hang things on the walls and turn that room into something it has never been before. In the near future, probably after Kiki has vacated to return to college, the room will get a new coat of paint and a new carpet. The room my little boy grew up in will transform, just as he did.

(Eraser buddies post: https://www.onecobble.com/2007/10/18/eraser-buddies/

Meal Habits

By / April 11, 2015

“Yeah. We don’t really have dinner at my house.” Gleek said into the phone. I’d been aware that she was talking to a friend, but hadn’t really been listening to her conversation. But that phrase jumped out at me and latched onto all my parenting guilt.
“I mean, mom makes food and calls us to eat it, but half the time, by time I get there the food is cold.” as Gleek said this, she turned and saw that I was listening. “It’s my own fault,” she rushed to say. “My mom calls me like 3-4 times. She’s a good mom.”

I thought about her words as Gleek continued to converse with her friend. I thought about the family meals we do have. Yes they’re more rare than the other kind, but they exist. I also thought of the other ways in which Howard and I deliberately draw our family together, creating bonding experiences. Yet I feel guilty about the lack of regular mealtimes. I worry about the fact that so much of what we eat is quick-fix food instead of planned and cooked from raw ingredients. This is one of the casualties of Howard and I both being stretched thin to cover all the jobs we have to do. And I’m not just talking about the jobs relating to our income. We’ve had a heavier load of mental health management in the past few months. That takes a toll.

I don’t foresee a grand improvement in our eating habits in the next three weeks. Howard and I are buried in pre-Kickstarter tasks. Then we’ll be buried in Kickstarter management. But next week the construction will be done on the previously unfinished basement room which will now be a bedroom. In three weeks Kiki will come home and I’ll have my live in business assistant again. Only a week or two beyond that and the school year will begin winding up. Some of the things that have been eating my energy will go on hiatus. Better meal planning can fit into the created space. I know it can because it has done so before and it will again.

Some months we eat too much frozen pizza. Other months we plan and cook meals in advance. In both cases we’re balancing needs against available time, energy, and finances. No matter I feel about our eating habits, I can be glad that I have a daughter who is socially aware enough to see that I’m listening and to give me a verbal vote of confidence.

Scenes from This Past Week

By / March 19, 2015 / 3 Comments

I talked to another parent with a son who is my son’s age. “He has a job now.” This other parent said. “It’s a restaurant job and he doesn’t like it much, but its being good for him.” The parent went on to describe how this boy is part way through learning how to drive and how he complains about the homework from his three AP classes. I sat there and listened to this father describe a parenting experience that was completely foreign to me. He wasn’t bragging, he was just telling me about stuff that felt completely normal to him. It was a description which matches the high school experience as witnessed in movies and on TV shows. And I vaguely remember going through something like it. I thought of my son, who spends so much time isolated. I thought of the therapy sessions, vocational rehab, and homeschooling that make up our existence. I thought about how none of it seems like enough and how I can’t currently picture my son going to college. It was like this other parent was telling me about a work of fiction, the fairytale of high school.

***

I sat in the elementary school office waiting for a meeting. As I waited for the teacher and the principal to be ready, I tried not to think about sitting in this same chair two years prior to discuss a different child in crisis. Two years is a long time, and you’d think that I’d have had time to process and let go of all the emotions. I haven’t had the time. I’ve been pushing thoughts out of my way so that I could take care of other thoughts. Mostly I don’t notice, until I hit a moment which would be déjà vu, except that I know exactly when and where I’ve experienced the moment before. It is so very familiar, same teacher, same room, same month of my child’s sixth grade year. But things are different too. Different child, different principal. This time there were only three of us in the room instead of five. This time we didn’t have to address behavioral or safety concerns. This time I didn’t show up with a plan for how to fix things. I’m too tired to make plans anymore. All I can do is say “this is where we are.” And to let them know that sometimes the homework won’t get done, not because I don’t think it is important, but because sometimes he can’t and sometimes I can’t. And I tell them enough about the things going on (beyond the those which relate to the child under their care) that they believe me when I say that sometimes the best I can give them won’t look like much.

***

My daughter was unsaddling the horse she’d been riding, so I wandered into the indoor arena. The big space was empty and the dirt was soft under my feet. I looked down at the shoe prints and hoof prints in the dirt and thought about how we all make marks upon the world simply by passing through. I looked back at my own prints, noticing the tread pattern of my shoes. I like going to the barn with my daughter. The priorities there are so different from anywhere else in my life. People tend not to be in any particular hurry. They chat, they pause to watch other people ride. The barn cats are friendly, glad to be picked up and snuggled. It is a space where my time is free of any other assignment than to bring my daughter, wait, then take her home again. Sometimes I bring work with me. Other times I just drift; watching my daughter manage a horse, listening to barn conversations. It is a much more pleasant form of therapy than the kind where we sit in and office and talk about hard things. Instead my daughter sits on top of an animal who outmasses her ten times over and learns that if she wants to control the horse, she has to first control herself. Telling people that my daughter has horseback riding lessons feels self-indulgent. Priviledged. But it is cheaper than office therapy by half. I walked back along my footprints feeling the quiet of the big empty space.

***

The words typed themselves on the screen in front of me. Or at least that is how it appeared. The truth was that my college daughter was typing words into a shared document. I was there to help her make sure the words said what she wanted them to say. It was a difficult message trying to give someone hope while also saying “I can’t be your security blanket. Please leave me alone.” It was the third or fourth time this year that I’ve helped my daughter sort out what words she needed for a difficult conversation. She’s had a semester of difficult conversations and growth.

***

The sun was bright in the front yard as Howard held up a brochure and squinted at the colors of our house. The page of the brochure showed shingles and we examined them to pick what would be on our roof for the next twenty years. The contractor stood in the yard with us. He’d made us a good offer, still expensive, but less than I’d been afraid we would have to pay. I’m just grateful we can pay. Even the contractor told us that the current state of our roof is a bit scary. All the gravel is loose, making the walking slippery. We couldn’t afford it last year or several years before that. I’m looking forward to being able to drive up to my house and not have to think “We really need to replace the roof before something breaks.”

***

After ten minutes of idling, I turned the engine off. My son looked up at this change in the status quo. We’d been sitting, mostly in silence. I’d run out of useful words. Instead I was waiting to see if he could decide to get out of the car and go to class. I could tell that part of him wanted to. When I asked, he said he liked his teacher, his classmates. He liked learning. Yet going was hard. It had been getting harder for a while. His teacher was worried. After twenty minutes I walked him into the building. He walked slow, his feet literally dragging with every step. In the hall we encountered his teacher from last year. She just happened to be there, and she happened to have time to stand and talk to us. She named what I knew, but hadn’t consciously recognized. I hadn’t wanted to recognize it because I really wanted one of my at-home kids to be fine. My son was depressed, chemically incapable of enjoying things that he would normally love. I mentioned that he’s already on medicine. She looked at my son, who was sitting, head down, arms curled around his knees, then she looked at me and said “If he’s on medicine, it isn’t working.” And I knew she was right. It was time for doctor’s appointments and teacher appointments. I am so weary of appointments.

***

“Take all the time you need.” He said to me in a quiet voice. We were sitting across a desk from each other in his office at the church building. I was there because I’d finally come to the conclusion that I should probably let the bishop of my congregation know about the mental health struggles impacting our family. I didn’t come with plans, just to tell him where we are and what feels hard. I tried to believe that I could take whatever time I needed, but I could feel that time pressing on me. LDS bishops are not paid for their ecclesiastical time. This man put in a full day of work and then put on a suit to put in hours during the evening. His job was huge. Bishops are always over burdened. I knew that on the other side of the office door sat someone who was waiting for the next appointment. And waiting. And waiting. Despite not wanting to take up too much time, I was so full of stories that I talked for ninety minutes. He listened to all of it.

At one point I apologized for not coming to him sooner. Because I knew that I should. I knew I needed help that my ward family could easily supply if they knew I needed it. But I didn’t want to be a burden. That seems like the good and kind thing to do, carry my own stuff so that no one else has to deal with it. Except that is the opposite of the purpose of having church in the first place. We’re not here to avoid burdening each other, we’re here to share one another’s burdens. With the weight of all the things spread across all the shoulders, it can be lifted. That can’t happen if we all hold our troubles tight and refuse to share them.

***

My fingers are on the keys and I want to spin out words through them, but the white space on the screen in front of me is empty. I try to find a place to start, a story I can tell. Except it seems like each story is tangled up with two or three things which are not mine to tell. My life and mind are filled with confidences that I must keep. Some of them will be less sharp in the future, less able to hurt. They can be told then. Others… will take much longer to lose their edge. I tell the stories I can, in the places that I can. The rest I hold for now.

The Walking Begins

By / March 7, 2015 / 1 Comment

In the brightest part of the afternoon, I told my kids to put on their walking shoes. We were headed for a park a mile away. One mile there, one mile back, with probable running around the park in the middle. It was the first walking event of the many that I expect to require this spring. We all need to be walking more, because in July our family will be going on a Pioneer Trek. We’ll spend four days dressed as Mormon pioneers, learning history, walking, and pulling a handcart full of our gear. I expect it to be a fascinating experience. At least it will be if we’re all in good enough physical shape that it isn’t miserable.

Pioneer stories are often told in my church. They feature large in our history as the early Mormons were often not welcomed in previously settled communities. They had to migrate en masse more than once until they went so far out west that they settled in Utah. Outfitting covered wagons and ox teams was very expensive. Over the twenty years that Mormons traveled across the plains to Utah, they found very efficient ways to get people and their belongings across. One of these methods were the handcart companies. These groups pulled two wheeled carts across a 1300 miles. They were devoted people who believed they were called of God to walk to a promised land. Three thousand people came to Utah pulling handcarts. The stories of these people are stories of courage, faith, endurance, sacrifice, tragedy, and pain. Those last items get an unfortunate amount of emphasis in the stories that are told at church. I often tune out when someone begins to tell a pioneer story because I know that the teller will attempt to yank on my heart strings.

We’ll be going on this Pioneer Trek with all the youth in our ward ages 12-18. The event is primarily for the youth, structured to teach them about church history and that they can survive hard things. Howard and I will be there as adult chaperones. We’ll be the Ma and Pa for a group of teenagers. Our kids will all be along for the experience, which is why we were asked to go. This is likely the only chance that clan Tayler will have to take a trip like this together. It will be something we won’t forget. It is already beginning to be. I had a reason to haul my kids out into the early spring air and make them walk to a park with me. Walking together led to talking with each other. It was all good. Next week we’ll walk to a different park.

Educational Off-Roading

By / January 16, 2015 / 5 Comments

There are things I don’t realize I hope for until the moment when I realize they won’t happen. In that moment I am smacked with sadness just as I have to figure out how to readjust my expectations. It was somewhere in November or December that I realized Link’s high school education was going to veer sharply from the standard path. He needed it to. I needed it to. Yet I still had to find that part of myself which had expected “normal” and make it let go.

The new plan is a partial home schooling arrangement. Link does most of his coursework through online packets. Most of the time he does that work in the computer lab at school. Sometimes he does that work at home. He still has a few regular classes on campus. I’m functioning as the enabler, assistant, and aide. I don’t make the curriculum, but I assist him in understanding what he is expected to do. Link loves this new format for school. For the first time he isn’t constantly overwhelmed by noisy classrooms where the coursework goes so slowly that he tunes out and misses important assignment details. He doesn’t get surprised by assignments being due when he didn’t even know he had one. He doesn’t have to fret over knowing he has an assignment, but not being sure how it is supposed to be done. All of the instructions are right there in front of him, patiently waiting for him to absorb them and do the work.

I can see how this arrangement is going to be good for him educationally. We’ve spent years adapting his school work to allow him to keep up in a regular classroom. Now he has to struggle with types of assignments that he’s never done before. But instead of simply failing an assignment and rushing onward because the class can’t stop for him, he will be required to re-do assignments until he has learned the necessary skills to move onward. In the areas where the assignments are easy for him, he doesn’t have to sit around and wait for other students to catch up. For a student like Link, who has some significant learning disabilities that impact some of his educational capabilities, this is brilliant. Especially since Link also has some off-the-chart educational advantages in other areas.

It seems like a perfect plan, but I’ve spent quite a lot of time being afraid that it won’t work. I fear that it will cause as many problems as it solves. In this plan Link has to sit for hours in a room mostly by himself. He has to keep himself working. He’ll have to work longer and harder hours than he has been used to doing. Unlike regular classrooms, those hours will all be focused thinking. Some of the skills he’ll have to learn are how to run the necessary software and format assignments for himself. There won’t be a teacher there tap-dancing and trying to keep him engaged. Instead it is just Link, the material, and Link’s own motivation. It is very possible that Link will not step up. That he won’t work at a rate sufficient to keep him on track for graduation next year.

This is one of those hidden hopes which I have had to acknowledge: I really want my son to graduate with his class. Ultimately the decision to do so is up to Link. I’ve done everything in my power to turn that goal from impossible to possible. Now he has to do the work to make it happen. It has been important for me to see that graduation goal. Even more important is for me to consciously recognize that I may have to sacrifice the graduation goal in service of a much more important goal: preparing Link to be a self-sufficient adult.

This is one of the other potential drawbacks of this plan, social isolation. In order for Link to be ready for adulthood, he needs to interact with other people. He needs to learn how to socialize and make friends in ways that he hasn’t yet learned how to do. He needs to figure out how to communicate his needs and how to listen to the needs of others. Sitting in a room by himself does not help him accomplish any of the important social learning which happens in high school. We’re going to have to figure out other ways to make sure he learns those things. That will mean more work for us as parents. This whole plan is a lot more work for me than the standard educational route. On the other hand, I’d much rather do this work than what I have been doing in the past few months. I was constantly manageing emotional crises as Link began to despair and consider himself a failure in all things. This new educational approach means that for the first time in years, Link can picture himself succeeding. We are both very aware how fortunate we are that the administration at his school is willing and able to support this plan. There are other schools in our school district who would not do the same.

We are now at the end of the first week and we have mixed results. Link loves it, but we’ve been confused by assignments frequently. I had to purchase and install Microsoft Office to make sure we had the same tools at home that Link has at school. We’ve spent lots of time just figuring out how to find necessary information, how to take the tests, how to submit assignments. And at the end of this first week, Link had a moment of despair because he could see that the work was all going too slowly. He thought he would fail at this too. I told him it is too early to tell if this will work. We need to keep going, ironing out the wrinkles, giving this our best try. So we’ll keep rolling along bumping our way over weeds and gullies as we travel parallel to the standard path.

Winding Down the Holiday

By / January 3, 2015

The Christmas Tree is once again banished to a bag in the basement. The other holiday paraphernalia is in boxes. Absent all the decorations, the front room feels empty. The house feels a bit empty as well. I spent eight hours of today returning Kiki and her belongings to college. We had good weather for the drive. The roads were clear and the combination of fresh snow and setting sun made for some lovely scenery on the drive back. More than once I wished I had a camera so that I could pull over and photograph the combinations of red hills, rising full moon, and bright yellow grass in a field of snow. Despite the camera in my phone, I did not pull over. It was cold out there, I was in a hurry to get home, and the resulting photographs would have displayed my lack of skill more than the beauty. Also, stopping on the side of the highway, not safe. Instead I contented myself with listening to a movie sound track and feeling triumphant when a crescendo of music carried me over the top of a rise and into the next valley.

Link went with me for the drive. He does this as often as there is room in the car and as long as the drives won’t pull him out of school. He just likes road trips. I like having company in the car, even when that company spends the entire trip with his hoodie pulled over his face so that he can sleep. We headed home to a house where I had a stack of books waiting for me. Before leaving this morning I made a quick trip to the library to pick up one reference book that I needed. It was located in the folklore section, so I came home with as many books as I could carry in my arms (14). Next time I’ll bring my bag of doom, because apparently I’m not a one-book-from-the-library type of person. The books are going to help me piece together some things I need for my novel. Though I admit that some of them just looked interesting.

We arrived home to a quiet house, everyone engaged in their own activities. I relished the silence for a while, but then gathered the kids for movie time. We’d watched Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II on New Year’s Day. It seemed like an appropriate way to ring in 2015, which is the future that Marty visits. It was fun to see how wackily wrong some of the future scenes were. What my kid didn’t notice was how eerily correct a few things were. Watching multiple channels at once is something the kids do every day. Being distracted by wearable devices at the dinner table, also normal. Today we pulled out Back to the Future Part III. These movies really are ridiculous and the second two have caricatures rather than characters, yet I love them anyway. They are steeped in nostalgia. They remind me of when 1985 was my reality. Also, they deliver the satisfying, if corny, endings. I’m really glad we had those movies to watch upon our arrival in 2015. I’m also glad that it has been ten years since I watched them. They are a mixed of brilliant and really dumb. Once every ten years is the right distance for me to enjoy them without being overwhelmed by the dumb bits.

Thus ends our holiday season. Tomorrow is Sunday, and marks the beginning of being back to a normal schedule. I think I may be ready for that.

Doubling Down on Family Time

By / November 28, 2014

We are a family of introverts and we live in a house which has more options for screens than there are people in the house. This means that unless we exert ourselves, the pattern is for all of us to scatter in separate rooms of the house and focus on screens. This is fine as part of what we do, but when it becomes the majority of what we do, that leads to us all feeling disconnected from each other. In the past couple of months all the kids have noticed the pattern and expressed desire for more togetherness.

When Howard and I discussed our Christmas spending plans, we took this need for increased togetherness into account. We also realized that we needed to break one of the cardinal traditions of Christmas. Instead of saving up all the shiny things so they can be revealed on the big day, we needed to break them out at Thanksgiving so that we can spend the entire month of December using them to draw us together. It would be a shame to only have a week to enjoy them with Kiki before she heads back to school when we could have three weeks.

Considering the challenge I described earlier, it would seem that banishing electronics would be the call to make. Instead we bought more, a game system and an upgraded computer. But the important thing is that these new things draw us all into the same room. We’re interacting and talking with each other about the games we are playing. We’re all trying to be conscious about spending time together. To be honest, it is a little exhausting. None of us are used to it and there has been more than one squabble. Feelings have gotten bruised here and there. But I think the shifts will be good for us. We’ll find the right balance between doing our own things and coming together as a family.

Finding Happiness While Being Busy

By / November 9, 2014 / 1 Comment

Someone posted a link to an article about busyness as a disease. The content of the post was familiar. I’ve read it a dozen times before in various iterations. It lamented our over-scheduled lives, the fact that we don’t disengage from technology, that kids don’t have time to be bored. Many times I’ve read articles like this one and I’ve agreed. I spent years in an ongoing struggle to slow down my life. I thought that surely if life had a less hectic pace, I would have more happiness.

Then I had an epiphany, how happy I am has very little to do with the quantity of things on my to do list. I have been happy while working full-tilt with no time to stop. I have been miserable when I had long and leisurely days. Busy becomes miserable when I prioritize urgent over important. Busy is miserable if I’m busy at the wrong things or if I have to be busy according to someone else’s priorities instead of mine. That last part is the part that trips me up most often. I share my life with four children and a husband who all put things on my schedule. Then there are relatives, friends, church, school, etc. All of them would like to schedule me. Misery is not the goal, but sometimes it is the result if I do not keep in touch with my own priorities.

For years my kids did not have any after school lessons or activities. They came home and they played. Mostly they played video games. (There’s another set of articles telling me all about how that isn’t a good idea either.) This year two of my kids picked up one activity each. I watched how these outside activities added to their lives and brought them joy. They became more than they had been. Recently my son has become quite easily stressed. As I was casting about for solutions to his stress, I briefly considered dropping his outside activity (cello lessons) to give him more free time. I’ve rejected that, because I can see that free time doesn’t make him less stressed. In fact, sometimes he gets stressed because choosing to play this video game means he’ll have less time for that one. He’s not stressed because he’s busy. The stress is coming from somewhere else. (Hormones probably. Puberty is hard.) The key is that we don’t want to allow stress to steal something he enjoys. We don’t want to let stress make him smaller.

The life I have chosen is always going to be a busy one. I’ll always have multiple projects running in parallel. I’ll always have to use lists to track the things I need to get done. When I’ve got myself properly focused, I like being busy. Not everyone would be happy with a life like mine. Which is fine, everyone has to build their own life and fill it with their own priorities as much as they are able. (Most of us don’t get to be the sole masters of the lives we have.) For me, these past few weeks have been made of schedule disruption as I’ve responded to kid meltdowns and school absences. I have to find ways to reach for happiness no matter what else is going on in my days. That is hard on the days when I feel both stretched thin and emotionally bruised. Yet if I reach for happiness in the hard times, I’ll likely grab it when things lighten up. And I can do it while still being busy. I’m not going to let stress or anxiety make me live smaller.

Other People’s Choices

By / November 5, 2014

Years ago I judged my neighbor for decisions I saw her making about her teenagers. It was a very light judgment that I only held in the back of my mind. She never knew about it. It never affected our friendship. I even supported her and aided her. Yet I thought to myself, “I won’t do that.”

This week I find myself making some very similar parenting decisions to the ones I saw her make. I finally understand the troubles which drove her to those decisions. All those years ago, I couldn’t see the troubles, just the decisions that resulted from them. Today I am surrounded by stresses and I have a child who is nearing an adulthood that he’s not yet ready for. Every day I make decisions and I am conscious of how those choices may look to people who aren’t mired in my context. Somewhere out there, someone is judging me. I’m not angry with them for not understanding.(As long as they don’t try to impose their imperfect comprehension on my actions.) I actually hope that they never understand this because having a depressed teenager is not something I wish on anyone.

My neighbor moved away years ago, only a year or two after my judgement of her. I have her number, but to call and apologize would be pointless. What I must do instead is train my thoughts to think more kindly when someone else makes a decision that I don’t understand. They’re probably driven to it by problems that I can’t see.