parenting

Brief Thoughts on Rites of Passage

By / March 1, 2015

When we talk about rites of passage, we are almost always contemplating the experience of the young person who is to pass through them. These days I have an entirely different perspective. I’m the person who stands aside and holds the spare gear while my children pass through. Sometimes the onus is on me to make sure that the rite happens as it should and on schedule. I’m definitely responsible to make sure that my youngster is prepared.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve failed at all of these tasks.

We’ve reached the portion of our lives where my children are hitting rites of passage faster than I can catch my breath. Eighteenth birthdays, turning twelve, becoming a teenager, sixteenth birthdays, leaving elementary school, leaving junior high, graduating high school, first dates, learning to drive, going to college, wisdom teeth removal, and on and on. All of it is crammed together with all the trappings of every day life. Things keep sneaking up on me and instead of making sure everything is prepared in advance, I’m left scrambling things together and hoping the kids don’t notice how very last-minute it all is.

I think overall things are fine. That’s the thing about rites of passage, there is no triumph if the path through is always smooth. I also have to recognize that their rites of passage also represent rites of passage for me. First child hits eighteen, youngest leaves elementary, teaching kids to drive, these are not just new for the kids, they’re also new for me. I’m as afraid of getting it wrong as they are. For some of these things I have far more emotions about the event than they do. We just muddle through together.

Learning to Work

By / February 18, 2015 / 4 Comments

Today my son has a money problem that I could easily solve for him. I am not solving it, because learning to solve your money problems by being willing to work is a vitally important life skill. And it is one that can only be learned if other people don’t always solve your problems for you.

This experience is not being fun for either of us.

Meetings and Guilt

By / February 5, 2015 / 1 Comment

I’ve had a lot of meetings with teachers and school administrators in the past few months. I’ve had even more in the past two years. Many of these meetings take place because I call for them. My kid is in crisis, life has become untenable, things must change. I’m always aware that urgent meetings are a disruption of the school personnel’s regular schedule. The meetings certainly disrupt my life and I know that teachers/administrators are every bit as busy as I am. This means that I enter these meetings with a strong urge to apologize for inflicting my kids on the school. I am always aware that there is more I could be doing to resolve the issue. I could support my kid more, be more regular at declaring homework time, establish a more firm bedtime. It is only recently that I recognized my deep emotional belief that it was my job to help my kids function normally in a classroom, and if they didn’t, that was a failure on my part. Pulled out into rational light, I can see how ridiculous this expectation is. Yet it was there in my head and it caused me a lot of grief.

I hit a turning point last November when I sat in a meeting with my son, his counselor, a student advocate, the vice principal, the principal, and a special ed teacher. All of these busy people sat with me and my son for more than an hour while I talked about what we were experiencing, what we’d done to try to resolve it, and expressed a need for help. As I talked, I really could see that we had done every possible thing that was in our power to do, yet my son needed more. Which the school staff identified and moved to provide. The help was wonderful. Even better was walking out of the meeting and realizing that they didn’t blame me. No one was standing in judgment to evaluate why we’d ended up in the emotional pit. They just asked if we’d prefer a rope, ladder, shovel, or backhoe as the means to get out.

After that meeting I began to stop blaming me. It was hard. I had to break long time habits of thought. As we were digging out to a better place, arranging therapy, adjusting medications, changing the school schedule, I learned that I was most helpful to everyone else if I simply said “This is where we are at today” without burying myself under an emotional load of guilt. In problem solving, how you arrived matters less than where you’re headed.

The frequency of meetings has begun to trail off. I’m looking at a March that might be completely free of teacher meetings. I would be fine with that, because it would mean that the arrangements for next year are made and no one is in crisis. In the interim, I’m glad that the only meetings I have coming up are routine meetings about school schedules for next year.

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.

Troubleshooting Sibling Disharmony: the Acquiescer and the Demander

By / December 30, 2014 / 1 Comment

The Problem:
Gleek is a full-steam-ahead person. She always has been. When she has an exciting thought, she wants to tell everyone about it. The only way to get her to stop is to confront her and say “Not right now.” Even then, she often feels hurt that we don’t want to hear all about the story she is writing instead of working on homework (or making dinner, or watching a movie, or whatever other activity her burst of needing-to-share has interrupted.) In contrast, Patch is a natural peacemaker. In order to not cause problems for others, he will give up things he wants. Sometimes he’ll do it without actually making a conscious choice to sacrifice. It is only later, when the game is done or the treat is eaten, that he realizes what he wanted. Then he is sad and frustrated because the chance is gone.

These two are good friends. They play together all the time. Yet we are beginning to see an accumulation of frustration in Patch. Because when they have an argument, it isn’t just today’s incident of Gleek not listening to Patch that is the problem. Patch will declare “You never listen to me!” and he’s got a lot of supporting evidence. Gleek is honestly shocked at how quickly Patch gets upset over such a small incident. She doesn’t see what went wrong and she is hurt that he got hugely upset over a small thing. They both feel like the other one ruined the game.

Evaluation:
It took me quite a while to see the dynamic that was causing the trouble. Patch is eleven and Gleek is thirteen, this has been part of how they interacted since they were tiny. I guess it became more apparent because puberty has begun to turn up the volume on Patch’s emotions. Right now he is less able to just shrug things off and let them go. Or maybe the pool of accumulated frustration finally got big enough to send out geysers that we could see.

I mediated a conversation between Patch and Gleek where I outlined what I was seeing. Sometimes clearly defining a problem is half way to solving it. Unfortunately in this case, it is going to take many conversations that take place over time. I know this because at a moment when Patch was feeling sore and un-listened-to, Gleek entered ready to tell Patch all about the story characters she was creating. She was angry when he turned away and asked “Why don’t you want to hear about my characters?”
I pointed out that Patch was full of emotions and needed to feel like she cared about him. I mentioned that a better conversation opener would be “Are you okay?” followed by a lot of listening.
Gleek looked at me confused. “But I did ask him what’s wrong.”
“No you didn’t, you wanted (demanded) to know why he didn’t want to listen to you. That is very different from ‘are you okay?’”
At that point Gleek got a bit defensive and angry, so we let the subject drop for a while. Gleek’s full-speed-ahead approach to life means that she gets corrected and criticized a lot. That hurts her. A single correction is one thing, a barrage is another. It accumulates in her in the same way that Patch’s frustrations accumulate in him.

I strongly suspect that on Gleek’s end we just have to wait for some additional brain development to provide additional comprehension. Gleek is in the middle of the early teen stage where significant brain remodeling takes place in the frontal lobe. Most teens become socially clumsy and tactless between twelve and fifteen. In Patch’s case this tactless phase will work to our advantage. He’s going to have less ability to squelch his own wants. This means more conflict in his life, which he won’t like, but will force him to see that wanting things is not inherently bad. Neither is conflict.

Applied changes:

1. I will continue to speak out loud about the dynamic I’m seeing between the two of them. I will continue to state that Patch needs to speak up about the things he wants and Gleek needs to practice stopping and listening to the game suggestions of others, even when they feel like an interruption of what she has planned. Perhaps my verbal repetition of the dynamic will help them learn to see it.
2. When I mediate a conflict between them, I may have to separate them and listen individually. Even when I’m trying to enforce “Now it is your turn to talk” Gleek still manages to do 70% or more of the talking.
3. It might be good to have Gleek learn some active listening techniques and get her to practice them. When she sees the emotions of others she is naturally empathetic and a champion of the downtrodden. She just can’t always see where she is treading and who might be under there. I don’t know that I have the emotional resources to tackle this right now. Too many other things are going on. But it is good to note it as a possible course of action for the future.
4. I will encourage the pair of them to pray for each other. Prayer gets inside where I can’t go. It creates compassion and understanding in ways that I have no power to do.

Coming Home from Church

By / December 28, 2014

I came home from church early with Patch because he was having a rough day. This has been the story of all my Sundays for the last two months. Someone in my house is having a rough time. Someone leaves early. Someone cries because life feels like too much. Often the someone has been me. I guess attending church pries us open and lays the emotions bare. I hope that we will make our way back to a place where church is for peace and comfort instead of raw emotions.

I broke down and bought pill boxes last week. They line up, four in a row, each with a week’s worth of pills sorted into their compartments. When I see those pill boxes, I have to face the fact that five out of six of us are on daily medication or vitamin supplements. There are nine prescriptions which I have to track and refill when they begin to run out. In theory I could get them all onto the same schedule and make one massive medication run to the pharmacy once per month. It never works out that way. I see the pharmacists 2-4 times per month. The pill boxes are an acknowledgement that I can’t track it daily the way I’ve been doing. The effort of remembering who has taken meds and who hasn’t becomes too much. Howard manages his own. I manage the rest and, in the dark of early morning, I must be able to run on automatic. Now I think through the medicines once per week instead of every day. It is a tiny simplification, a small thing that reduces the daily burden. Yet I didn’t quite realize what a burden it was, until I had all the pill boxes lined up like that.

The other thing I must face when looking at those pill boxes is the fact that I’ve become the mother who medicates her children. I was more comfortable with that when I had fewer children on medicine. I could use the non-medicated children as evidence that I was responding to need rather than jumping to pills as the solution to life’s troubles. This self-reassurance is less available now. All I have left is to cling to the knowledge that mental health is a process. I’ve not put my kids on meds and called it good. We have doctors and therapists involved. It is a constant process of evaluation and re-evaluation. Is this working? What does this child need now? How does that compare to what was needed three months ago? Six months ago? Last year? That too is exhausting. There are so many decisions to make. Which really is just a description of parenting whether or not medicine is involved.

It snowed Christmas Eve. I went to bed when things were wet, brown, bleak. We woke to the world coated in white. All the edges were softened and made beautiful. I’d heard this might happen, and the moment I did, I prayed that it would be so. I wanted Christmas to be different. I wanted to get to that day and set down the emotional load I’ve been toting around. I wanted Christmas to be a respite. At least for one day. Then the snow came, and our celebrations were everything they needed to be, and at the end of the day I was at peace instead of weary.

Of course the next day the snow was less lovely as it turned to slush and then ice. There is always a day after. This can be either discouraging or hopeful depending on what sort of a day it was. For me, I can feel the holiday continuing to work in me. I feel like I’m convalescing during this holiday space where the kids are out of school and the work burdens are lighter. I haven’t much time left to rest. Life will resume its regular pace next week and I have to hope that I’m up to speed.

I went back to church after Patch had settled and all the talking was done. There were only ten minutes remaining, but I went anyway. I wanted to be in the building and to be comforted by being near the people there. I came in just in time for the teacher to close her lesson. I sang with the closing hymn and listened to the prayer. Then the meeting was done before I was ready. I could have used a longer time sitting and listening. Just sitting there gave me strength.

In the hallway after the meeting I was greeted by friends. Once again I remembered how complicated it can be to answer the question “How are you?” I want to be truthful. I want to bring my friends in, and include them in my life, but some conversations are much too complicated for the hallway of the church building. Also, I’m kind of tired of crying at church. So I say that I’m fine, because that is true. My life is good in so many ways. There are dozens of joyful stories about the holidays. Our house has been filled with laughter during the past few weeks. So I pull out those stories and tell them. Yet, in the telling, I have to talk around all the worries that continue to plant themselves front-and-center in my brain. It is like being short and sitting behind a tall person at the theatre. I can lean this way and that to see the bright and beautiful display, but the view is not clear and I kind of want to complain about what is blocking my view.

The ice crusted snow crunched under my feet as I walked to my car with Gleek. The other kids had made their own trips home from church already. Gleek made a joke about the cold and I smiled. We passed Howard walking on the drive home and he hopped into the car. The three of us entered the house to find Kiki playing a game with Patch and Link. They were laughing. I watched them for a minute and treasured the sound of the laughter. Next week we’ll go to church again. Perhaps some of us will come home early again, perhaps not. I’m not going to pray for a week when we all stay. I’m going to pray for us all to work our way through the challenges immediately in front of us. I trust that when we do, the other things—like peaceful church attendance—will take care of themselves.

Boundaries and Drowning

By / December 16, 2014 / 1 Comment

A thing happened to my son at school. It was a small thing, but my son’s emotional reaction to it was very large. When this sort of disproportional reaction happens, I know that it usually has very little to do with the thing itself and much to do with a dozen other things which are often invisible to everyone. Even the person having the big reaction does not know what it is about. They think it is about the thing. So it was with my son. He got quite angry with me when I did not respond as if the small thing was a dire and immediate emergency. I got angry with him because I was confused why he was suddenly so angry with me, and because some of his choices about how to handle his emotional reaction were not ideal.

Boundaries are a problem when a child struggles with a mental health issue. It is morally wrong to do nothing while someone drowns. It gets more complicated when someone is drowning in water that is only waist high. Particularly if that person won’t listen to shouts of “just stand up.” So I find myself soaking wet, not wearing my swim suit because I wasn’t planning on getting into the water today, helping my son to stand up. This has happened many times. Each time I wonder if maybe my rescues are part of the problem. Maybe I should just stand on the edge and let him flail until he figures out for himself that he can just put his feet down and stand. Except, people do drown in waist high water. People drown in bathtubs. Even adult people. It happens when something interferes with rational thought. A person who is drowning is not able to be completely rational. The drowning is real even if the water is not deep. I can’t let my child drown while I watch. Yet, a person who is always rescued learns to rely on rescue. That person can get very angry with people who try to get them to manage solo.

I don’t have any good answers. I just know that today I was dragged into the pool to perform a rescue that was not entirely of my choosing. I’m tired and wrung out. Again.

Diagnostic Appointment Delayed

By / December 11, 2014 / 4 Comments

I made the appointment three months ago. I made it after a hard day where I realized that I needed guidance on how to help my teenage son shift into adulthood while managing his own particular mix of capabilities and disabilities. I needed a doctor to talk with him about the medicines he takes, so that my son is prepared to make rational decisions about those medicines rather than making reactionary decisions.

A month passed and things did not get easier. We ended up meeting with a general practitioner to adjust meds. I met with the school to adjust his schedule. I learned about programs that become available with a signed diagnosis letter. I was glad to be able to say “We already have an appointment scheduled.” We were struggling and muddling toward solutions, but I knew that an appointment was scheduled with a doctor I trust. I was willing to wait so I could see this particular doctor.

It was all lined up. The appointment was today. I could get the school form signed. I could get prescription refills. Howard went on the run to get the college kid from school. I arranged for my neighbor to pick up the elementary carpool. I’d cleared and defended the day. I didn’t know all the results that the appointment would bring. Maybe a new diagnosis. Maybe a process to switch medications. Maybe just affirmation that we were already doing all the things that were necessary. But at least I knew that I would no longer be waiting for an appointment. We would then be on the patient list rather than the New Patient list, which meant follow up phone calls and appointments would be handled far more expeditiously.

This morning I got a phone call. They had to reschedule. Next available appointment is January 5, twenty-five days from today. I get another month of muddling through and waiting for an appointment. I’m not mad at the doctor. He didn’t want to have stomach flu today. I’m certain he would much rather have spent his day meeting with me. Yet the cancellation of the appointment hit me hard. Today has been hard. Sometimes I don’t realize how much emotion I have riding on an event until the event is cancelled or changed.

I think this is one of the hardest aspects of mental illness. After making my way over the hurdle of admitting I needed professional help for my child, I had to wait. Then I had to talk about the appointment to school staff. Then I had to go explain to a general practitioner why I needed an interim prescription until I could see the psychiatrist. With the appointment moved, I had to have all of those conversations over again. I had to call the GP and say “Would you please write this letter that the school needs?” because my son can not afford to wait until January for the services. I had to ask the GP for a prescription extension so that we won’t run out before we have the chance to meet with the psychiatrist. Across the middle of this, our insurance will be switching over to a new plan on January 1st. This will probably be to our benefit, but it still requires me to adjust for the new company.

I have enough force of will and comprehension of what needs to be done that I can wade through all of that. I want to cry for the families who have no idea how to navigate to get mental health care and who don’t know what questions to ask at the schools to get help. It has been confusing and exhausting. Instead of exiting today with a new health partner and a new course, I am facing another month of stopgap measures. I don’t like stopgap measures.

So we do the only thing we can do, which is to keep facing each day and do the best we can. The good news is that something in the medicine switches, therapy, and schedule switches has been helping. Life is better for him now than it was two weeks ago. We’ll just keep on doing the things that seem to be working until we can have the diagnostic appointment that we need.

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.

Signs of Stress

By / November 18, 2014 / 1 Comment

I was sitting on the kitchen floor in front of the heating vent by the kitchen sink. My back was to the cupboards with additional cupboards on all three sides. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, aware that this sitting-on-the-floor behavior is only something I do when I’m stressed. I don’t know why sitting in that particular spot is comforting when I’m upset, but it is. At least in the winter when the vent blows warm. I sat there, eyes closed, sorting my thoughts. One of the thoughts was to review in my mind the various signs of stress that are typical for the other members of my household. Howard gets irritable, particularly about food things. Kiki fixates on small problems and sleeps more than usual. Gleek gets angry and defensive, she also accumulates things. Patch fidgets and gets indecisive. So I review, the girls are both doing well right now. Howard is under work stress, but in normal quantities. The boys are both struggling. They are stressed.

In that list of signs of stress, I didn’t mention Link. That’s because I made a very saddening realization. If I made a list of “Things Link usually does daily” that list will match up one-to-one with the list of “signs that Link is stressed or depressed.” The stress has been so pervasive for so long that none of us recognized it as anything outside of normal. Mental illness is so sneaky. It doesn’t show up with a dramatic change the way that a cold or the flu does. There is no quick comparison yesterday to today. Instead you have a child who is changing and growing all the time. So you assume that everything is just part of their evolving personality. Except there is this creeping, niggling thought which grows stronger. Maybe this isn’t normal. Everyone says the teenage years are hard, but maybe they shouldn’t be quite this hard. I owe huge debts of gratitude to my parenting community. There were people who listened to me and said “no, that’s outside of normal.” I feel like I should have been strong enough to seek help without needing that decision validated.

The good news is that the school administrative staff have bent over backwards to be helpful. I don’t know if everyone has that experience with them. It probably helps that I was able to say that I’ve already scheduled doctor’s appointments. It was obvious that I’m taking all the “right” steps. And yet this still is not easy. There are also teachers in the mix. Some of them understand and work with me. Others, not so much. Which is why I end up sitting on the floor of my kitchen, rehearsing parts of difficult conversations I need to have in the next few days. And I think about how difficult it is to stand strong and say “Yes I know that thing should be simple, but for my child it is not.” And then to have to say it over and over again in different contexts, working to give my child the space he needs to heal and grow strong. My job seems clear when I type it out like that, yet I constantly second guess myself about whether I’m choosing correctly. And once I have the conversations, I’ll probably spend hours rehashing them in my head, thinking of different things I should have said. It is all so exhausting.