parenting

I was crying in the hallway at church. It wasn’t how I expected to spend Sunday when I got up this morning, but then a series of things happened. None of them were big things, they just all hit me in the exact same emotional spot, slicing me open and leaving me in tears.

Patch was too overwhelmed to participate in the annual children’s program at church. He’d had an overnight camp out on Friday where he didn’t sleep well, followed by a Saturday visit from an out of town friend, capped off with a late night Halloween party. On Sunday morning he was in a state where cutting up his waffle to eat it was cause for tears. The syrup wasn’t right and none of us, Patch included, could figure out how syrup could be wrong. But it was. I could not in good conscience put Patch up on the stand in front of the congregation with so few emotional resources and feeling unprepared. I once sat in an audience watching my child have an anxiety attack during a performance. It is not an experience I care to repeat. So I excused my boy to go back home, knowing that this decision meant I was letting down his teachers and church leaders who put so much work into creating the program and getting kids to practice for it. It did not help that this was Patch’s last year in the children’s program, his last chance to be part of it. I’m sad that this rite of passage has been impacted by anxiety and emotional limits, as have so many other important moments in our lives.

Patch came with me to the first portion of the meeting for sacrament, and we planned to let him quietly leave after that. As I was walking into the chapel I was caught by Gleek’s young women teacher, who wanted to let me know that Gleek’s habit of drawing in class was distracting the other girls and causing a problem. She asked if I could tell Gleek not to draw in class. It was such a small request, the sort of thing which should be simple to do. I was left standing there with no time to make clear why this small request actually needed to happen a week ago. In order to comply, I needed time to negotiate with Gleek. I needed to help her figure out alternate ways to manage in-class fidgeting. I needed to remind her how to take deep breaths and stay respectful to teachers even when she is angry with them. I needed to give Gleek her medicine on Sunday morning instead of letting it be an off day as we’ve been doing. I probably needed to create some sort of bargain with a reward so that Gleek was willing to make an effort to learn new skills instead of being resentful and angry at an imposed change. I can tell you that resentful and angry Gleek is the one most likely to make split-second unfortunate choices, particularly when she is unmedicated. My thoughts weren’t organized enough to say all of that, I agreed to talk to Gleek and see what I could do. Then I sat down on the bench with my family and tears began.

I’m sad that simple things—sitting through a meeting without drawing, sitting in a group on the stand to sing songs, attending class activities, organizing homework, speaking to non family members—are so hard for my kids sometimes. It takes significant behind-the-scenes effort for me to help my kids manage these things that the world expects to be simple. And I’m left feeling the unfairness of it. I’m also left wondering if the failing is in me. That perhaps these things would be simple if only I knew how to teach my kids better. Everything I’ve done has not been enough, and I don’t know if I’m capable of more. I get so tired.

Gleek and Patch (before he ducked out to go home) noticed my tears. They leaned over to ask what was wrong and I had to find words to whisper back. I hadn’t even had time to articulate my sadness to myself, so I whispered carefully selected truths to let them know what I was feeling, but to not make them feel responsible for it, nor to guilt them into doing the things. Even if they had spontaneously decided to sing in the program and to not draw in church, that would not have ended my tears. When the meeting was over, I wended my way out of the chapel, eyes firmly fixed on the feet of the people around me. I could feel that my face was red from tears. Anyone who looked me would see that I’d been crying. I looked at no one and took care to pass behind instead of in front of those people who were most likely to notice. I didn’t get away completely, several people stopped me in the hall and gave me hugs. Fortunately the words “Parenting is hard.” Tumbled out of my lips and no further explanations were necessary. They understood and didn’t ask more, which was good because the rest was all a jumble of incidents and emotions that I didn’t know how to sort into a comprehensible narrative until hours later.

Parenting is hard. Those words earned instant understanding and sympathy. I am not the only parent to end up crying in a public place because some small thing made all the worry overflow. Today will not be the last day it will happen to me. I left church early and took my emotions home where I had the space to sort them properly. They still aren’t entirely sorted, but I know what my next steps need to look like. They look remarkably like last week’s steps with only minor adjustments. In the quiet of my house where I could cry without having to explain, I also prayed and got quiet answers to help me know what adjustments to make. Everyone needs to sit down and cry sometimes, but that doesn’t mean we’re doing anything wrong. It just means we needed a rest before carrying on with the work that needs to be done. So, that is what I’ll do.

Link got into the car smiling. “I haven’t felt like this in a long time.” He said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Free.”
Today he turned in enough work so that when the end of the term hits on Friday, he will pass all his classes. I can look back on the term and see all of his decisions that landed him underneath a burden of overdue work and parental displeasure. I’m glad to know that he felt that burden and enjoys it being lifted. I hope the experience will motivate him to not allow himself to get so far behind again. I put the car in gear and drive him home. I do not mention the additional work I know he could do to bring his grades higher by Friday. Letting him feel the difference between burdened and free is probably more useful in the long run than taking away his sense of freedom for an incremental uptick in grades.

These are the sorts of decisions I’ve been having to make with Link since the beginning of school. I’m playing the long game; trying to make sure he learns lessons that will help him be an adult even if those lessons sacrifice his grade point average. It is hard for me. My own schooling has ingrained the paramount importance of grades on a very deep level in my brain. I have had anxiety attacks over school work my son was not getting done. So I do battle with my anxiety to prevent it from driving me into badgering him until the work is done. That path would result in better grades, less anxiety for me, more arguments with my son, a deterioration in our relationship, and would prevent him from learning his own lessons about how he feels when he doesn’t do the work that is expected of him. Some days it took all my strength to give him the space to fail or succeed on his own choices. I’m very glad to know that we won’t be having to make up failed credits over the summer. Though I won’t feel completely relieved about that until I see the official grade reports.

***

“I’m stressed. I don’t want to be stressed.” Patch said as we sat snuggled together on the couch. The days are long gone when I can snuggle him in my lap. He’s almost as tall as me these days and his feet are bigger than mine. At eleven, he’s primed to shoot up tall. He’s also entering a rocky hormonal and emotional place where childhood things start to slip away leaving bewildered pre-teens adrift from who they were, but not yet sure who they will be going forward. It is an anxious place for anyone, but particularly for a child who is already prone to tie himself in little emotional knots. Patch’s expectations for himself are high and he never wants to make other people disappointed or upset.

“I know, buddy.” I say and put my arm around his shoulders. Touch is a stress reliever. I’m hugging him a lot these days. We’ve also begun a three part list: Things that stress him, Things that relieve stress, and things that pause stress. Being stressed and not knowing why is in itself stressful. So the list is helping Patch practice identifying stresses. He is beginning to be able to examine his own thought processes and figure out when the emotional reaction is out of proportion to what is going on. Most of the time when he becomes anxious it is because there is an insoluble conflict in his head. It may have a simple solution in the real world, but it requires that he readjust one of the constants in his head. For example: I have to remind him that he is allowed to inconvenience other people to ask for things that he wants. In fact the very act of being alive requires us all to do this.

Some surprising things are ending up on the de-stressor list. Seeing the accumulation is sparking new ideas about how Patch can help himself feel less stressed on a daily basis. The trickiest bit for me is trying to set up de-stressing systems that don’t require regular maintenance from me. In the next eight weeks I’m going to be stressed and I’m going to accidentally drop some of my responsibilities. Patch is already going to pick up some of my radiated stress because he’s naturally empathetic. He needs systems that won’t fall apart when I do. Haven’t figured it out yet, but we’re working on it.

***

I called Link my oldest the other day. The words sat there on my screen, staring at me until I realized why they were bugging me. Link is not my oldest child. I have Kiki, who is away at college. But Link is my oldest child at home. He is my oldest child for whom I am still performing active parenting. Somehow my subconscious has graduated Kiki into adulthood, thus leaving Link with the title of “oldest.” Or so I must infer from the fact that the word has slipped out in reference to him on at least two occasions.

I told Kiki about this mental promotion as I drove her back to college. She’d come home for fall break to spend four days doing nothing much except playing video games and watching movies. Kiki laughed out loud at the story. I was glad she laughed because I never want her to feel evicted from the family just because she is the first child to venture out into adulthood.

***

“Do you believe in Ouija boards?” Gleek asked me as we were unloading groceries from the car. My brain had been planning where to put food, what to cook for dinner, and when to haul kids in for homework time, so it took a moment for me to switch gears into a conversation about the occult.
“I know the thought of them makes me uncomfortable.” I answered. More than uncomfortable, the thought of my daughter dabbling in occult things made me afraid. Not so much of supernatural things coming to get her, but more because I worry that dark interests might lead her to dark emotional places. I don’t know that it is a valid worry, but I have it. There were so many ways the conversation with Gleek could have gone. It was one of those “teaching” moments when parents are supposed to pounce and teach kids good things. I could use it to warn her away from such things. I could use it to try to instill my values. But my child chose to open up a piece of her inner world to me. Instead of jumping on the moment and trying to use it for my purposes, I asked questions. I listened to what she has already learned about ghosts, hauntings, and communication with spirits. I found out what she believed to be true. Because I listened, she told me about her experiences. This is where parental lectures often go awry, if the lecture directly contradicts a real-world experience that the child has already had, then the child is less ready to believe what parents say.

In the end Gleek’s fascination was no more deep than the average kid who has watched a few ghost-related videos on YouTube or who has checked out a book about Spooky Encounters from the library. There wasn’t really anything for me to worry about and in the course of our discussion I was able to acknowledge that I do worry. She accepted my worry, just as I accepted her interest. It was a good conversation to have.

Yesterday I experienced some cognitive dissonance. I was going through my August 2013 blog posts to put them into my One Cobble at a Time book. I hit a set of posts which could easily have been written this week. They were all about GenCon and the impending beginning of school. Only I’d forgotten exactly how much more stressful all of it was last year, because GenCon was followed by WorldCon which was followed by Salt Lake Comic Con, all pretty much without a break. Also we took Kiki to college for the first time and all my kids were switching schools, I was carrying a giant load of unprocessed emotional baggage related to parenting and mental illness. And then there was the point of sale system, which I pulled together at the very last minute, not in time for GenCon, but in time to send that completely untested system off to WorldCon where I then had to perform long-distance tech support.

If I’d had any time to think about it, I would have hated last August.

This year I packed up that same point of sale system and sent it to GenCon. It has been tested across multiple conventions since. It is stream-lined and functional. It gives us lots more flexibility and reports. This year the system is reducing stress rather than adding to it.

I feel like I’m playing year to year comparison a lot in the last few months, and an extra lot this week. It reveals so much to me about myself. It makes me realize that I was not over-reacting or parenting badly, I was really carrying quite a lot. The thing is, I couldn’t tell. It felt normal to me, which is the sneaky-awful thing about stress. Unless it hits with a clear cause and onset, it starts to feel normal.

Today I went out and finished out the last bits of school shopping. I’ve never been one to completely re-outfit my kids if they have good clothes, but when I paused to consider the contents of my kids’ drawers, I began to see things. Like the fact that Patch doesn’t own any socks without holes in them. Or that Gleek has changed shape and thus needed new underclothes. Additionally, both my teenagers need a new shirt or two so that they can face the new year with confidence. Clothes help teens define themselves and both Gleek and Link are slightly different than they were eight months ago.

Last year the majority of my back-to-school shopping dollars went into college supplies for Kiki. Not surprising I guess. I’m not the first mother to splurge spend on towels for the college kid because I was afraid that I hadn’t adequately prepared her so at least I could make sure she had linens. I thought about that as I walked through the store today and saw all the displays aimed at parents and new college students. They had little effect on me this year. I wonder how susceptible I’ll be when the other kids leave, but that is a question for years from now. Thankfully.

Reading through last August’s posts was hard, not just because it caused me to relive some of the hardest bits. The thing is that I do have some of the same emotions that I had last year. I’m trying not to think about it too much, but a new school year means new stresses. I hope, hope, hope that three out of my four kids can simply have calm/good years where they learn things at a fairly even pace. Patch is destined for a rougher year, because of puberty, but I’m planning for that. Yet there is this little trickle of fear that lives in the back of my head, behind a door that I’ve tried to keep shut. Reading those posts cracked it open just a little. Because parenting can get really hard, so hard that my heart hurts every day and I can’t even tell that I’m exhausted because that feels normal. It feels like we won’t go there again. Logic says that most of the difficulty was because of a massive confluence of transitions and developmental stages. I’ll never have that again. But my imagination is very good, and I can picture new and exciting configurations of disaster. So I’ve been trying not to think too much about the coming school year and instead focus on the tasks each day brings.

There is one glaring exception: Link’s eagle scout project. I got very angry at Link about it a few days ago. It took a massive effort on my part not to just yell at him and require him to do it my way. I could have. He would have. What happened instead was that I acknowledged, out loud, how very difficult it is for me to not be in charge of this project. I left it in Link’s hands and I’ve done quite a bit of thinking since. I was pushing and trying to rush the project, because I’m afraid of the coming school year for Link. I keep saying that he’s lined up for a good year, but I’m afraid it will be more complicated and difficult than that. The last few months of last school year Link was really managing all his work. I want very much to trust that version of Link. I want that to be the school year we have. I’m afraid of how difficult it might be instead. So I pushed at the eagle project, trying to make it happen fast so that it would be out of the way before any of the school stresses hit. I don’t get to pick that. Instead I need to start doing what I’ll probably spend the entire school year doing: back off and let Link handle his own things even though the way he approaches tasks is so very different from my methods that it sometimes drives me crazy.

So, yeah, I’m scared about the coming school year. Even though I don’t want to be.