But There's Also This

Last week, I ran into an old friend in Big Y. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years, but she let me know that she’d been keeping up with me on Facebook. “You guys are amazing!” she gushed. “You’re always outside, always on some kind of adventure.” 

 “Well,” I stammered, “that’s just how it looks on Facebook. It’s not really. . . "

 “You’ve done a great job, Mom,” she continued, taking my response for modesty. “Good for you.”

 Maybe this conversation should have left me feeling proud, but instead I felt like a hypocrite. Like I’d duped her. Good for you. I could certainly see where my friend had gotten this impression of my family as well-adjusted, adventurous, rugged, carefree. Sometimes, we are. But like most Facebook profiles, mine is comprised of carefully curated images of contentment and joviality. We are a close family, closer than many, and I’ve been blessed with willing and (usually) eager travel partners in my kids–we’ve dragged (or encouraged) them up mountains in Alaska, hilly bike trails in Colorado, winter overnights in the White Mountains. 

 But there’s a lot of other stuff, too. Before running into my friend, I had been pushing my cart up and down the aisles in a state of preoccupation and anxiety, thinking about my son, who hadn’t gotten out of bed in two days but who, just a day before that, was happily talking about where he’d like to go to college. He’s on his 3rd high school (4th, if you count the alternative program in our town, which he attended for a few months in his freshman year). He’s missed a lot of school since 8th grade. Like, a lot. 

 What I don’t post on Facebook: Our morning routine, which for the past 4 years has been fraught with emotion (much like my bedtime routine, which usually includes meditation to ease my apprehension about what the morning will bring). I’m generally up at 5:30, which is my time to breathe deeply, drink a cup of coffee, eat some granola, and enjoy a few moments of guarded optimism as the sky turns from inky to hazy to faded pink. I catch up on lesson planning and then wake up my daughter at 6:15. Around 6:40 I turn on the SAD light in my son’s room and gently open one of the blinds. (Right now, some of you are thinking, “F-that! Get that boy’s ass out of bed! Dump water over his head! Set a loud alarm clock and let it blare!” Well, guess what? We’ve tried that. We’ve also tried yelling, coaxing softly, moving the bed, opening the window, calling 2-11 for assistance. Sometimes something works. A lot of the time nothing does. But rest assured that if you’ve thought of it, we’ve tried it.) 

 Also not on Facebook: The gazillion intervention techniques we’ve tried. Talk therapy. Medication changes. DBT (highly recommend). Advisors and school directors and guidance counselors texting encouraging messages and even, on one occasion, meeting my son at school with donuts and hot chocolate. Taking away privileges. Incentive programs. “Accumulating positive experiences”(a DBT strategy). Countless meetings with social workers and principals and teachers and advocates, all of whom see the same promise and potential and amazing kid that we see, and all of whom are befuddled by the ineffectiveness of these interventions. Many of these worked for a time. And there has been progress. After all, this is a kid who spent a good chunk of 8th grade in fetal position with the covers over his head. Now he battles the darkness. Not every day, but overall. He signs up for soccer and personal training and marine science camps. Some days, he doesn’t make it, but he knows he should. He had a full-time job last summer and was beloved by the kids and parents in the day camp where he worked. He’s awesome. And troubled. And as confused as the rest of us about what happened. 

One therapist says Don’t hover! 

One says Hover more! 

One says Let him fail! It’s the only way he’ll learn. 

One says Step back and let the school handle it. Your job is to be loving parents. 

The school says Help him get his work done at home. 

I believe all of them and none of them depending on the day. (Some of you are still thinking, “I would have done this. . . “ or “You’re coddling that boy” or “If you had only done. . . “ That’s okay. Think it. After four years, I’ve learned to resign myself to judgment and to believe in my ability to parent my child as I see fit.) 

Not on Facebook: The beautifully-written, heart-wrenching essay my daughter wrote last year about watching her brother go off in an ambulance yelling I want to die, I just want to die! The “anniversary reaction” she had when we put up the Christmas tree in the front room the year after my son’s first breakdown. We both cried as we remembered how she and her brother had tried that year to uphold the tradition of sleeping in front of the tree, and how the Christmas Tree Room had become the site of so many morning battles, well before any of us learned strategies for keeping things from escalating. Also not posted: my own worry over the stress all of this puts on my daughter, who holds things close because she doesn’t want to upset the balance. 

Usually not on Facebook (unless you’re looking for it): the many, many other kids who present as normal but who are struggling, some of them with crippling anxiety or depression. They can’t do school the way a lot of kids can. They are susceptible to their moods, to their biochemistry, to the effects of adolescent trauma, which takes many forms. Most of these kids are the children of parents I look up to and aspire to emulate. 

  

 Boldly blogging: One of these inspirational parents is my friend Elizabeth, who indirectly inspired me to write this post. She and her husband adopted 4 (!) kids at the same time, siblings who were all under the age of 5. They are super parents in the most loving and awe-inspiring ways–the kinds of parents who host the neighborhood holiday party, arrange Easter egg hunts, encourage their kids toward music and literature and arts and sports without being overbearing. They set boundaries and teach social skills; as a result, their kids are confident and accomplished. And yet, the oldest, my son’s age, is struggling in his late adolescence, trying on different identities, taking risks, deeply worrying his parents. I know this because Elizabeth is open. She’s not afraid to get real. Her openness has made me take a deeper look at how my own fear of judgment has inhibited me over the years. Maybe it even prevented me from having the empathy my son needed from me when he first began to struggle. 

On Facebook: ribbons and posts acknowledging “mental health awareness” and suicide prevention. Also on Facebook: rants from parents about “bad” kids in schools who are potential bad influences. Pictures of report cards celebrating grades as a measure of character. I’m not knocking that trend; I’ve done it, too–just saying that grades are only one kind of achievement. Sometimes, when someone posts “My daughter got all A’s on her report card!” I want to post “My son got out of bed today and made it to school for half the day!” Maybe I should. Maybe that’s a step toward de-stigmatizing mental illness (I hesitate to even call it that). 

I’m currently reading an insightful book by Adam Price, PhD called He’s Not Lazy: Empowering Your Son to Believe in Himself. Price refers to kids like my son not as “underachievers” but as “opt-outers:” The prevailing myth is that opt-outs have “more potential,” potential that somehow needs to be unlocked. We fall into the trap hinted at by a recent advertisement for the March of Dimes, which asserts, “Every baby is born to do something great.” As a nation, we’ve bought in to an obsession with greatness. Americans have always believed that with a little grit and ingenuity, any goal is reachable, any obstacle surmountable. We conquered the frontier and put a man on the moon. . . Potential is a wolf in sheep’s clothing–it’s a term that sounds like it is all about growth, but which has really become synonymous with competition. When parents complain that their son is not achieving his potential, what they are really saying is “I believe he’s so smart that if he worked up to his potential 100 percent of the time, he’d be at the top of his class.” The danger here is that all of the emphasis is placed on the outcome, rather than on the process. 

Price explains that “opt-outs” are terrified of failure, and so the focus should be on helping them learn the skills that will give them confidence, rather than pushing them to finish that damn essay, already. 

A therapist I trust and respect echoed this sentiment last night. He told me my husband and I need to step back and let our son figure it out, even if that means he misses another god knows how many days of school. That’s scary as hell. A few days in and I can barely keep my emotions in check because I’m wracked with worry. I hold in my tears (usually) on the drive to school and put on my teacher persona when I get there. It’s hard, but I’m willing to try this, because fundamentally, I think the therapist is right. And if he’s not, well, nothing else has worked, either. 

I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t feel hopeful. I do. I’ve watched our son wrestle demons and emerge as the victor time and time again. He’s self-sufficient and insightful and curious. He’s really fun to be around when he’s not under a dark cloud. He’ll figure it out. We will. It’s the paradigm shift in thinking that’s scary–that a kid should graduate by a certain age, that he should be college-bound if his parents went to college, that not doing homework is equivalent to “bad behavior.” We’re all learning. And this journey has made me a more empathetic educator, too. I see these struggling kids–many of them boys–through a much different lens than I did when I started teaching twenty-something years ago. 

I’m grateful to that friend in the grocery store. Maybe her compliment was a response to my curated Facebook posts, but she also knows me well, and like my friend Elizabeth, she gets it. So when she says You’ve done a good job, Mom, I’m inclined to believe her, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.