Oh my god. I am horrible.
"You are making progress," said my friend Karen. "Three months ago the Boy just started treatment and you were exhausted. Look at all of the progress both of you and the Boy have made!"
Yes, I have made progress, but I still feel like an emotional mess. My heart is pulling me in forty different directions and my brain is like "Seriously woman. All of these feelings are so conflicted and then throw in an anxiety attack. Give me something consistent to work with here and I'll try to help you sort things out."
I walked around Green Lake with a friend today, who is kind and patient, like all of my friends. I am waiting for one of them to say, "For god sake's woman, pull yourself together!"
But no.
"I want to have peace," I told my friend Jessica walking around Green Lake today. "I don't want to be in this chaos anymore. I want to be calm and fun and carefree, like I used to be. I am tired of reading self-help books and books on how to parent a troubled teen. I want to read a novel. Anything."
"You can't skip to peace," said Jessica, a two-time cancer survivor. "You are in a time of conflict. There won't be peace during a time of conflict. You are trying to sort things out. Peace is a nice long-term goal, but you need to go through this. You can't cut around it." She said this as she pointed to a tree. Behind the tree were the giant fields where dozens of little girls played soccer while parents watched. The youth soccer pitch--the Promised Land of Parenting. For some parents, the Promised Land might be a swimming pool or a stage or a concert hall. Let me tell you: it isn't Wilderness or therapeutic boarding school. And yet, I am lucky that I can send the Boy to a place where he can get the care and support he needs to make it to adulthood.
Jessica has a son who is in his senior year of high school. Having been through that with Claire-Adele, I know that is a very difficult time. Toddlers are more rational and open to suggestion compared to a NE Seattle teen who feels their existence depends on whether or not they get into their top choice university.
"I made the mistake of watching videos of them when they were little," she said. "They were so full of joy. Will they ever get that back?"
I hope so. I am equally guilty of looking back at pictures and videos of the Boy when he was a tot. But that is not a bad thing. Seeing the sweet boy he once was gives me more reason to make sure he is getting the help he needs.
My manager often says to me he wants me to be happy, and the subtext there is that I am not. He has known me for a few years, and has seen me at my worst and my best at work. He recalls that I have a sense of humor and fun, but hasn't seen it in a while as it has been hidden behind my worry about the Boy.
Like my manager wants me to be happy, I want the Boy to be carefree and fun, too. I miss his sense of humor. I miss the joie de vivre he had a kid, like in the video above when he was crashing his plastic lawn chairs with the wheelbarrow. I remember when the Boy was little and Claire-Adele was in pre-school, I would dance with the Boy on my hip in the kitchen. I'd put him on my hip and spin around and he'd laugh and laugh. Obviously, that isn't going to happen, but I remember in recent times when he'd have good stories to tell about school, his friends and skiing. I remember dinners at Santorini with the kids when Jack was working, and they'd bombard me with tales of the crazy things they had done.
I miss that, but I am hoping sometime the Boy and I will both return to not necessarily our past selves, but better, future selves that enjoys the ups in life and can safely weather and navigate the rainy days. I hope Wilderness and boarding school will give him the rain coat, the umbrella, the rubber boots he will need to keep him warm and dry during those inevitably rough times. I used to wish--as I am sure most mothers do--that the Boy would never face hard times, that his life would be sunshine and rainbows. I have had enough tragedy in my life I should know better, and yet I still wish him a peaceful life.
But I can't. There are hard parts of life, the times of conflict that we cannot avoid or go around. We need to go through, as I was so gently reminded by Jessica. Unlike rain, we can't just sit and wait until it stops. We need to work through, or else the conflict will wait.
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| The leaning stack of books next to my bed. |
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