An Empty Chair, Words & Actions, Head & Heart and a Work in Progress

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Claire-Adele was at home, which was nice. There was an empty chair at the table as the Boy is in Montana for treatment for anxiety and depression. This was the first major holiday he's been gone. The Fourth of July and Labor Day were not easy, but Thanksgiving was hard. The Boy gets a pass over Christmas so I'll get to see him then for a few days.

The Boy has been making progress on his therapy. Yesterday on our phone call with him, he talked about colleges. He was reading Fiske's college guide and was looking at engineering schools in California, Montana and British Columbia. Claire-Adele pointed out that the last time she talked to him over the summer he was thinking of a gap year or community college. Now, Caltech is his dream school, as it was when he was in middle school. I think he'd probably be happier at Montana State where he could ski and mountain bike regularly. Anyway, it is a very positive development.

Lately, I've been thinking about words and actions, and the head and the heart.

One of the biggest challenges is when words and actions, and the head and the heart are not in sync. I've faced in the past year is dealing with people whose words and actions might align, but might not align with how they are really feeling. Other times, words and actions don't align. In some cases, the words and actions are not aligned. The words might match the mind, but the actions match the heart, or the actions might match the mind, but words match the heart.

In all cases, it is very confusing to be on the receiving end of this mixed up communication.

In all fairness, I am just as bad. Since the Boy left in June for therapy, I have been working on trying to figure out what I want for myself. Since I am in a little bit of a mess, I don't know what I want so my communication might be off.

Recently, I read an article on Medium, my new favorite blog anthology. Instead of putting your life on hold while you are figuring out what you want, this blog says to consider yourself a "Work in Progress."

Claire-Adele & Thanksgiving

Yesterday, I talked to Claire-Adele for three hours.

It was lovely.

Life here has been super hectic and I hadn't had the chance to talk to her in a while, which was a drag.  The Boy's work at the boarding school has gotten deep, so it harder for him and harder for me. Claire-Adele, on the other hand, is doing fine. I ran into an old friend at Bartell's while I was waiting for a flu shot. She has fraternal twins. Her son is having problems and her daughter is like Claire-Adele: hard-working, ambitious, and organized.

"They grew up in the exact same environment," said Rachel. "Everything was the same, so how did one end up fine and the other not? And how can any of it be my fault?"

I wonder how much of the Boy's situation is my fault and then I think of Claire-Adele. She turned out fine, maybe in spite of me. Like I can't take blame for the Boy, I can't take credit for Claire-Adele. The Boy has helped prove me humble enough to accept that.

Claire-Adele was in a confident and cheerful mood. She has interesting conflicts in her life, like should she go to the make-up class her History of Politics professor rescheduled or should she go to the CNN Town Hall to see Nancy Pelosi speak? (Answer: Skip class.)

I found out that three of her favorite movies are Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman (Claire-Adele has seen is five times, a movie that is well worth multiple viewings), Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, and Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn.

"I watched Roman Holiday while I was in labor with you," I told her. "It is one of my favorite movies." She was surprised that she never knew that. I am surprised I never told her.

I am so looking forward to her upcoming visit this week. This Thanksgiving will be completely different from last year, which was a shit show. Claire-Adele was stressed about her first semester at college and the Boy was struggling with school. They were both short fused, which was not good.

This week at my Al-Anon meeting, we had to write about emotional sobriety and how was plan to practice that over the upcoming holiday. Emotional sobriety is about dealing with negative emotions that were ignored while a person was drinking or using drugs. In my case, I have to deal with the negative emotions I has ignoring while I was getting the Boy into treatment, plus ignoring the toxic behavior I felt from my husband.

As other people shared, I realized I had not emotionally prepared for the Boy staying in Montana over Thanksgiving. I was at a wedding on Friday night and the bride asked about the Boy, assuming I would see him over Thanksgiving. I must have stumbled over my answer because my friend came to my rescue and chimed in for me.

"No," said my friend. "They won't send him home this early. He might not want to go back to school if he goes home now." She was right.

I started to think about this Thanksgiving. This is the first major holiday since Jack and I have been separated. This is the first major holiday since the Boy has been away. I thought about the three A's for dealing with challenging thoughts:

• Acknowledge
• Accept
• Action

I can acknowledge that this holiday will be harder than most because the Boy will be gone. I can grieve his departure, but I can also accept that he is in Montana getting the help I can't provide. What action can I take? I can look forward to spending time with Claire-Adele. Jack is working the holiday, so I will have Claire-Adele all to myself. We can bake. We can watch old movies. We can shop and go to museums. I can hear more about her college adventures and who she wants to vote for for President.

And I can be thankful for that.

Addiction, Aspergers, Attraction and Acceptance: Part 1

Last night, Jack and I met with our third marriage counselor/therapist. Oh joy! Third time is the charm? yeah.

Actually, I like this guy. Our first therapist was fine, but she retired. She admitted she was out of her depth when we started having challenges with the Boy. The second therapist worshipped doctors, which was not a good thing. She had wanted to be one herself but didn't make it.

"You know doctors work long hours, right?" she said to me condescendingly. Yeah. I've been with him for decades. I know the drill. "You are going to have to accept that," she said. The "suck it up, buttercup" attitude did not sit well with me. I hated it.

Anyway, this guy seems reasonable, more into the root cause of why things don't work.

"Do you have any addictions?" he asked both of us. "My definition of addiction is something that you do or use to avoid feelings."

Avoid feelings. Yeah. I've been avoiding feelings. Lots of 'em, joy and happiness included. I go to work and I don't have to think about the Boy or Jack for eight hours a day. I work out at the club and watch guys play volleyball while I am on the elliptical. I bitch and drone on to my friends about the drama in my life, which completely distracts me from the agony and pain of knowing the Boy is struggling with his own demons.

Which got me thinking about the Boy. His addiction is screens. Netflix, YouTube, SnapChat, Instagram, video games all kept him from feeling. When the screen was off, it was meltdown city. The feelings didn't go away, they were just hidden, blocked.

As I learned years ago when Ada died, grief waits. Feelings wait. They don't go away. They sit there and wait to be addressed, and when they are not, they come out sideways, perhaps in unhealthy and unproductive ways. They scream at us, begging us to pay attention.

Now the Boy is in a place where they take away the addictions, the distractions, so he can focus on his feelings. So he can pay attention.

Feelings are important, especially in our intellectualized world. They are messengers, telling us what we need to heed. Some times those messages are confusing, or leave us not knowing what to do. This is the hard part, and I wish I had an answer, but I don't.

-- to be continued. I gotta go to work.

Apprenti Speech

Last week, I spoke at the Apprenti graduation. (I can now cross "Give Commencement Speech" off my bucket list.) Apprenti was the program that got me my job a few years ago. 

It has been a while since I've used my public speaking skills. It was hard to get back into gear. It was also hard to temper my own expectations. I liken it to an athlete who has been is coming out of retirement and his hoping to hit a home run on their first at bat. I should be happy with a double or a triple. Nevertheless, I have given some amazing speeches in my life, and it is intoxicating to have a crowd sitting in the palm of your hand. I remember two speeches I gave when Jane Addams Middle School was opening and I was the PTSA President. Jane Addams was going to hold the APP program (for gifted students) NE Seattle, which means these were some of the most intense parents in the Pacific Northwest. In the first one speech the spring before the school opened, I told a packed auditorium of anxious middle school parents that "opening a new school has a thousand moving parts" and the principal is doing her best to keep on op of everything. In other words, I very politely told 600 parents to back the fuck off and let the principal do her job.

The second speech kind of had the same tone. This speech was three days before the first day of school. I told everyone to be kind, for in three days everyone in the building would be on their first day at a new job or their first day at a new school. Some parents wept.

No one cried at the Apprenti graduation, but that is okay. The speech was vetted by the Apprenti team and they thought I have a compelling story, even though as times I thought I sounded like an affluent white woman bemoaning her existence. 

Here is the speech as written, in case you are curious.

____________________________

I am Lauren McGuire and I graduated from the Apprenti program last year. I am also a recovering politician and when Sasha asked me if I wanted to speak I’m like yeah, of course. Do you know how long it has been since I’ve held microphone in front a crowd? Been awhile.

First, congratulations to the new Apprenti graduates! It is a lot of work and is quite the accomplishment. 

Today I am going to talk about my experience with Apprenti and what it has meant to me. I was one of the pioneers/guinea pigs of the program, which was fun. I am now an Information Analyst.

Before I start, I have a few questions.

How many of you is this your second, third or fourth job in different area or field? You don’t need to be an apprentice to raise your hand. Maybe you were a weather specialist for the army and now you are working for Amazon Web Services? Looking at different clouds? 

Now, how many of you have some prior formal education or job training that is completely different than what you are doing now? 

Great, thanks. Like many of you here, I had a lot of different experiences before I joined Apprenti.

Before I found Apprenti, I was a stay-at-home mom for seventeen years. 

Before that, I worked at Ernst & Young where I did compensation consulting and organizational change management. Before that, I worked in a strategic marketing consulting firm. All of those jobs required decent amount of travel which was not compatible with motherhood. 

I went to Northwestern University where my first major was undecided. Then I got a double major in History and Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences. The I got a Masters degree in Communication. As you can see, I was all over the place. As Sasha says, I have very expensive brain.

While I was a stay-at-home mom, I was really involved in community service. When my son was in kindergarten, Seattle Public schools was experiencing tremendous growth and so I got involved with group of parents who advocated to the district to open new schools to meet the demand. That was when I got hooked. I loved that kind of work. I later became president of the City-wide PTSA where I did a lot of education advocacy. I worked with teachers, parents, students, principals, the school board, the superintendent and State legislators. Great experience.

In 2015, some friends and some people I didn’t like very much told me I should run for school board here in Seattle. So I ran and lost but it was great experience and I learned a lot and I met a lot of really interesting people.

So what was next? I was tired of volunteering, my kids were getting older and wanted a real job, something with a paycheck.

All of friends were like “Oh Lauren you are so smart and nice and have such great experience…you can do whatever you want!” and I believed them. I applied for one job at UW that was leading an organizational change project for their accounting department. The role required working with a variety of stakeholders. My friends were like “Oh my god you’d be perfect for that!” But didn’t get that job. Or the next job. Or the next job. My friends, amazing as they are, are not leading HR departments in Seattle. Finding a just turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. 

It was very, very, very humbling. I didn’t have a straight, linear career that I could hop back into. I wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. Instead, I did whatever I found interesting.

Still, I wanted to get back to work. My friend Julia organized this group for moms wishing to return to the work force and that was when I found Apprenti.

Sasha set me up for an interview with Lief. I was very grateful he hired me for a job that I had no idea what it was about. He told me his group provided an enterprise wide service desk solution and I had no idea what that meant. Not. A. Clue. You’ve seen those Charlie Brown cartoons where the adults talk and they sound like “wah-wah-wah-wah”? It was like that. Accepting the job was an act of pure faith. 

Lief was a very supportive manager and believed in the Apprenti program. In the interview, I asked him why he wanted to hire someone from Apprenti andhe said “I am looking for someone who can think.” I can do that.

Learning the new skills was challenging. It wouldn’t say it was hard, but it was like drinking from a firehose—a lot, all at once, coming fast and hard. It could be intimidating at times.

It was just as important to have supportive peers, which were a lot harder to come by. My peers had been working in the field for a long time and in comes this new person with no direct experience. Two of my peers really didn’t like me and they didn’t understand why I was there. I think they thought I was a charity case, and they were kind of right. As you could tell by the first part of my speech, I don’t really have a small ego. I had my friends constantly telling me how great I was and these people were like "Why are you here?" Again, this was very, very humbling. 

Fortunately, I was an analyst for a developer who was very helpful and supportive both technically and emotionally as I was dealing with some of the tensions from my other peers.

So that is how I got here. But what I have I learned? What insights have I gained?

One of the primary insights that came to me was when Sasha had invited me and a handful of other apprentices to a meeting with a potential donor. We all went around the room and talked about how we got to the program. Another woman had worked in sales. Another guy was an officer in the military. Brain had been a Project Manager with the Army Corp of Engineers.

I was listening to Brian, and I thought, as soon as Microsoft learns that this guy was a project manager, he is going to be running the show. Then I had an epiphany listening to the other people talk: I had thought that not being from tech was a liability. It turns out, that was an advantage. Once I got the core skills of my job down, my other skills came back into bloom.

Here are a few examples:

·     Lief asked me to run a meeting once for the first time. He said wow that was a great meeting! You are really good at this! I’ve been a PTA President, I’ve run lots of meetings.

·     Our team is working with another team where we are going in and are going to “fix” their process. On the one hand, they are happy about it, and the other hand us coming in and fixing their process means they were doing it wrong before so now they are getting a little prickly. How can we get them on board and still move the work forward so they don’t become a blocker? Get people to do things they don’t want to do and make them feel good about itis part of organizational change management. That’s what I did in my life as an education advocate and when I was at Ernst & Young.

·     Some of the things I’m good at, too, do not require my expensive brain, as Sasha calls it. One of the senior managers in the company was having two people who weren’t getting along so he swung by my desk and asked for advice. I’m a mom of two kids. Two people not getting along is my bread and butter.

I hope you look for those other skills you have from your past life and bring them to your new role. If I haven’t convinced you, then I highly recommend you all read this book. “Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein.

This is from the book jacket: "Epstein discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on just one. They’re also more creative, more agile and able to see connections their more specialized peers can’t see."

This is you.

This is me.

This is us.

This is Apprenti.

[When I said this, everyone clapped like I was done, and I wasn’t expecting it. I still had more to go. I should have just said thank you and gotten off the stage.]

When I read this book, I thought of Apprenti and my own experience. Now that you all have finished your on-the-job training, of course you will need to continue to work on your tech skills. But in that process, remember all of the other wonderful skills you bring to the table.

Congratulations!

"Work is the new sex" and Don't Know? Wait

I was reading the New York Times review of Ford v Ferrari by A.O. Scott when I came across this sentence:

"Work is the new sex."

Well, that's interesting, especially if you read it alone and out of context.

I wanted to see this movie just based on this line alone. What did Scott mean? 

He was comparing how this movie made today would have been different if it had been made a few years after the real-life story took place, and starred Robert Redford or Steve McQueen. 

"Damon and Bale, both charismatic movie stars, don't put out the same kind of erotic magnetism, and their characters are decidedly not tomcats or horndogs...I’m not complaining, just taking note of a shift in mores. Onscreen and maybe off, ambition has taken the place of lust. Work is the new sex. And work — its pleasures and frustrations, the interference of bosses and the camaraderie of colleagues — is what propels “Ford v Ferrari."

Something to think about, yet ambition being a major motivator for characters (or people) isn't a new idea. See: Julius Ceasar by Shakespeare.

On a different topic, I was at brunch today with my friend Ellen when she said something so relevant that I had to stop and write it down. I was looking back at the past year and thought about all of the changes and drama I have seen. In some cases, I postponed making some major decisions about my life, and not moving forward as soon as I would like to have. Specifically, my marriage was in a toxic rut for a long time and I didn't do anything about it. I would stoically suck it up instead of taking action. I was kicking myself about it at lunch today.

"Don't beat yourself up, Lauren," Ellen said. "When you don't know what to do, wait."

I needed to wait on making a decision on my marriage as it would have destroyed any chance I had of getting the Boy help. If I raised up all of the things that were bothering me while the Boy was in crisis, it would have been like pulling the pin out of a grenade. Everything would have blown-up and the Boy would still be laying in bed, not going to school, or maybe he would have killed himself. 

After talking to Ellen, I felt better about back-burning my marriage. She reminded me of something else I read* about dealing with problems:

• Acknowledge -- When there is a problem or situation, acknowledge it. This might be the intellectual realization of a situation. Where is your head?
• Accept -- Look at the situation and accept it for what it is, i.e., avoid denial. This might be the emotional reality of a situation. Where is your heart?
• Action -- Are the head and heart aligned? Can you move forward.

All of that sounds easy, but it is not. What if there is no clear path for action andyou don't know? What if there is a double-bind, where neither choice is optional? Where Option A would be heartbreaking and Option B wouldn't be doable or viable? Then what? 

For some situations, it is okay to put them on the back-burner, but when there is a crisis at hand, we don't have the luxury of waiting. It was heartbreaking to send the Boy to Wilderness and Boarding School, but letting him lay in bed all day avoiding school and life wasn't working, either. I didn't want to wait to see how bad the Boy was going to get before we got him help. My head and heart got aligned when I acknowledged and accepted that the Boy wasn't going to get himself out of his rut. He needed help I couldn't give him.

Now that he is gone, I've been missing the Boy a lot lately. He is digging deep into his therapy and getting to the root cause of his depression and anxiety. Uncovering the root cause is good (intellectual realization), but incredibly painful to witness (emotional reality). I won't get to see him for another month. Plus, I think he would have liked to see Ford v Ferrari.

* I've been reading a lot lately, and can't remember what I read where. Everything is blurring together.

Change

Whenever I find change on the sidewalk

I wonder

Did a rich person have a hole in their pocket

or

did a homeless person lose

everything

they had

in the world?

The Woman on the Plane

I was having a hard evening after a difficult call with the Boy this morning. He is coming into some of the deep and difficult part of his work and it is hard for me as his mom to hear. It is just as hard to be told that I shouldn't try to rescue him, and tell that people really do like him and he does have friends.

So I called my dad, who is the greatest guy on the planet. My mom has Alzheimer's. She has lived in a memory care unit for four years, and my dad visits her every day and feeds her lunch. He is devoted. My mom can't communicate, and while he loves her, he often wishes he had more engaging companionship.

My dad asked me if my mom ever told me how my parents got together. My mom had told me when I was a little girl, but I had never heard the story from my dad's side. My mom had been dating this guy who was friends with my dad. My mom and her then boyfriend often double-dated with my dad and "whatever chick your father was dating at the time."

My mom's boyfriend had moved to St. Louis, and my mom and dad flew down from Chicago to visit him. On the flight home, my parents talked.

"She looked at me with these googly eyes and told me the only reason she was dating this other guy was to hang out with me. She liked that I wore glasses. She liked the way I stood," my dad said. He was moved talking about this, remembering what she was like decades ago.

"I remember that, the beginning. I was so touched that she said all of these nice things about me," my dad said. "I'd give anything be on that plane again."

"I'd do it all over again, everything," he said. "Sometimes when I am at the nursing home feeding her, I still see the woman on the plane."

Why Kids? Why Marriage?

I was at lunch last week with one of my co-workers and he asked "Why did you get married?" and "Why did you have kids?"

Which are exactly not the questions I want to think about now that my son is in treatment for depression, my daughter is off at college and my marriage has imploded. Thanks, dude. He is from India where arranged marriages are the norm, so asking an American woman what she thinks will yield a different answer than he's used to, if I can figure it out. My answering the question to someone from India will require more depth of thought than if I were talking to one of my American women friends whose experience was identical to mine. (See: Jessica who also married a guy who went to Northwestern.)

Because I am mildly (or majorly) neurotic, when people ask my questions like that I can't let go of them in my mind until I have an answer. Kids are perhaps a simpler answers--marriage is more complex. And those are two giant questions, possibly the biggest outside of "What is the meaning of life?" That might be easier: to love one and other. Or, as E.M. Forster writes in Howards End: Only connect.

Let's start with connection. Why do we get married? For connection.

Why do we have kids? For connection again, but that connection is far more work. To give and receive love. When we are kids, we are often the recipients of love from our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles. We don't give a lot of love at that age. My friend Betty recommended getting a dog for the kids when they were little: "They need to learn to give love in addition to receiving it." She was right. It is also a reason people have kids. I remember when I was pregnant with Ada. It was a surprise/oops pregnancy, but I was okay with it. "I have more to give than I need to receive," I thought at the time.

I remember reading Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Meaning comes from working, connecting and overcome difficult situations. Parenting provides all three. It is brutally hard work, but also very rewarding. It can be mind-numbingly dull at times and the most fascinating experience. It is when your heart lives outside of your body. No one pushed me or inspired me to be a better human being more than my kids.

Marriage is harder, and there are lots of reasons to get married. Some of them could be on a check list that may or may not apply.

At a basic level, I think all marriages stem from a desire for companionship, wanting to live with someone else instead of alone. What that companionship looks like varies for everyone.

Some men might want someone to cook their food, do their laundry and raise their kids, in a traditional sense.

Some women might want someone who is a good provider and will be a good father to their kids, in a traditional sense.

I've never been to India, so I can't fully speak to this, but based on the people I know, family and extended family are a big part of people's lives. I watched a video by Esther Perel who talked about individuality versus community. If you are part of a society that strongly values community, then conformity will be more important because conforming to expectations means to belong. In societies that value individuality, conforming is far less important. Even within the U.S., there are varying degrees to which this occurs. For example, there are parts of the U.S. where interracial marriages are deeply frowned upon. Other places it might not matter. If you want to marry someone from a different race, that might mean not belonging to your community if your community frowns upon it. So there you have a choice.

What causes people to get married is also very different from what keeps them married. People may marry for love and find out they are incompatible. Others may marry for compatibility, and then discover they are lonely. Or, they could marry for who knows what reason and they lives happily ever after for fifty years.

What does companionship look like for me, or what do I want out of it? I want someone who is concerned on a daily basis about my emotional well-being, and I want to be concerned about theirs. I want this person to hold me in high esteem and place me above all others. I want someone who challenges me to grow, who comforts me and soothes me.

Who that person is also important in addition to how they treat me. I could marry someone who is nice but dull, which would not be fun. Medium had an article on what makes people attractive to others: curiosity, empathy and humility were their top three traits. I would agree. I would also add laughter. Are they fun? Do they have a sense of humor? Do they love life? Do they have a sense of purpose? Do we share common values? Are they fuckable?

Do they "get" me? Do they like me for the reasons I like me? Do they understand my weaknesses and can live with them?

Likewise, what does a partner want from me? Do they want or need what I have to give? Can I contribute to their happiness, their well-being?

How are all of these things demostrated? Do they listen to me? Do they feel listened to? Can I reasonably disagree with this person? Do we make amends and apologize when things go south?

Can we make dinner together on a Tuesday night? Do they share in the household tasks, so do they expect one person to take care of everything?

Now that I think about it, the most important thing someone needs to know about why to get married is to know themselves and what they value in a relationship. It doesn't matter what the other person brings to the table. If we don't know what we want, how can someone else help provide it?

Insomnia

I love to sleep. I am not a night owl or an early bird. I am a go-to-bed-early-and-sleep-late kind of gal. A good nights sleep is essential to my functioning. Insomnia is a disaster for me as I am super sensitive to caffeine so I can't really fake a bad night's sleep with a regular mocha. If I can have a non-decaf cup of coffee, I am bouncing off the walls with too much energy, which does not make me the best co-worker in the world.

When the Boy was at Wilderness, Hector/Yoda, the leader of Family Services, explained to us that people have been waking up in the middle of the night for thousands of years. This "sleep through the night" thing is more a result of industrialization because people had to get up in the morning to go to work. In an agricultural society, when you were tired in the middle of the day when the work was done, you'd just take a nap.

Since I am not living in the woods and I have a nine-to-five job, I need my sleep at night. I have been having insomnia on and off for the past several months, which is horrible. Instead, I am learning to embrace it, and by embracing it a bit, I am able to fall back to sleep a little bit faster. When I wake, I might lay in bed and write in my journal or read a book. I might try a few meditative exercises to clear my mind instead of dreading it or worrying about how I am going to feel the next day.

I also ask what is my night mind trying to tell me? What is it that my brain is processing that I can't access during the day? Now I am trying to listen instead of wishing it away.

Regrets

I got a text from a friend today whose son was in Wilderness as the same time as the Boy.

Still thinking about what your question of what happened to the sunny optimistic middle schooler?  And why can we just decide to be happy today? (Paraphrasing). 

I ask myself that same question and I want to answer that question so badly, and more so, do something about it. Struggling to get there. Struggling to reading all of those great books that we’re recommend and instead watching mindless Netflix. 

I don’t want to get to the end of life’s journey and have regrets. 

I know the choices I want to make. That’s a start. 

Before I got her text, I was struggling with a bunch of regrets I was having during the several month period before I got the Boy into Wilderness and the months after wards while I was swamped with logistics, travel and other odd tasks for the Boy.

Do I have regrets about what I did and what I failed to do, to paraphrase a line from the Catholic mass?

Yes. I have a ton of regrets, and now I am looking at the wreckage of my personal life and wondering how on earth I am going to clean up that mess. Or, can I magically start over with a new life, a fresh clean slate? But like bring all of my friends with me because I don't want the slate THAT clean. Maybe just take the nicest parts of my old life with me.

When I think back on my regrets of what I did and failed to do, I think of the fifteen things I wanted to do or wish I had done, and I only got two or three of those things done. 

The number one thing I did was get the Boy into treatment. The other fourteen would have been irrelevant if the Boy would have killed himself. Would I care if I got a promotion at work if my son killed himself? No.

Some of the regrets I have are because I only had room in my life to get three out of fifteen things I wanted to get done but couldn't. Is it fair to regret not doing the other twelve things when it was of the utmost importance that I got the first three done? Should I be happy with the how I prioritized my list? For example, there were lots of issues in our marriage that Jack and I did not discuss while the Boy was settling into treatment. Do I regret not attending to them sooner? Yes and no. I wish I had addressed them sooner instead of letting them fester, but I didn't have the bandwidth. I feared that any adjustments to our marriage would have been a disaster that I didn't need while coping with the Boy. I was afraid that attending to those issues would have been pulling a pin out of a grenade and the explosion would have impaired getting the Boy to Wilderness and boarding school. There were other relationships I neglected, too. Do I regret not being as attentive and open as I could have been? Yes. Did I have the bandwidth while I was seeking treatment for the Boy? No.

I have no regrets about the priority I placed on getting the Boy in treatment, so therefore I need to cut myself some significant slack about not getting the other twelve done. My family was in crisis and I needed to pay attention to that. I can regret not getting those things done, but I shouldn't fret about it, I suppose. 

Is it okay that I have regrets? In these cases, I think yes. I couldn't do everything. I had to make choices. I still might regret the things I didn't get done, but that is okay. It could mean that I had ambition to get more stuff done than I possibly could have.

Regrets drive us to continually evolve and evaluate our options. They help keep us focused on what we want and need to do. They are an engine for growth, if we let them be.

Blessings and Abundance

I talked to the Boy Friday morning and he seems to be doing much better, which is a giant relief. His voice sounds strong and hopeful, more hopeful than I've heard in ages. Last week, he wrote us a long and detailed letter. His interest in aerospace is back, which is fantastic. In middle school, one of his favorite activities was rocketry, where the kids would build rockets and compete in a national contest. He is grades are up due to his improved time management and ability to manage is anxiety in the face of a pile of work.

As he gets stabilizes, so do I. The week before last was almost blissful. I was peaceful, in a good mood and carried with me an open heart. I was present, not preoccupied for the first time in a long time. At the same time I am relieved, I now have the emotional space to focus on my personal life. I have to attend to a bunch of situations that have been ignored for months. My marriage, my friendships, and other family relationships have all been neglected while I worked to get the Boy into treatment. My marriage was a disaster, but I couldn't address those issues at the time for fear of losing focus on the Boy.

One of the major issues I have been struggling with since the Boy has gone to Wilderness and boarding school is finding peace and reasons to be happy in spite of the miserableness my son struggling with. The week before last was fine, but how can I keep that up even when times are low? How can I make it part of my long-term view?

I think I may have figured part of it out. Today, I went to an Al-Anon meeting to help me find some sanity and healing with Jack's workaholism. I went years ago, but Jack told me it made him feel bad that I was going so I stopped, which was a mistake. The purpose of these meetings (or so I am figuring out) it to help the person who lives or loves with someone (partner, parent, child) with an addiction reclaim their identity, which is what I am trying to do. Often the person who is in a relationship with someone with an addiction can lose themselves in the process trying to help/fix/save the other person who may not want to be saved.

Today's topic at Al-Anon about our prayer or mediation process. I really don't have one, yet. I used to have a more spiritual life, but somewhere along the way, it got lost. As I was writing my thoughts in the meeting, I stopped to mediate for a few minutes to see what would come up. This little thought popped into my head.

You will be given blessings and abundance for saving the Boy's life.

The same thought came into my head three or four times. I don't even use words like "blessing" or "abundance," but there they were. I don't even know what those blessings will be, or what abundance means, but I'll take it on faith that things will be okay.

My friend Ellen said she and her daughter were better off because of her daughter's problems. I had a hard time reconciling this. How could she be glad her daughter was a recovering alcoholic? I think what Ellen is happy about is the recovering part. Her daughter had these issues and she overcame them. Viktor Frankl would agree. Overcoming challenges can give our lives meaning. I suppose I need to stop looking at these problems as if I have a choice about them because I don't. I don't have a choice that my son has anxiety and depression. How am I different from a goose? I am not in the sense that I cannot prevent tragedy from befalling me, but in the case of the Boy, I can be supportive and see that he gets the help he needs.

His engaging letters, his hopeful voice, those are my blessings, my abundance.

Death, Wildie & Geese

My friend Ellen and I were talking about a Facebook post I read in a group of parents whose kids are in treatment. A common complaint amongst this group is that their friends and families don't understand why they are shipping their beloved children off to sleep on the ground and shit in the woods with a group of strangers in the middle of the Southwest U.S.. I told Ellen I was lucky that my friends, family and acquaintances all seem to understand why I needed to send the Boy away.

Ellen said only one person--her financial planner who was helping her sort out the money for sending her daughter to Wildie--gave her grief about sending her daughter away.

"He asked me how I could send her off," Ellen said. "How could I not? She was going to die."

Now that the Boy is settled, I can more clearly see what I was trying so hard to avoid acknowledging: the Boy might die if I didn't get him help.

As much as I saw the potentially suicidal behavior from my son, it was hard to know if these were chronic feelings on his part or if they were occasional and fleeting thoughts. Twice, I was told the Boy might die by outsiders. First, his psychiatrist. I once asked if we should tell the Boy he needs to go to school if he wants us to take him skiing.

"Skiing might be the only thing keeping him alive," she said.

The second time was from my friend who suffers from anxiety and depression himself. Since he is an adult versus a teen, he generally has more insight into his illness than the Boy does.* Last spring when I told him that the Boy hasn't gone to school for four or five months, he fire hosed me for an hour about how the Boy needed to break the cycle of inertia. The sentences that haunts me are:

"You are at work all day, leaving him alone. You don't know how dark his thoughts are."

I know I have written about this before, but this is from a general diagnosis perspective instead of from acknowledging my own kid had a problem. In short: if you think your kid is going to die from untreated addiction or anxiety and depression, the treatment is Wilderness.

I was talking to another friend recently--I can't remember who--but she had assumptions about the type of parents who send their kids to Wilderness therapy.

"They are probably kind of disorganized," she said. "They might have a lot of problems themselves. You know--drugs, can't hold a job." In short, she thought these parents were the dregs.

"No," I said. "I've met these parents who send their kids to these programs. Sure, some of them might be slightly neurotic, but having a kid who is off the rails can do that to a person.

"But otherwise, if you took a picture of the families at the Boy's Wilderness program, the parents at Roosevelt, the parents at Lakeside and the parents at the Boy's boarding school, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart."

Which brings me back to my friend with depression and anxiety. We were at lunch and he said, "I've watched a lot of nature shows. I've seen the animals live and die. How are we different from geese?"

How are we different from geese? What makes me--an educated, affluent woman living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world--different so much so that I should be protected from the aspects of life that are determined by nature?

Or I could think of it from a different perspective. Last night I saw Parasite with some friends. "Money is an iron," said one of the characters. "It gets rid of the wrinkles." It can get rid of the wrinkles, but doesn't promise that the wrinkles won't appear in the first place. Wilderness therapy and boarding schools are irons that we are using to get the Boy the help he needs, to smooth out the wrinkles so that someday he might become a vibrant, engaged and beautiful adult.



* That may be changing as the Boy is in residential treatment. The Boy is gaining insights every day about himself.