Defiant Little Shit, or the Pit of Despair, Part II, and the Bear

Now that I feel like I am on more emotionally stable ground with the Boy, I can look back and see how challenging the past four years were. I wrote earlier this week about the Boy's walk to the Ravenna footbridge in May 2016. 

That was first time.

There were numerous trips to the footbridge between then and when he went to treatment. The Boy had low grade suicidality for a few years. He never had a trip to the ER where we found him half dead or he needed his stomach pumped, but there were lots of time I feared he'd impulsively take his like by walking in front of a bus, jumping from a bridge, or riding his bike down a steep hill and crashing into traffic.

When the Boy was admitted to the PBMU (Psychiatric and Behavioral Monitoring Unit) at Seattle Children's in 8th grade, Jack and I attended parent education where they showed us a graph like this one to describe the mental state of a kid like ours:

The Green Zone is a peaceful, normal state. The Red Zone is where the kid gets agitated and loses control. The Black Zone is where the kid crashes down from the Red Zone into depression. This is where they have clarity about their previous actions, and they often feel remorse, shame and embarrassment that they lost control. 

The Red Zone is where kids risking hurting other people. 

The Black Zone is where they risk hurting themselves.

Neither is fun.

The hard part is when kids repeatedly go through this cycle. It is agonizing to watch your child struggle through this again and again.

So, as a mom, my first job was to make sure the Boy avoided the cycle as much as possible, which ironically is not what you are supposed to do. Here is where life sucks.

I was talking to another friend whose kid was in rehab. "They told us we had to throw everything about being a good parent out the window and do the opposite." That doesn't mean screaming at your kid like a maniac. It means detaching. It means when you see them slowing destroying their life, not to nag and tell them they are ruining their life. It means watching them crash. It means letting them fail. It means not enabling them. 

In this case, I am dealing with a minor, not a grown adult. I am still a responsible parent.

All the while, my heart is breaking.

Now the Boy is in a safe and supported place where he will get to practice his new coping skills. He will be living with three other guys who had similar struggles. He will live in Montana where he can ski, mountain bike, fly fish, hike and swim in lakes.* This weekend, the kids went floating down a river on inner-tubes in Glacier National Park.

"We saw a bear," the Boy said. "It was about thirty-five yards and across the river."

I had never thought there'd be a day where I'd be excited my son encountered a bear in the wild. After the past four years, I am glad his is exactly where he is.

* I asked the Boy if the school ever takes the kids hunting, as hunting is a major outdoor activity in Montana. "Mom," he said, "Do you really think they are going to take a bunch of trouble youth into the woods and given them guns?" Fair point.

Defiant Little Shit, or the Pit of Despair

I was talking to a parent with a kid in residential treatment (PKRT) recently about the Boy. Her son knew my son somewhere along the way so when she read Jack's article, she reached out to me to commiserate. I told her a story about when the Boy was a defiant little shit.

"'Defiant little shit' is a technical term," I said. She laughed.

All kids reach a stage in their lives when they become a defiant little shit (DLS). If a kid doesn't become a DLS at some point, they are either 

a) too young (but just wait), or

b) there is something wrong with a kid who can't stand up for themselves or have boundaries by time they are eighteen, or

c) the parents are super controlling or drunk and the kid is afraid to act out. 

I remember a vivid incident when the Boy was a DLS. It was May 2016 and we had tickets to Billy Elliot. Two months prior, the Boy saw a flier for the show that came in the mail and asked if we could see it. 

"Sure," I said and ordered the tickets. I ordered them early enough to get seats in the third row. Jack and I had been taking the kids to the Seattle Children's Theatre for years, so it made sense they would show interest in theatre for adults.

The day of the show came and the Boy was in a bad place. He was grouchy and tired and probably hungry. He was in no mood to see the play I had bought tickets to months earlier, but fuck it, we were going.

The Boy sulked in the car on the way there. He had a tantrum in the restaurant before the show, triggered by very mild rudeness from his sister. He stormed out the restaurant, didn't eat and was texting Jack "Fuck you!" when he was asked to return to the table. 

The show was about to start, and the Boy settled down. I was anxious during the most of the show as we were in the third row. What if the Boy had a fit and disturbed the performers? I had a flashback to a Northwestern v Washington basketball game where he punched his sister for leaving him behind at the concession stand. The Boy was lost for twenty minutes. When he came back to our seats, he slugged Claire-Adele. We were sitting four rows behind the Northwestern bench. The security guard gave us the stink eye and watched us for the rest of the game, ready to eject my family if the situation got out of hand.

Fortunately, the Boy was fine during Billy Elliot.

After the show was another story. Here he was a defiant little shit. He sat in the front seat of the car where I usually sit. I told him to turn his phone off in the car, and he didn't. 

When we got home, Jack walked the dog and the Boy melted down. He raged and threatened to smash his computer against the floor.

"Don't you dare!" I said.

"It won't break!" he yelled back as he chucked it against the floor.

The screen was demolished. Shattered.

"What the fuck were you thinking?" I screamed. I was pissed after being on edge for the previous five hours.

The Boy's anger flipped on a dime to sorrow. The gross realization of the damage -- physical and emotional -- hit home. He left the house. I texted Jack that the Boy was on the loose. I was glad he was gone. He needed to cool down.

Except he didn't cool down. He walked to the footbridge in Ravenna and looked over the edge. Jack was there with the dog, talking him off the edge, both literally and figuratively.

This week, after talking to this new mom with a kid in treatment, I realized that for the past four years, I have lived in fear that my son might kill himself, a fear that grew until the Boy was sent to treatment. It became more tangible as the Boy receded from the world, escaping into Netflix and Youtube and Instagram.

This week, the Boy called from Montana. He is been given the green light to run from his physical therapist since his ACL surgery. 

"Mom, I ran on the track instead of the treadmill. I hate treadmills. I hate them so much I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it and these treadmills had Netflix," he said. He paused.

"I passed up Netflix to run on the track," he said. He knew meaning of this was not lost on me, that this was a major development. A sober alcoholic can pass by a bar and not walk in. The Boy passed a screen and didn't watch.

I finally feel like I can breathe. After four years, my fear of my son killing himself is abating. 

Now that my fear is receding, I can step back and see the pit of despair that I was living in. I had glimpses of it before and it terrified me. Now, I can see the hole for what it was. I am starting to recover from the trauma.

In my recovery group, there are lots of people who became lost their sanity themselves after living with someone with addiction. 

Why is it that we who live with someone with mental health issues or addiction become so sick ourselves? Why?

If my son had cancer and I dropped everything to save his life, I'd be considered heroic? Yet, when I tried to save my son from anxiety, depression, suicidality and screen addiction, I became just as crazy?

Bandwidth

This weekend, my dad commented that I haven't posted recently on my blog.

This past summer has been crazy, with two trips to Montana, the Boy coming home, Claire-Adele coming home, layoffs at the company where I work and the Boy transitioning to the next phase of his program where he will attend a public high school in Montana while living with a handful of his peers from the boarding school (residential treatment? in-patient treatment?) in a house in town.*

This weekend, I was super tired. I slept a lot on Sunday, which was good. I'm still tired, but I will make it through the week, I hope.

As I am recovering from a busy few months and a very intense two years, I am taking time to take care of myself. The bandwidth I have to take care of myself is expanding, and I am almost feeling flooded by the need to attend a bunch of stuff that has been unattended for years. I feel like I moved into a house years ago, and then a bunch of unwanted guests moved in a trashed the place. Now, the unwanted guests are out and I am assessing the damage. Do I think of my family as unwanted guests? No, but rather I didn't have the appropriate boundaries in place to keep myself sane, and to keep my inner space clean and calm.

No wonder I am exhausted.

The good news is, I actually am looking forward to cleaning up the mess. I am looking forward to having a clean, calm inner space. I am feeling better as I address these issues that have been festering. I am re-learning to stand up for myself. I used to stand up for myself, but somewhere it got lost along the way.

I am glad to be finding my way back.

* Saturday night, the Boy called. It had been his turn to make dinner. He made chili and was exceptionally proud of his homemade cornbread.

"I don't care"

I went for a walk today with one of my former work colleagues. He is gay and originally from a conservative part of the country.

"When people in my hometown see me with my boyfriend and figure out we are a couple, they act all super sweet. It is performative," he said. "When people see us in Seattle, they don't care if we are gay or not."

I don't care. What does that mean? There are so many ways those three words can be interpreted. It is like the expression "Too bad" where tone matters. The French have multiple ways to say "too bad" ranging in meaning from "my deepest condolences your grandmother died" (je suis desolee) to "I am sorry your car broke down (quel domage). Tant pis, like "I don't care," can be kind or cruel, meaning either "oh well" or "tough shit" depending on the context and tone.

My friend H from college lived in Taiwan until moved to the US when she was seven. While her English is undistinguishable from a native born American, she was missing a few idioms.

"Lauren," she asked me once, years ago, "where do you want to go for dinner?"

"I don't care," I replied.

"How can you not care? You should care where we go to dinner!" she replied. 

Uh...I thought I was giving her space to chose the restaurant. Fortunately, I realized she was having a glitch in her internal American dictionary. I recovered with "I am open and flexible with where we go."

Still, "I don't care" is tricky. It can seen as belittling or dismissive. "I don't care that the former police chief in Seattle was a Black woman" can mean I am simply tolerant. I could mean I am apathetic. I could mean that I am embracing a non-white man leading the city's police force. 

At best, "I don't care" is imprecise. Sometimes imprecise can be fine, but other times, it matters. Like all other language, half of communication is what the other person hears. My friend H's feelings were hurt when I told her I don't care, which of course was not at all my intension. 

I apologized because I care more about her feelings than I did about where we ate dinner.

The Kids are Back, or Boarding School Boy and Poker

And all is well.

For the most part.

Eh.

Families are hard.

I wish my family was easy

but is it not.

I wish I was relaxed

not anxious about everything.

I am trying to change

but is it hard. 

Earlier this week I was going to write about how splendid and wonderful it was to have my family all together, and how fantastic and wonderful the Boy is doing. He is doing so much better. I feel like he is out of the woods in so many ways. He understands what his anxiety is, and he's learning tools to help him manage it himself. One of our family's many therapists said "Emotional maturity is being honest with yourself." The Boy is getting there, and I am so grateful and relieved.

Saturday, the kids taught Jack and I how to play Texas Hold 'Em poker. Both kids play regularly at school. The Boy plays one a week at school. (Replacing drug, alcohol and screen addictions with gambling addictions, or just a fun, social game? Anyhow...) Claire-Adele plays with friends in the dorm. The Boy in some ways is living the college life, minus the freedom to make his own schedule. He hangs with friends and peers 24/7, from brushing his teeth to every meal to all entertainment to sleeping in the same room. Layer in fifteen months of residential therapy, and the Boy is so mature. He seemed more like a twenty-three year old than a seventeen year old. He is learning self-mastery, the ability to manage himself instead of needing an authority figure to do it for him. Some people need someone to give them rules, then they can follow the rules. That is not self-mastery. That is rule following.

As a parent, I feel tremendous relief.

Then, the bickering started. 

Oy.

I hate bickering.

It makes me stressed.

I need to detach

and look at the positive sides of 

my kids.

Loneliness from Working and Living Remotely, or Four Months Left til the Zombie Apocalypse

Along with millions of Americans, I am officially five months into working remotely. 

How's it going?

A few weeks ago while I was in a coffee shop waiting for my barista to make my mocha, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal by Chip Cutter Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All.

Now, as the work-from-home experiment stretches on, some cracks are starting to emerge. Projects take longer. Training is tougher. Hiring and integrating new employees, more complicated. Some employers say their workers appear less connected and bosses fear that younger professionals aren’t developing at the same rate as they would in offices, sitting next to colleagues and absorbing how they do their jobs.

Months into a pandemic that rapidly reshaped how companies operate, an increasing number of executives now say that remote work, while necessary for safety much of this year, is not their preferred long-term solution once the coronavirus crisis passes.

“There’s sort of an emerging sense behind the scenes of executives saying, ‘This is not going to be sustainable,’” said Laszlo Bock, chief executive of human-resources startup Humu and the former HR chief at Google. No CEO should be surprised that the early productivity gains companies witnessed as remote work took hold have peaked and leveled off, he adds, because workers left offices in March armed with laptops and a sense of doom.

There are lots of other reasons why working remotely has its challenges for some types of work. There aren't spontaneous conversations. Young people don't get the mentoring they need. Teamwork diminishes. Some people feel more productive, but ask their bosses. Do they feel the same? Sometimes not.

I read another article from the Wall Street Journal that said people become lonely after working remotely for nine months. When I read that, I thought that is so true. I thought about myself working remotely when I moved from Chicago to St. Louis from for Jack's job years ago. We moved to St. Louis in June and I kept the job I had in Chicago. Everyday, I went to my cube in the St. Louis office where I had no peers. For nine months, I had no one to eat lunch with (except when I was on the road). I quit my job the following February. I had another friend/co-worker who moved to another state a few years ago in July to follow a girlfriend. The next spring, he was showing signs of anxiety. By the summer, he checked himself into a hospital for mental health treatment.

When I told my friend Ellen that after nine months of isolation people become lonely, she said, "So in around the holidays we all are going to collapse?"

Yes and no. Not everyone will collapse, but some of us will. Social connection is a very important part of living a healthy life. It is like diet and exercise: some people eat crap, smoke, drink never exercise, and then live to be 86 with very few health issues (see: Auntie Chris). Other people who do the same die of a heart attack when they are forty-three. Likewise, some people can live an isolated life and are fine. Others not so much.

How can we stay connected to society, to our friends, our peers?

I don't have an answer or plan, but at least I have a goal of staying connected.

High Heels & Lipstick

I was getting ready to go out and get my haircut today and I put on lipstick, rouge and powdered my nose.

Why? 

No one can see my face, so what is the point? All you can see are my eyes and forehead. I don't wear eye makeup because I had an eye injury as a child. Will makeup evolve into forehead makeup, where we will decorate everything above our eyebrows?

And I looooove my new shoes, but I haven't worn heels in months and my legs and feet got a little sore. Heck with high heels -- somedays I don't wear shoes at all expect to go to the lobby of my building to get my newspaper.

P&E

My kids real initials are P&E, which is an accounting term for Profits & Earnings, neither of which either of my kids are for me. Maybe one day they will earn their own way, but for now...

Anyhow.

Both kids will be in Seattle next week.

Which is terrifying. I feel like a horrible mom for saying that.

And I don't. 

I went to dinner last night with one of my new downtown friends. She is a mom of elementary school kids. She is divorced and splits her time between Seattle and Pullman, WA. Her kids live in Pullman, and she works in tech in Seattle.

Like me, she is a part-time parent. She knows what it is like to both be a mom and not live full-time with her kids. When I told her P&E were coming back to town at the same time, she said,

"That must be so stressful." 

She said what I had been thinking but I could not admit. I've been working on "my stuff" lately, and I realize that many problems in people's personal (and even professional lives) are often because we are not honest with ourselves. For me to admit or acknowledge that I am terrified of my kids being home is the first step. Then I can do something about it.

Why am I terrified of both of my kids coming home at the same time? I happy to have one at a time. 

P&E have very, very different personalities that sometimes clash and there can be big problems. I don't like big problems.

Early this morning, Jack forwarded me a text from one of our college friends whose 14 year old daughter "up-and-died." "Up-and-died" is a non-medical medical term for unexplained and/or unexpected death. Ada, my firstborn who died an unexplained and sudden death, would have "up and died."

Yesterday, this friend carried ten pounds of his daughter's ashes on a hike and scattered them off a cliff. "I carried the ashes in the same backpack that I carried Madison in as a baby. This was the last time I carried her."

I've read the text three times and I've cried every time.

I felt like a heel for not joyously welcoming my two living, breathing, kids back home, especially at a time when almost every other mom on the planet with kids under the age of twenty-two has her children underfoot. Here I am, dreading two weeks. My kids are alive and healthy and I should be happy. I should be thrilled, but instead I am not.

What should do? When I started back to work, I had a friend who said when I started to feel upset, I should ponder three things:

• What am I feeling?
• Why am I feeling this way?
• What am I going to do about it?

When I am at work, I am good at sorting these things out. At home, not so much. At work, I am not nearly as emotionally invested in whatever problem I am having as when my kids are ready to kill each other.

What can I do? 

1. Learn from others 
• Alexis and David Rose, my favorite fictional brother and sister even, fight all of the time. ("Ew, David!") Fighting between siblings is good, right? 
2. Practice gratitude. Kids home = 
• Cranberry muffins
• Chocolate chip scones
• Claire-Adele's cooking (see: stuffed portobello mushrooms, chicken parmesan, and peach pie)
• The Boy's movie must-see list
• Legos
• Hiking
• Hearing stories
• Playing game (Scratch that--50% of games lead to fights because everyone is my family is fiercely competitive.)
• New music that the kids introduce me to
• Team crossword puzzles with the Boy