Only the French...

...can have a highly regarded television show where a lesbian gets pregnant in a three-way with her boss.

In most shows, this scenario would either be in a sitcom of craziness or a melodrama or a soap opera.

Nope. This is Call My Agent on Netflix (aka Dix Pour Cent in France) an office drama where talented people flounder and flail in the personal and professional lives. Just like real people, except their jobs involve movie stars.

Kudos to Camille Cottin for playing a smart, hardworking woman with an indiscriminate sex life with dignity, grace and complexity.

Simone, Self-Care and the Twisties

Pedro is a skier. When he skis, he pushes his limits jumping over hills at high speed, hopefully to land safely on packed snow. It is beautiful and sublime to watch people jump on skis. It is also terrifying. One of Pedro's friends was skiing at Mt. Hood this summer and broke his leg. My motto to Pedro is "Ski so that you can ski another day." If he chickens out on a jump, that is fine with me. I trust that he and only he knows when he feels safe.

As everyone on Earth already knows, Simone Biles, the 24 year old GOAT of women's gymnastics, bailed on the Olympics. She was doing a vault when she got the "twisties," a gymnastics term for the mind losing track of the body in the middle of a complicated trick. She claims she was suffering from stress and wanted to protect her "mental health."

Why must we distinguish between "health" and "mental health"? Like it is okay to bail if you broke your leg but not okay if you broke the concentration and focus required to do the physically near impossible? As an athlete, Simone Biles isn't just a body. She has a mind, too. Her mind is just as--if not more--important than her arms and her legs.

This is a remarkable amount of self-care to be on one of the largest stages in the world and step back. As my mom used to quote some dead English guy (I'm too tired to google the exact quote), "Discretion is the better part of valor." Simone is the greatest in the world, but knowing when to stop allows her to vault another day. Simone used her discretion, and that took guts. Likewise, her discretion likely helped her to get so far in the first place.

I know millions of people are commenting on Simone, but how are those who are nearest and dearest to her supporting her? Her coaches, her teammates, her family, her friends? Her mom, her dad, her siblings, her grandma? Are they asking her WTF? Or, are they giving her a hug, telling her she has their love and support, no matter what, that they respect her right to take care of and protect herself.

I think of myself and the people I know. Am I as kind and gracious when people I know and love bow out, on smaller stages, on things that are moderately important but not epic? In the past few weeks, I have known a few people who have imploded, who said "I need to take a step away from my life right now." (I did it myself a few weeks ago.) 

How do we hold these people when they break? Do we push them? Do we allow them to slide? Do we hold them? I'd like to imagine Simone's family, wrapping her in their arms, telling her they love her. I imagine that I would do the same. But would I? Have I in the past? Or, was I jerk who pushed my friends and family--mostly my kids--to do things they didn't want to do? There is encouraging. There is enabling. There is letting people have the right to listen to their own inner voice that tells them what they need to do to stay safe. 

A friend of mine said she told her son, "I have faith that you can take care of yourself." I told my imploding friend "I am here if and when you need me. Let me know that you are safe, otherwise I will give you time to sort things out, to feel your feelings. It sit with those feelings, uninterrupted. I will welcome you back when you are ready. 

"Remember I love you."

Thank you, Simone. You made me think how I treat myself and those I love when we need to step away. Thank you for teaching me to be kinder and gentler to myself and to those I love.

I Fear Dying of Climate Change

I was reading the New York Times the other day when I saw the Quote of the Day followed by the "Here to Help" article.

In case you can't read this picture above, the quote of the day is from a Russian who is fighting fires in Siberia as the permafrost is melting. "This is not a phase, this is not a cycle--this is the approach of the end of the world."

Followed immediately below, is an article summarized as "OMG! Bathing suits cost $250? WTF?"

Right.

Rome is burning and we are worried about how much bathing suits cost. More specifically, Oregon, Washington and California are burning, blowing smoke into the jet stream and floating as far east as Maryland and New England. Russia is burning. Europe is flooding. Seattle had a heat dome a few weeks ago where temps reached 108F.

My son is a fisherman. He has gotten me interested in the sport.

Fish are dying in Montana. Having lived in Montana for two years, Pedro learned to fly fish. He reads voraciously about rivers and trout and flies. He also reads about how the rivers are warming up and killing off the fish. While one could ask, why do I care about fish? If you care about fish, then you also care about people. Fly fishing brings in $500M a year to the state of Montana, which is lots of jobs.

I can see why people focus on bathing suits instead of climate change. Buying a bathing suit is in my control. Containing forest fires and floods is out of my scope. Plus, most days climate change isn't a big deal.

Until it is. My daughter is coming to town next week, as is Pedro's girlfriend. I ordered 50 KN95 masks in case we get smacked with forest fire smoke while they are here. (I already googled that the KN95s which are the Chinese standard are just as good for smoke as are the N95s.)

Do I really think I am going to die of climate change? Not specifically, but it is now on the list of things I could die from. Before I thought the most likely cause of my death would be due to being overweight and out of shape. Think getting Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, or a cancer.

Jack, Pedro and I were eating dinner, and Jack said the coronavirus was a bigger threat than climate change. I can see his point, as the docs at his hospital are still taking care of people who are dying because they didn't get vaccinated. Yet, Pedro and I disagreed with him.

"When the virus is contained, climate change will still be here."

We can do two things: We can try to stop climate change and all drive electric cars and whatnot, or we can figure out ways to live with fires and floods and other biblical levels of catastrophes. 

Or, we could do both.

Or, we could do nothing. 

Doing nothing is a bad idea. First the fish die, and then us. I know we all will eventually die, but no one wants to die unnecessarily, before our time and due to otherwise preventable causes.

We could get closer to the fish, to the waters and the streams, to help us realize the smallest things we need to protect.

Newton's Fourth Law of Therapy & Why I Meditate

"For every problem in the child (identified patient), there is an equal and opposite problem in the parent."

                                                                                        -- Pedro's Fourth Law of Therapy

A friend of mine recently asked me about my meditation practice. We didn't get a chance to finish the conversation, but my first thought was because meditating doesn't cause a hangover like gin and tonics do.

I'm kidding.

Sometimes you can get a meditation hang-over.

I'm kidding again.

I meditate because it clears the noise and busyness in my mind, giving my soul a chance to speak. 

In Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Towards an Undivided Life, Parker Palmer writes about his battle with depression. While there are dozens of reasons why people get depressed (and cures), he describes his own depression rising from "burying true self so deep that life becomes one long, dark night of the soul." His depression "was the soul's call to stop, turn around, go back, and look for a path [he] could negotiate...When I was living my outer life at great remove from inner truth, I was not merely on the wrong path: I was killing myself with every step I took... We can reclaim our lives only by choosing to live divided no more. It is a choice so daunting...that we are unlikely to make it until our pain becomes unbearable, that pain that comes from denying or defying our true self."

I meditate in the hopes of aligning my inner and outer life, and meditation is one of my many hedges against insanity. My flavor of crazy isn't depression -- it is a spinning and obsessing mind, constantly trying to avoid and control and figure things out so nothing bad ever happens, which is impossible. Bad things do happen. Of course I want to be careful and not careless, but there should be a word that means being too careful to the point of failing to thrive. My favorite elementary school teacher Ms. Kolin affectionately called me a worrywart. If she had seen me two years ago, she would have called me the worry-melanoma.

I can hide my worry-wart-ness from the public and co-workers, but privately I can spin and spin and spin, which is unhealthy, not just for me but for my kids. See the Fourth Law of Therapy: for every problem in a kid, there is an equal and opposite problem in the parents. In the past two years since Pedro was away, I've had a lot of time to do my own inner while Pedro was doing his. 

Unfortunately, there isn't yet a drug for worry-wart-ness. The only way out for my disease is through. 

And so I meditate.

"Professional"

I was at coffee the other day with a new friend I made during the pandemic. She has a kid about Pedro's age and we were comparing notes about teenage boys. This mom is super smart and well educated, just like most of my friends. (I would never say I have dumb friends. Why would I be friends with someone if I thought they were dumb? That makes no sense. I do however, have some friends who never finished college, and that is fine, too.)

Where was I? This woman is also a professional. She has a professional job and is very competent at what she does.

Competent.

You know how sometimes you are sitting across the table with someone for coffee and you realize you are looking in the mirror, and you discover something about yourself that you NEVER saw about yourself until you sat down with them? Recently, I went to dinner with a friend and we had butterscotch pudding for dessert, passing up carrot cake and some decadent chocolate thing. I would never order butterscotch pudding ahead of anything chocolate.

And the butterscotch pudding was delicious. See? I learned I like butterscotch pudding! Who knew? I also realized I like cocktails better than wine! Again, who knew?

Back to the main point. We often learn about ourselves through other people.

This woman was just like 95% of the moms in NE Seattle. There is nothing unique or exceptionally different about her: all women in NE Seattle are exceptional and unique. 

I have had the same conversations with many moms over and over again. Maybe this distance in time and space from the quarantine allowed me to uncover this. Maybe it is because I no longer live in NE Seattle. 

As parents (moms aren't the only ones who do this), how often do we apply a professional approach to dealing with our kids? How often do we treat them like colleagues instead of kids? How often do we connect with our kids head-to-head, and not heart-to-heart? Our children might come crying to us with a broken heart, and we give our kids an intellectual solution?

How much of our professional culture has infected our homes? Kids aren't residents or fellows or interns or Analysts in our families. We aren't there to train them in the ways of the professional world.

I grew up in home where my dad was a professional. He does my taxes (thankfully) every year and he offers me advice on how to manage this long-term care insurance law that is hitting the State of Washington. All of that is well and good, but what I most love about my dad is I can call him when I am happy, sad, frustrated and/or thrilled with the world. (I mostly call about the things I am frustrated, worried, annoyed or sad about, TBH.)

Does he respond to me in a "professional" manner, giving me advice? Nope. He just listens. He meets me heart-to-heart.

Where did me and my friends lose our way? Did we fell like we needed to raise our kids to become professionals, so therefore we must treat them as such?

I need to stop. I need to focus more on being a mom and meeting my kids where their heart is at, not as much their heads. School and work can and will meet them where their heads are, but they won't meet them where their heart is. That is why we have family and friends, people who care about us and want to understand our hearts.

Lily Pads and Lotuses, and the Wonder of the Water

This evening I took my paddleboard to Green Lake and I actually stood up on it. 

Yay! Go me!

Below is a map of my excellent adventure.

I started up at the northwest corner of Green Lake. The water was calm and still so I decided to stand. Which is the first real time I've stood on my paddleboard since I've owned it. When I paddleboarded in Tofino on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, I stood up just fine. Since then, I've gotten a case of the jitters. I don't feel so bad since 80% of the paddleboarders I see in Seattle are also sitting. Standing was fine, except I couldn't look around. I was too focused on the water directly in front of me instead of looking around for birds.

The yellow line is where I stood on my paddleboard. The green is where I sat. At the end of the first yellow, I heard the wind roar through the trees and punted--I was back on my bottom.

As I turned south, the wind and the waves picked up. My paddle board rocked in the water, but I was moving along fine. I had to paddle on my left side to keep my board going in a straight line. As soon as I switched to my right hand, I was turning and heading straight back to shore. This is interesting, I thought. it was harder than I thought, but I was doing okay.

Part of my problem is that I didn't really think of Green Lake as a real lake. I've walked around it hundreds of times since I moved to Seattle, but this is only the second time I've been in or on the water. I had thought of it like a Disneyland lake or something equally contrived and perfect and not impacted by forces of nature. I mean, it is not like Lake Washington or Lake Union or the Puget Sound. I had thought those were real bodies of water. Green Lakes was like--meh--not a real lake. The first time I paddleboarded on Green Lake last weekend, it was easy-peasy. The weather was hot and sunny and water was calm. There was a gentle breeze. Most of the people on the water were laying down on their paddleboards either sleeping or sunbathing. 

Not so today. The wind and waves were such that if I stopped paddling I would have drifted to shore.

"This is kind of hard," I thought realizing that Green Lake is a real lake. If I am struggling on this glorified pond, how on earth did people manage to get across the ocean before steam engines were invented? I started humming Row, Row, Row Your Boat to myself to distract myself from the wind and waves.

Once I got to the south end of the lake, I turned around to head back. I wanted to paddle past my favorite part--the lily pads and lotuses.

Except I couldn't. 

I turned around just fine, but I was rowing against the wind and the current, which were not subtle. I looked to the shore and I saw a father and daughter walking. I paddled and paddled and I looked at the shore again.

I saw the same father and daughter, except this time they were watching me. That was when I realized I wasn't moving. I paddling and staying in the same spot.

Which totally sucked.

I wanted to go to the lily pads and then back to my car, but the wind and water had other plans.

I was at the opposite end of the lake from where I parked my car. I seriously considered taking my board ashore and walking a mile and a half carrying my paddleboard back to the parking lot. The paddleboard isn't super heavy, but it is cumbersome. It is a pain in the neck just to get it the 200 feet from the parking lot to the water. I didn't think I'd make the mile walk. Maybe if there were an unexpected thunderstorm I would have gotten out of the water, but this is Seattle. We don't have thunderstorms.

Instead of paddling towards the lily pads, I went in a direction that I could go, where the wind and water would take me. I ended up heading straight north, and I was able to clip along fine without getting stalled.

I still wanted to see the lily pads, so once I made it far enough north, I tried to cut over to the left.

Success! I saw the lily pads! I started to stall a little bit again, so I got back to a spot where the water and wind would take me.

I paddled past Duck Island, where I saw a dozen ducks going home after a day of ducking. Just east of Duck Island, the wind was minimal. I took off my shoes, tucked them into my bungee cords and stood up. I paddled my way back to the launch spot.

In typical Seattle fashion, I saw both a beautiful heron standing majestically on a log, and a rat scampering along the shoreline, probably cleaning up after a day of picnics at the park.

But that is the wonder of the water.

If I Could Re-live a Year...

This week, I was talking to a prospective mom for my son's former therapeutic boarding school. It is not uncommon to get phone calls from these parents, especially during the pandemic when it was impossible to visit programs in person. 

Like many of the moms who call, this one was a train wreck, bless her heart. Looking back, I am sure I was worse when the Boy was at the same stage. 

Instead of talking about the school, I told her more specifically about my own experience:

"I wish someone had told me cold when I was starting this that the best thing any parent can do is take care of their own problems. Address that drinking issue. Get help for the workaholism. Figure out how to get rid of your co-dependency. Dig behind your ego and emotions and find your soul. If nothing else, take care of the basics: meditate, drink enough water, get enough sleep, find community and exercise."

When I was done talking to her, I thought about what I was like back then, before the Boy was sent away. I wish I had known then what I know now. "Experience is the comb nature gives you after you lose your hair," said my 9th grade English teacher. 

I know I am supposed to live in the present, blah, blah, blah, but as a thought experiment I wondered if I could relive a year of my life, which year would it be? A year that was fun and nearly perfect, or a year where I struggled and stumbled?

I came down to two: my freshman year of college and the year the Boy fell apart.

My freshman year of college was good. It was fun, I learned a lot about myself living on my own for the first time, minus the need to pay my own way. It was filled with collective effervescence. 

As far as bad years go, I would definitely skip the year Ada died, the year my brother's mental health imploded, and the pandemic, but maybe I would relive the year the Boy went away. It was so hard and heart breaking, but if I could go back and do it again with what I know now, I would have been so much more peaceful, calm and serene. Maybe some of it would have rubbed off on the Boy, helping him heal faster. I think about how much I obsessed that year, about everything and everyone instead of focusing on myself. I think of all of the bad habits I've since broken. Would I want to relive this year as a test, to see if really could do better? Maybe I just imagine that I could have handled it all, but maybe it really wouldn't be that different?

Maybe I wish I had learned what I needed to learn faster, but that is the challenge of learning as an adult--I don't often learn things until I am forced, until the status quo is too painful that I am forced to grow.

Fall In...

At two weeks ago, Pedro was giving me crap about a lot of things:

• How come you didn't take a fly fishing casting lesson before you went to Montana?
• How come you are not doing your skiing exercises (aka "Leg Blasters") so you can ski something other than green runs?
• If you really what to motorbike through Moab, you need to learn to ride a motorcycle. How come you haven't take motorcycle lessons yet? Do you need motorcycle lessons even? Why can't you just go out there and ride?
• Why don't you take your paddleboard out more? Why don't you standup on the paddleboard instead of sitting? You don't need a lesson. You just need to stand up, fall in and get back on the board.

Yeah.

He is right about all of these things, but he was--in his own words--"shitting on me." He was downloading a long list of things I was doing wrong and giving me advice on how to do them better. 

I walked along side him and nodded, listening to what he was saying, not telling him to mind his own business, that I can live my life as I see fit.

I felt myself slipping back into old, crappy patterns of co-dependency: not standing up for myself, taking the BS people dealt to me without thinking about it. "Just because they are giving it to you, doesn't mean you need to take it," my friend Ellen has said. That is true, and easier said than done.

What is the truth, though? Were those things my truth or were those Pedro's truth? He wants me to ski and fish and paddleboard--do I want those things too? Sure. I love to ski, but do I love it enough to do Leg Blasters every other day for six months? As of now, no. Do I need to make dinner after work instead of paddleboarding? Maybe I could skip dinner and paddleboard instead.

Part of Pedro's direct commentary on my life might come from living in therapy land for the past two years where direct conversation between the kids in his program was encouraged, even celebrated. Perhaps he is thinking of me as one of his former roommates, where he did tell them the truth as he saw it, and they gave it back. Maybe after many years of me being a parent to Pedro telling him what he needed to do, he feels like he can return the favor. 

Oy. That was not exactly what I had expected as my boomerang or karma gift, from parenting.

In time, I will change from sitting on my paddleboard to standing. First, I need to welcome and embrace falling in the water. I need to trust that I can get back on the paddleboard after I fall.

Parents are suppose to teach their kids new things, to let them know it is okay to fall, to encourage them to get back up. And after being away for two years, Pedro is doing that to me.

As American parents, how often do we encourage our kids to try and to fail and get back up, but all from the safety of the sidelines? Pedro never watched me on the soccer pitch. He never saw me run a cross country meet or perform in a band concert.* Yet, we expect and push our kids to perform.

Why did I feel so uncomfortable when my kid pushed me to do what I have been pushing him to do all of his life?

* I was in a dance recital as an adult. I'll have to find the blog post on that wild and crazy experince.

Addiction and/or Codependency & Meeting in the Middle

My friend Delaney is a doctor and a writer and a filmmaker. Her primary creative topic is mental health, writing and filming about her father's battle with schizophrenia and her kids' addiction to screens. 

Recently, she wrote a blog post with which I whole-heartedly agree: When We Judge Moms About Their Children's Mental Health. She writes about three sisters, one who has a child with mental health issues. The other two sisters blame and judge the mother for her child's problems, saying if she hadn't gotten a divorce or been such a free spirit her kid would be fine, which is of course, bullshit.

As a parent of a kid who was in treatment for two years, I agree we shouldn't blame or judge the moms. Delaney said we should have curious compassion, which is a great way to treat someone who is in the depths of a struggle instead of blame. This is all well and good.

Yet, I don't think parents should be let off the hook or get a free pass when their kid has problems, even in "good" families. And what do we mean by "good" families? They are affluent, well-educated, polite, civilized, professionals? Not that that are warm, kind and sweet?

Since Pedro has been home and since my visit to Montana a few weeks ago, I realized a few common denominators of many of the families in Pedro's program.

• They come from "good" families where at least one of the parents is (or was) a leader in their field.
• At least one parent has an addiction or co-dependency from growing up in a house with addiction or other dysfunction.
• The parent with the addiction is high achieving, thereby making it easier to mask the addiction. 
• Perfectionism is part of addiction, and as much as it is hard to live with a perfectionist, sometimes the right type of perfectionist can be very successful professionally.

It is hard for a high functioning, high profile person with an addiction to hit rock bottom. There is no vomit. They show up at work on time, ready to go. They might be loved by their colleagues and friends who don't see the addiction. I had a friend years ago who had an addiction to pain killers and whose husband was a narcissist/psychopath. She was kind and lovely and her family life was a complete shit-show. I saw her every day as our kids went to school together. It took me two years to figure out she had an addiction and her husband was a nutjob. Two years. I don't know if addiction is easy to hide or that I was blind to it. Nevertheless, her son had a truckload of problems and they got him into all of kinds of therapy, none of which worked because the root of the problem--addiction and psychopathy in the parents--was never addressed.

Not all kids collapse in a house with addiction. Some kids are like canaries in the coal mine: they wilt and struggle and suffer when they are raised with addiction. Other kids survive better. Think orchid versus daisies. Orchids need specific conditions to bloom--the proper amount of light, water, temperature. Daisies need water, sun and a patch if dirt. They are hardy and survive all kinds of conditions. The kids in treatment are orchids. They suffer without stability and consistency.

Back to my friend Delaney. I agree with her that we shouldn't blame or judge parents when their kids struggle, but families and parents need to look at themselves. What pain are they trying to avoid? What unhealthy ways are they trying to cope?

What happens when parents get better and do their work along side their kids? The parents get better and the kids get better. Pedro told me that the kids who do the best in his program are the kids whose parents do their own work. Part of me felt bad about not finishing all of the parenting books I bought before he came home. Instead, I was working on my own co-dependency problems. I was cleaning up my side of the street. And it was the better thing to do. I am sure those books have lots of wisdom, telling the parents they need to change. But do they ever spell it out for parents, in black and white, and say "YOUR ADDICTION AND/OR CODEPENDENCy IS PART OF THE PROBLEM. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER AND LIFE WILL BE BETTER. Life won't be perfect, but you need to leave your perfectionism at the door. Don't bring it in the house."

No, they never tell parents this.

Why? Because we don't want to blame or shame or judge parents of kids with mental health issues which is all well and good, but because of that we are closing the door on honest conversations about how families and people and emotions work.

So how do we bridge this gap, between not blaming the parent but getting the parents to honestly look at themselves and see that addictions and co-dependency are killing their families? 

Why did teen anxiety and depression gone up during the pandemic? Why did alcohol consumption for adults -- especially women -- rise during quarantine? Is there a possible correlation between families who spend all day together now exposing each other to their addictions and co-dependencies? Are addictions in general on the rise for parents and therefore more pressure on kids to cope and therefore the kids become more depressed and anxious? 

What can we do as parents to support each other when our kids fall apart? Perhaps is having honest conversations about how we got to the other side, that my son didn't come back from therapy fixed and problem solved. I did my work, he did his work and we met in the middle.