Before and After, Then and Now, & This Too Shall Pass

A few weeks ago, a friend called and asked how I coped with a teenage son with anxiety and depression. She was struggling with her child, and wanted to talk to someone who would understand and not pass judgment on her or her kid.

As I talked about the Boy when he was a young teen, I realized how far he has come since then. I was talking to her about the before. We are now living in the after. 

Still, I struggle with what was then and what is now. I wasn't present for a majority of the Boy's recovery, nor was he present for mine. While the Boy was living in Montana going through his therapeutic treatment, I was going through my own.

Because of this gap, I had a hard time differentiating between who Pedro was when he was sent away, and who he is now. Then, he was sleeping all day. In the meantime, he got organized and graduated from high school. He studied, did his homework and took exams, while also going through therapy. He also made friends outside of his therapy group. He did a lot, and just because I wasn't physically present for it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

So how do I honor and recognize my son where he is at now? There is a cliche-trap that moms of kids in treatment fall into: They see their children as the cute, adorable toddlers or first graders that they once were, and then wondered what happened. The adorable kid who made mud pies and finger-painted is now a nineteen year old druggie who stole their car sold it for coke. 

"What happened to my sweet baby boy?" they wonder.

Sometimes the past sweetness is what keep us holding on so we don't let go. The hard part is acknowledging and accepting the present. The word "and' helps. For example, "My kid was _____ and now they are ______."

Which brings me to "This too shall pass." I was talking to some friends this week about this topic. "This too shall pass" applies to bad times and good times. As we were talking, I realized this expression also comes with letting go. As we are parents, the ages and stages kids go fly by. The colicky infant becomes a cranky toddler who becomes and curious kindergartener. I can't hold it against my daughter that she was colicky. Sure, it sucked parenting a kid who cried all of the time, but it passed. She is not that way anymore. Likewise, I need to separate who Pedro was from who he is now. Of course, I can hold a dear spot in my heart for the kid who said "waterlemon" and built a "Stomp Drop Rocket" out of legos. Parents build a bank of fond memories of their kids so when the times get tough they remember why they are still a parent and don't sell their child to the circus. 

And sometimes the rough times last a long time, seemingly without end. I think of the addictions and mental health issues that persist. I think of chronic, debilitating diseases that won't get better. I think of Viktor Frankl surviving the Holocaust. On a much less impactful situation, I think of when I tore my ACL and spent a year in physical therapy re-learning how to walk. I knew I would become mobile again if I did the work, which at times as painful. I couldn't change the path of my recovery, but I could accept the discomfort and work instead of wallowing in self pity.  Once we get to acceptance, we can think about what to do next. I had a choice about my attitude. I had a choice to do the work or not.

I can hold the sweet and the sour, and I can separate the past from the present. I can hold Pedro as the adorable toddler, the angry adolescent, and the depressed teen. I can see him as the leader of the Lego Club and the captain of the soccer team. I can see him as a kid who turned it around and graduated from high school. I can see a kid who is brave and courageous.

And I can see him now as a college freshman, living on his own. 

The Imperfect Lily and the Bee

As I live blocks from Pike Place Market, I often pick up a giant bouquet of flowers from one of the dozens of flower vendors.

This week, I bought a red, yellow and orange bouquet, with dahlias, lilies and sunflowers. The scent is usually too powerful for me, so I often leave the flowers outside on my patio table. I can still enjoy them and skip the allergy attack.

Yesterday, I looked at the flowers and thought they were past their prime. The dahlias were withering and one of the lily buds had been munched on by a bug. I was going to chop it the bud off and dump it in the compost. Fortunately, I was too busy and/or lazy yesterday to get rid of this deformity. Instead of dead-heading the flowers, I turned the vase so I didn't see the wilted one.

This morning after I walked Fox, I sat on my patio eating breakfast*, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. On the table was the vase of flowers. I was thinking about my scrappy flowers, and how I let them go past their peak. 

The deformed lily bud had opened. Some of the petals had chew marks, but what was ugly when the lily bud was closed was barely noticeable once it had bloomed. 

A bee came. He hovered over the wobbly anther** of the stamen, and collected pollen. 

To the bee, these flowers were perfect.

* A croiffle -- Croissant dough pressed in a waffle iron. This is best high carb breakfast to be had. Not to be compared to high fat (e.g., quiche) or high protein (e.g., omelets) breakfasts.

** Yes, I googled that. I am not a botanist.

Final Draft!

 ...which is totally ironic because the name of my blog is "Rough Draft." Oh well.

I posted my first article to Medium.com. They had a writing contest and I was inspired.

Here you go! 

https://medium.com/@mcguirelauren

I'm not behind the paywall...yet!

Wilderness & Mercury in Retrograde: Part 2

Pedro's father was working twelve hour shifts at the hospital the week my son came back home. Instead of staying with his dad the house, Pedro decided to stay with me while I was working from home. I was grateful. I thought it was better that Pedro have someone to talk to when he woke up instead of being left alone in an empty house until dinnertime. And to be honest, I was grateful for the company. I just started a new job a few months earlier and I was lonely working at home during the pandemic. There were weeks where I only had one or two meetings. I didn't spend much time interacting with other people. At times, I felt like I was in solitary confinement. My quarantine prison cell had a nice view of the water, but the same could be said of Alcatraz.

For two months, Pedro lived with me. I felt like the time was an aberration--when you send your kids out in the world, they aren't supposed to come back as children. Two years ago, I had grieved his departure, and now he was home again. This felt like when the inner planets Mercury and Venus are in retrograde. There is an optical illusion when the planets appear to be moving backwards in their orbit around the sun. In fact, their orbits haven't changed at all. My son was home was a brief stop on his way out again.

I had been a busy mom for so many years, driving kids to soccer practices, going to band concerts, watching cross-country meets. Unexpectedly, I became an empty-nester two years earlier than expected, grieving that loss of time. Pedro's oldest sister had left for college the year before Pedro was sent away. I had been looking forward to the time Pedro had his chance to be an only child, to get his parents' full and undivided attention. I was looking forward to not having to manage two kids at the same time. I was looking forward to slowing down, and just having one kid to focus on. That was all lost. Now, he was back, just for a short bit, before he leaves for college.

While Pedro was moving from a group living situation, I had a roommate for the first time in a few years. At a basic level, I enjoyed it: I had someone to talk to over breakfast, someone to decide what do with for lunch. He was much more amenable to taking direction and taking care of himself. Sometimes he would forget to eat, but a gentle nudge from me telling him to get a bowl of cereal was not met with hostility. He would make jokes. Sometimes he would make me breakfast. I had to learn to be patient when he didn't do things as fast as I would have liked. It took him longer to get a job than I would have liked, but in the end he got a job walking distance from my apartment, which locked in where he was going to live for the summer.

The funny thing about life is that when it is easy, peaceful and serene, sometimes it isn't all that memorable. The blow-ups were few and infrequent. I often had to remind myself that my son was eighteen, not exactly the easiest age for young men. 

There was one instance about three weeks in. After I had finished work, Pedro and I drove forty-five minutes away to a local river to fly fish. On the dark trail back to the car with my headlamp lighting the way, Pedro started busting my chops about how I wasn't a good enough fly fisherman, how I wasn't taking those dream vacations I had on my bucket list, and on and on for an hour. I didn't tell him to stop or set a boundary or ask him to be kinder and gentler to his dear old mother. When I got home, I freaked out for letting him rag on me. Here it was, I was the one relapsing first, not Pedro. I was the one falling into old patterns.

I was terrified. What I couldn't do this? What if I couldn't effectively be a mom? What would happen to my son?

The next morning, a friend called and asked if I wanted to get out of town for the weekend. I said yes. I packed my bag and texted Pedro and his father that I taking off for a few days. I needed them to watch the dog.

"Are you okay?" Jack asked. He called when he saw my text. Instead of being angry or annoyed that I was leaving town and leaving him with the kid, Jack seemed worried about me.

"I need a break," I said. "I am falling back into my old ways." The old me would have asked Jack for permission, checking that his schedule was clear before I made any plans. Fuck it, I thought. If I don't get a break, I will completely lose my mind and that won't serve anyone. 

On the ride out of town, I called one of the other mom's at Pedro's boarding school. I was worried that Pedro would feel abandoned, that he would be mad at me forever. She cheered me on. 

"Go have a great time," Diana said. "You will be a better mom for this in the end." I needed the support from someone whose son also returned home this summer. She knew as close as anyone else could what I was going through.

On the trip, I went fly fishing with a guide along the Kootenai. I improved my cast and learned how to mend my line. I learned how to hook a fish once it bit the fly, and how to pull it in. I learned how to spay cast. And I caught five fish, including a beautiful fifteen inch rainbow trout.

When I got home, I talked about my fishing trip and how I took my paddleboard out on a lake. I was relaxed and happy. Pedro was actually happy for me.

Pedro had his relapse, too. One day at work, he was feeling overwhelmed and he came home in the middle of the day. This was a test for both of us: Would Pedro be able to bounce back from his set-back, and would I not freak out about it? Would I catastrophize and imagine my son never going to work again? Would he get fired? Would he decide it wasn't worth it to participate in the work force and give up? Would he become a sponge and never get a job and just fly fish for the rest of his life? I was an expert at mentally spinning out on the smallest gravel patch.

After all of the books and therapy sessions, the biggest beacon for me was Simone Biles and the twisties. What if I were her parents? Would I have been supportive of her not competing, or would I have told her suck it up, buttercup and get her butt on the beam? I was horrified that I might have been that nutjob parent. 

Internally, I was freaking out. Externally, I was calm. I asked Pedro what I could to support him. If he needed space, that was fine. I'd see him after I got back from paddle-boarding and we'd have dinner. The dog had surgery the day before. Before I left for the lake, I put the dog on Pedro's bed and asked him to take care of Fox. As I was leaving, the dog snuggled up next to Pedro. I saw Pedro's posture soften as he held the dog.

When I came back a few hours later, Pedro was restored. I don't know what did the trick: the dog, calling his girlfriend in Montana, or me giving my son space to sort through all of his mixed up and confused feelings. Maybe given the space, my son was able to tap into all of the emotional tools he had learned over the past two years, and work it out himself. Maybe it was all of those. 

Maybe part of it was just me and my view and reaction to my son's challenges. How often before would I try to swoop in and save him from unpleasant feelings, to fix his emotional bumps and bruises instead of letting him sit with his own feelings and figure it out? How hard was it for me to do something different, and not fall back into my rutted behavior? My re-entry to motherhood required me to use emotional muscles that I had never used before. I was a little sore--just like I was after learning to paddleboard--but I was in a much better place.

Just like Mercury's perceived backwards loop in his orbit, my loop back into parenthood came to an end as Pedro left for college last week. Now I get to re-enter another world: life without kids.

Wilderness & Mercury in Retrograde: Part I

[Hello, fair readers. I am going to enter this piece into a writing contest, which explains why this deviates from my usual style of writing about the day-to-day. You get to see the first draft.]

This summer, my son returned home to live with me in the brief window after he graduated from high school and before he went to college. I returned to full-time motherhood after a two year hiatus. After Pedro turned sixteen, he went to Wilderness therapy and then on to two years in a therapeutic boarding school. He was sent away by his father and I, but mostly me. Jack didn't think Pedro's crippling depression and anxiety was a real problem, but I did.

"It is not like he is doing drugs," said Jack.

"He isn't getting out of bed," I said. "He isn't going to school. He isn't participating in life." I didn't see how he going to get out of this funk without a major intervention.

Pedro had already thought his life was ruined: "If I don't graduate from high school, I won't go to college. If I don't go to college, I won't get a job. What is the point?" Every evening when I came home from work, I feared I would find my son dead in his bed. A few months before we shipped him off, Pedro knew he needed a change. "If I go to boarding school, I will be forced to wake up in the morning and go to class."

When a co-worker who suffered from anxiety and depression found out about Pedro's continuing low mood, he lambasted me for an hour: "How can you leave him home alone during the day? You have no idea how dark it can get." My friend had another bout of depression after he broke up with his long-time girlfriend. Weeks later, he found a replacement. As a mother, I don't have that option. There is no Tinder, JDate or Match.com for me to round up a random sixteen year old boy and call him my son.

Willingly, Pedro went to camp in the high desert in Colorado for eleven weeks surrounded by other lost boys and a team of therapists. While my son was sleeping under a tarp and learning to make fire from sticks, I was in my own emotional wilderness. Even though a good part of me was relieved that my son was getting the help he needed, I now needed to face the many issues I had neglected in my own life while focusing on my son. I was spinning and obsessing about everyone's life but my own. I worried about things outside of my scope of control. My life had become unmanageable.

Both of my son's programs required parental involvement. These were not places where you gave them a low functioning child and they send you back a fully formed and functioning adult human. Parent participation was key.

"If your child is here, you should be in therapy, too," said the leaders of the Wildie program. "Your child didn't get here alone."

"What did you contribute to your child's being here?" was a frequent refrain at the therapeutic boarding school. 

"I dragged him here like a wet bad of cement so he wouldn't kill himself," was my immediate reply in a group therapy session with other parents.

"Lauren, what are you doing to take care of yourself?" asked a more seasoned mother in the program. I burst into tears at the question. All I did was take care of other people. My own therapist often asked me what I wanted. I didn't understand the question. What I wanted didn't matter, as far as I was concerned.

During the two years my son was gone, I wish I had gone to wilderness therapy, where I could skip out on my current reality, practice meditation and yoga, and sleep under the stars. Instead, I worked my day job full-time and in my spare time I went to family therapy and a twelve step program. I meditated and prayed. I read books on self-awareness and parenting challenging teens. Everything had the same theme: You need to change yourself if you want your world to change.

My re-entry into parenthood wasn't planned. Initially, Pedro was going to live with his father and stay in his old bedroom when he came back from boarding school. If I wanted Pedro to stay with me at all over the summer, I would need to convert the landing in my condo--which was serving as my home office during the pandemic--into a welcoming bedroom. Like a new mom, I was nesting: making new curtains for the room, moving out my desk making room for a bed, making space in my closet for my son's clothes. I was reading parenting books like I was cramming for an exam. Instead of What to Expect When You're Expecting, I was reading The Parallel Process, Not Left to Chance, and The Journey of the Heroic Parent, along with other favorites like Untamed and Man's Search for Meaning. For fun, I would watch Schitt's Creek to see how one dysfunctional family could pull themselves back together. To be honest, I hadn't read a few of the half dozen parenting books recommended. Was I missing a secret that would have explained everything? Should I bother reading these books now, or was it too late? Would it make any difference?

The books could not answer any of my real doubts: Could I parent this child who was gone for two years? Would he slide back into his old patterns and not get out of bed again, watching YouTube videos and looking at Instagram? Would I slide back into my old patterns of walking on eggshells around him, fearing if I made my son upset he would kill himself? Would I be able to speak up? Would we both relapse and regress, making a waste of the past two years of progress?

["Tune in tomorrow to find out..." 😁]

Exhausted & Jigsaw Puzzle Mecca

I am exhausted.

Utterly exhausted.

I probably should just go to bed, but instead I'll write about how tired I am.

I feel like I gave birth and after a big, eighteen year push, I am done.

I can rest.

The Boy is out the door, out of the house, out of the nest. He is out. Out of my hair. There is a Boy sized hole in my heart.

Tuesday, the Boy moved into his dorm. Wednesday, he hung out in College Town with his father and I, with no complaints and no demands. He was perfectly accommodating to everything we wanted to do.

"Do you want to stop at a bakery cafe and get coffee?" Sure.

"What to stop at this cute gift shop and poke around?" Sure.

"Lunch?" Sure.

"Hike?" Sure.

"Do you need anything?" Not really.

Wow. It was a lovely day, and also surreal. Normally, the Boy doesn't like us that much. But now that we were in College Town, to the Boy we were familiar. And familiar is safe.

Today was different. The Boy texted and said he was fine. He didn't need anything. I burst into tears.

Tears of sadness, relief, and joy. Salt water can have so many shapes, colors, meanings. It can be clear, or it can match the color of the sky. It can be a tear or it can be the ocean.

Of course, I worry. The opposite of worry is faith. I can hope and wish for faith. Wishing for faith is a substitute for real faith, but it is a starting point. 

The best I can do while the Boy is away, is to take care of myself. After I cried, Jack drove to Jigsaw Puzzle Mecca, a side trip on the way to the airport from College Town to Seattle. I had fifteen minutes in the store. I picked out two puzzles, both of which were cheaper than the condo I bought when Claire-Adele left for college. 

Birds for Ada, fish for the Boy. After Ada died, I became very fond a Robert Frost poem about his daughter's death. Her voice melded into the song of the birds. "The song of the birds will never be the same. And to do that to birds is why she came."

The Boy hasn't died, and yet I grieve. I will miss him, and I am glad he gone. I am happy for him, though he isn't happy yet for himself. He will be, though, I hope. He will be.

The Paradox of Motherhood

The Boy is leaving the nest today. We are flying him to college. Of course, this is sad for me. I've enjoyed having him around this summer. Having him in my day-to-day makes me realize how much I've missed these past two years when he was "sent away." Not my first choice, but necessary.

There is a Bible story about the wisdom of King Solomon, who served as a judge. (I learned this story--I'm not kidding--in kindergarten. It had a super big impression on me, but I might be fuzzy on the details. Anyhoo...) Two women went before King Solomon both claiming that they were the mother to the same child. Solomon had to determine who the real mother was, so he said he would cut the child in half and they could share.

One of the women screamed, "No! Don't! She can have the child." Solomon knew the real mother would rather see her child live away from her than die.

I can relate to the screaming mother.

Anyway, yesterday and this morning, Pedro been angsty and irritable. I was a little weepy about him leaving. He told Jack he didn't want me to be sad, which is fair. 

So then Pedro was upset and saying he didn't want to go to college. Here in enters the Paradox of Motherhood. Was I happy that he didn't want to go to college twelve hours before we were supposed to leave? 

No.

No.

Hell no.

No.

I internally panicked and freaked out.

"He's leaving tomorrow. Where he is going is yet to be determined," I thought. "If doesn't get on that plane to college town, I am packing up all of his shit and he can live with his dad."

Our flight to college town was delayed for more than twelve hours. Fortunately, we were able to go back to the condo and hang out. He apologized for being angsty, and I thanked him.

"Just because I am sad because you are leaving doesn't mean I want you to stay," I said. "I am happy to kick you out of the nest."

He laughed. Someday, when his kiddo goes off to school, maybe he will relate.