[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..." 😁]
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