At some point during our time in Maine last summer, I gave up my efforts to keep Wilfred napping in his crib on his own. Up until that point, I would nurse him, read a few books, sing a song, and put him in his space with a blackout tent and a sound machine and let him fall to sleep on his own. We still do something similar at night and up until that point, it had been an excellent rhythm for naps as well. But whether it was simply a developmental shift that he would have hit regardless of where we were or was something brought on by less familiar sleeping locales, he started to resist our routine and I threw in the towel. So, from sometime just before he turned two, I have been reading and snuggling and nursing him to sleep. Still with the white noise, minus the blackout. And honestly, it was a decision that has felt just right to my heart. I always fall asleep with him for at least 10 minutes, lately for an hour or so and it is warm and cozy and restful and close in a way that I am so grateful to get to have with him.
It was perhaps a bit more challenging to love this pattern up until I finally night weaned him in early December. Physically, I was running on empty to such a huge degree that it was hard to perceive how I really felt about our setup and also because I still felt so tethered at night that I craved some semblance of autonomy during rest time. Even though I was so tired. So very, very tired. But I would get up more frequently in those days once he was asleep, and sneak quietly to the door, opening it in that particular way that only Chris or I know to do to keep it from squeaking and creep downstairs for some tea and to either move my body or try to work a bit or do any single thing that could for some precious moments claim me as my own.
It was exhausting. Even though it felt necessary. I am much more content with it this way even if that means I essentially no longer take much time for myself during the day. My practice time has shortened significantly. I write very infrequently, and I do the work of teaching yoga and selling skincare very sporadically and inconsistently. Now, I am snuggling my growing son, my last child, and I am burying my face into his round cheeks and fuzzy head and in so doing weaving pathways between him and I that stretch back into the years that I snuggled Maple and Eider in the same way. The two of them never napped independently and while that was often a struggle for me at the time- people use the phrase “nap-trapped” now and it is utterly apt- one day it was over and outside of the occasional random nap and snuggle with Eider- never Maple- it was done and I missed the regularity of that soft closeness with my children.
So much of parenting is discovering that one moment has ended and the next has begun. That once again it is time to figure out how to be in the new configuration of things even if you were just beginning to understand, appreciate, or simply surrender to the previous moment. One of the gifts of Wilfred is knowing that this is the way of things enough to slow down in the space that I occupy with him and remember that once he was quite wee and one day he will be well grown and my role in his life is to love and support and shore up the perilous edges until he is able to do so for himself. My role with the big kids these days is the same. Love, support, guide as needed (or wanted. or appropriate), and shore up the perilous edges until they are capable of doing so for themselves. And perhaps also recognize the non-linear nature of living and growing and tending. Whether it is tending our people or tending ourselves. I am learning that in new ways these past few months it seems. Bigger, deeper, more difficult, and maybe, hopefully, with lasting significance and lifelong relevance.
And wow if you have read this far, congrats to making it to the heart of these thoughts. Because while it is interesting and widely applicable to commiserate over the parenting of young children, it feels much more pressing to rally around the conscientious parenting of young adults as they grow into their agency and independence and their own sovereign voice within the heart of their own lives.
As I have traversed the sludge of the past several months, I have also been easing through the murky waters of parenting and caring for a teenage daughter. And somewhere along the way, I unearthed a wound in myself whose depth and gravity I had grossly underestimated. My own outcast teen.
It is funny and also strange, and not at all either, the way in which we travel to our own childhoods by virtue of our kids. Especially once they reach the ages in which our memories are thicker and more prevalent. In all truth, I do not think about my teenage years all that often and having wandered into those woods these past months I can see that my avoidance of this particular time in my childhood is rooted in my own belief structure around The Bad Teenager archetype. As an adult, I think I have been just as complicit as the primary adults in my life and the culture at the time were in crafting that particular narrative.
And as I truly work to understand my own teenage daughter; her strengths, her vulnerabilities, the places where room for structured support and love and regard and guidance live in her young life; I am unable to recall ever being asked after as a teen. Not in how I was feeling or doing, not in what I might be wanting or needing, or really any engagement at all of interest in the young woman I might be becoming. Instead, it was assumed that I was a typical teen, up to no good, engaged in nefarious behaviors, keeping community with a crew of bad influences. And while a lot of that is true, it is true alongside something else entirely which is the narrative of a young person with a home that was absent of emotional, and at times, physical safety in which questions that weren’t already making assumptions about their answers were never asked, and who I was growing into felt like the least significant thing in our family culture.
Which, honestly, I can understand. I think much of the world was crafted that way in the 90s. Which is also why I consider myself complicit in my delay at unearthing the wounds of my own teenage self. But, ready or not…
I have shared countless pieces of writing about the grace and grit of being maple’s mom. Christ, I’ve been sharing personal shit online since she was nine. And I have, over the last 5 years or so, processed the nitty-gritty of my life with her, in particular, less and less and less out loud. Per her request, but also per my own gut and my own evolving understanding and occasional doubt of how personal stories are the most universal and are often the entry points for our deeper understanding of our own humanity in all of its imperfect messiness. Indeed, I am a believer in sharing the real and the raw, and the true. And yet. Sometimes it is a fucking painstaking slog. This is one of those times.
Indeed it is why I have been so quiet with my out-loud voice lately. I have been churning and churning into old griefs I didn’t know I had and also working my ass off to be a good mother to my kids. That has involved a lot of my quiet. And all of my attention.
And while the tale is only in part mine to tell, do believe it deserves a broader audience, especially in light of the reactions that our telling has received so far in our smaller audiences. So here. Maple crashed in February. It has been building for a long time. Maybe forever. She has always interfaced with anxiety and what those of us that know her have thought of as “her quirky mapleness”. Which is wonderful and amazing at times, and run for your life horrifying at others. She has been seeing a therapist since mid-November. A godsend in all ways and sadly something I should have taken the initiative with (as her mother!) and got going for her long before then. But we vetted him, as one does, especially when one has spent a good amount of time in therapy herself and oh yeah has also worked her ass off in raising an emotionally fluent child. Any ‘ol counselor was not going to do the trick for moo. So hers, who is doing the trick and then some, has a background in Jungian psychotherapy and also utilizes tools such as emdr to good effect with her. So there was a net in place thank god when the bottom dropped out.
Of course, of course, the fall happened the very first week Chris was on the road in two years. A kid in class said something horrible to her that she simply couldn’t either deflect or absorb and it unraveled her to a degree to which being in school wasn’t an option and an emergency trip to our primary was suddenly our only agenda. The boys and I held space for all of it as best we could and as her care team linked arms we agreed to collaborate on a plan of care for her. A few weeks later, when she and Chris were home on their own for a week, she made it back in for a follow-up during which we agreed that some action was necessary and we chose to introduce a low dose of Prozac for moo.
It was an easy decision for us. Not simple, and not straightforward, but relatively easy. We had to weed through some of our own personal baggage and biases around medication, but we both were very clear that the decision was not about us and all about moo and what she needs and how she feels and how much she has been asked to bear by virtue of our unintentional negligence in this regard. She was carrying a load that was one she could manage, but just barely and with great difficulty. It was not necessary for her to do so. A perfect living example of “just because you can doesn’t mean you should." Easier said than done in a world that favors independence in the form of isolation and grinning and bearing as a strategy for success.
The transition to being medicated was rugged. As she adjusted and her energy lifted so much anger and grief and frustration that had been pooling just below the surface overflowed into form; there were so many tears. But as she settled, she has been able to process years of patterning that she had developed as a strategy for coping with what has been an underlying dis-ease for years. From deep hopelessness to passive and diffuse thoughts of self-harm. She was not ok. But she was able to manage enough to limp through her low days in a way that perpetuated the cycle but never relieved her of any of the suffering.
Now that we have this broader perspective of this particular journey of Maple’s, and ours as her family, it has been both alarming and disheartening, to see that many of her friends and peers are struggling in different yet similar ways, who also have the support of therapists and doctors recommending mitigation in the form of medication, but whose parents refuse the suggestion for one reason or another. We hear accounts of this near every day right now. Another of her friends whose parents say that they just need to change up some supplements or get more exercise, or this particular one which we hear more than I can even believe: that they should try smoking (more) weed. Yeah. Cuz that is working so well for the parents I am sure. I can testify that that was my strategy through much of my teens and it did many things to shift my perspective, but easing my anxiety and depression not so much.
It is incredible that there can be all of this chatter about destigmatizing mental health and medication and that it is often the ones that are preaching the need to drop the stigma that are doing all they can to push it forward. It is strange. And trust me I get the internal struggle around the narrative, I do, but I am more interested in engaging a reality in which young people are supported in their personal becoming; a world in which teens are not vilified simply because of their age; and where parents are supported in differentiating between their own childhoods and those of the people they are raising. None of this is simple, but I think all of it is easier than we might suppose. And infinitely more worthwhile.
Life is fucking hard. It is hard to have a body, it is hard to have a mind, it is hard not to distort one thing for another and it is harder still to not sacrifice one part of ourselves in favor of another. I do not have many answers, and I reserve the right to grow and evolve my opinions and perspectives over time. But I also aim to stay awake for as much of this messy life as I can and be in right relationship with reality as it meets me and my family day to day. It’s not too late to forgive or to make amends or to try again, not yet.