Things come together and fall apart

Lately, I've noticed that I've become more anxious, due to both my thyroid medication and the more mundane realities of middle age. I've always tended toward a slight and useful paranoia, but circumstance and hormones have tipped the balance and I am substantially more prone to worry than I used to be. Although I've come through a disruptive bout with thyroid cancer pretty well, it left me with the lingering feeling that if anyone were to look too hard, we'd probably find some more bad news. I don't get through the routine mammogram as breezily as I used to, and the other night I woke up from a sound sleep with the distinct thought that, just based on age and statistics, my life (at least the active part of it) was probably more than half over, which was not a soothing thought. I am sure I am quite typical of American adults in their forties.

I'd like to quell the emotional edginess of my newfound perspective (or lack thereof), and at the same time, I'm aware that it's a fairly frank response to reality. As the Buddhist Shunryu Suzuki Roshi once said, "Life is like getting into a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink."

My fretfulness does not make me a better parent, but it does make me more like T, who is a world-class worrywart. Just today, he walked into the bathroom and said with absolute seriousness "What are we going to do when I'm not here to remind you to brush your teeth EVERY morning?!" Yesterday, he told me three times "Do not forget to lock the front door behind me after I leave!" The day before that, while we were packing for a short vacation, he must have asked Tim and I a dozen times "Is there ANYTHING we forgot? ANYTHING AT ALL?!"

Selfishly, I find this relaxing and a little bit comic (my thyroid medication compromises my short-term memory, and I'm embarrassed to admit that his post-traumatic stress-induced hypervigilance works out rather nicely sometimes!). There's little likelihood I'll overlook some obvious risk, so vigilant is he in alerting me to life's potential hazards. But I feel for the guy. It's no wonder he has a hard time giving up his beloved marijuana!

We had a nice weekend trip with T and his bestfriend, with whom he shares a very similar life story. Together, they create an odd atmosphere, both innocent and mournful, but they love each other best perhaps because they let each other ebb and flow and never let a stormy mood interfere with their absolute loyalty to one another. I think they are a bit ahead of me on the path to enlightenment, as obvious as their struggles are. (In fact, I have often wondered that T must be a particularly advanced being, because the universe seems to have conspired to hurl at him an epic and ceaseless array of thunderbolts from the moment he was born, while all it's really dealt me was an ordinary midlife crisis!)

Listening to them chat casually about this childhood disaster and that one, I was struck by their advanced awareness of loss. The lesson I am learning now--that I can't control or predict the future, that inevitably, everything I have and love will be lost or change--took a long time to sink in. Dumb luck made me arrogant; I became accustomed to having and holding on to what I wanted for myself. But T and others like him knew the truth very well a long time ago; through no action of their own, they've lost their mothers and their fathers, as well as numerous homes, many friendships, and most opportunities to experience a "normal" childhood. (While we were driving to the mountains, T's bestfriend casually said to me "This is so great- I was never allowed to go on trips like this when I was in foster care, because I had to get permission for everything from my social worker, and if was up to her, nobody would ever be allowed to even talk to me without being fingerprinted first.") Yet they manage to get up every day and take the next shaky step on their path, and listening to them together, it's impossible not to notice their open-heartedness.

Which brings me to another bit of Buddhist perspective, two quotes from the writer Pema Chodron that, together, capture my thoughts about bonding with and parenting an older traumatized kid. She writes, "Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others."

And further, "We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy."

I'd say that only a grasp of those two ideas is required to make a decent foster/adoptive parent to a traumatized kid.

Happy New Year!

Peaceful

This Christmas, our fourth with T, was unexpectedly peaceful. In fact, at the end of the evening last night, T came into the living room and gave me a hug. "Thank you for a good day today," he said. "I love you." A small thing but a marked contrast to years past, when T just wasn't ready to let the happy feelings flow.

I'm often struck that T, like other traumatized kids I've known, seems most uncomfortable with happiness, of all life's strong emotions. I think happiness strikes him as very risky - to be happy, or to reach out to another person with affection, is to balance on a very fine point, one where the gale force of disappointment might easily knock him over. And to be grateful, even for a small thing, is to expose need and want, and often causes him to feel that someone has gained power over him--a dangerous thing. So for these reasons, Christmas has been a bit difficult, an entire season that demands happiness and gratitude.

But not this year. I believe adoption was much more significant to him that I ever realized. It took us three years of navigating the court system to finalize his adoption, which we did just about eleven months ago. By the time we crossed the finish line, I have to admit, I mostly felt like it was a non-event. The children's welfare system in Los Angeles drew the whole thing out for so long for no particular reason save bureaucratic ineptitude that the little piece of paper making it official just ceased to feel like a goal worth having, particularly as they only forced it through on the eve of his 18th birthday.

But on the day his adoption finalized last winter, I saw a smile on his face during the final court hearing that belied his superficial nonchalance. And this Christmas, due to his advancing maturity, but also, I suspect, to the security of adoption, he was at ease in a way I haven't seen him on any holiday occasion before. This year is the first one where he elected to stay home with us for the whole holiday. In the past, by his choice, we've taken him to see his cousins with whom he lived when he was young, and we were okay with that. But this year, early on, he let us know that he'd decided to stay home for the whole holiday. He even weighed in on the foods he thought he'd like to eat, and proposed seeing a movie on Christmas Day. When he opened his gifts, he said "thank you" in a natural way.

He also made arrangements for us to visit his younger brother. In the past, we made such arrangements for him, and he got through these visits as if he were holding his breath the whole time. This year, he initiated the process, which was fairly convoluted, and required various permissions, due to his brother's circumstances. What's more, the visit had a different tone. T was visibly uncomfortable, sad, and awkward, but he allowed himself to be those things. I could hear the emotion in his voice while he struggled to make conversation, and at some point, he gave me the mournful eyes that mean "Can we wrap this up now?" So there was pain, but he managed the pain; in years past, instead of letting the pain surface, he's often become agitated, bossy, and bullying. This year, he seemed able to let himself feel the grief without turning it to rage. And his brother, because he wasn't being ribbed and roughed up by T this time, got a chance to speak for himself and to show us that he's doing well, and becoming his own person.

I love to see T mastering the art of defining what is comfortable and tolerable for him. It is so hard for any young adult to learn how to be appropriately assertive, more so, young adults who as children had little opportunity to develop a sense of personal power and deservingness. Self-assertion takes so much trust, that other people may be reasonable and willing to grant what you ask, and so much self-knowledge, to understand what you want in the first place. Because I've been his parent, I understand now that family is, at its best, an incubator for those capabilities. The shape of our Christmas holiday this year bore the imprint of his stated needs and preferences, and that made it more magical indeed.

Enough

We had an extraordinary week, with T’s bestfriend staying with us. The kids have parallel histories, both growing up in foster care in south LA, and then landing, in their early teenage years, with new and similar parents; he came to live with us, and she moved to a new home about twelve blocks away, where the female half of the parental unit actually has the same first name that I have, making the coincidence even more odd and wildly amusing to the kids. Lately, bestfriend’s living situation is in transition, and her parents are traveling, so she came to stay for a bit.

Having her in the house was an eye-opening experience. On day two, when it became clear that she might be staying with us for awhile, I invited her to claim the large sofa in the living room as her own, and to unpack her bags. She didn’t lose a moment--soon her clothes were neatly folded at one end of the L-shaped sofa, and she’d made her bed at the other. On the floor nearby she had her essential papers, (kids who’ve spent much time in foster care seem so often to travel with a sheaf of essential paperwork – everything from their birth certificate to their recent children’s court documentation and even the life histories they are often encouraged to create with their social workers). 

At first, given my own conventional habits around hosting guests, I felt compelled to chat with her as I passed through the living room headed to and from the kitchen, and I like her, so doing so was easy. But after a day or so, I realized that she had taken my offer of personal space quite literally, and that when she was on the sofa, she was “in her room”, so to speak. There was an invisible wall there, and she didn’t mind at all if we passed through without making niceties. Unlike T, she seemed to enjoy a lot of quiet alone time, and she was often lost in deep thought. When she was hungry or wanted to chat, she let us know, and then we’d share some time. She was pensive and polite, except when a topic riled her, and then she was animated and fiery.

Her presence was like itching powder to T. He loves her with a deep devotion, but he went bananas. He wouldn’t spend time with her. He left the house to visit friends without inviting her to go with him. He made fun of her hair, and tried to irritate her on purpose, preying purposefully on her vulnerabilities. He refused food, just to avoid sharing the table with her, and insulted everyone as often as possible.

Around day four, my mother called, and I told her that we had a houseguest. “How is T doing with that?” she asked carefully. “Terrible!” I said, suddenly realizing that I had overlooked the obvious. “Now that you mention it, he’s been a monster!” Of course – any experienced mother would have seen, we were dealing with sibling rivalry on a level more often seen in a much younger child. He did not want to share. Not his grape juice, and certainly not his parents or his home.

By day five, a cloud of depression had settled over our home. Both kids kept to themselves. Both began to sleep long hours. Bestfriend shared that she was experiencing some grief around the long separation she’d endured earlier in her childhood from her birth family and her confusion about those feelings. T’s exaggerated emotional radar picked up on her grief, of course, and began to mirror it. It was as if their feelings were contagious and created an endless, ungovernable feedback loop. The atmospheric pressure began to drop, as if an emotional tornado were headed our way.

By day six, our house was in chaos. People were storming in and out. Voices were rising. T was so irritable and provocative that nobody could be in the room with him for more than a few minutes. He was unceasingly restless and increasingly self-destructive. His substance abuse, ever-present like a chronic illness that rises and falls, grew worse. Nobody could stand to be around him, and when he was out, we worried more than usual.

By day eight, T and I were barely on speaking terms. I was so frustrated I failed to resist shaming him. I had intended to set boundaries and protect myself from his extraordinary acting out, but I was overwhelmed.  My own raw unprocessed emotions were contributing to the toxic atmosphere.

By day nine, the shit hit the fan, so to speak. T tried to lecture me about being a bad parent without atoning for some notable misdeeds of his own. I had an exhausted moment of rude candor where I told him with more emotional precision than was truly required how he was making me feel. He ran into his room and wrote a dramatic poem that he then ran back and read to us in our room (which is, I should note, something he has made an occasional habit of doing over the years, when he needs to communicate). We listened, thanked him for sharing his true feelings, and retreated for an hour of adult time to regain ourselves.

When we returned, we found a two-page letter in tiny handwriting from T, describing in painfully articulate exactitude the confusion he felt. He explained that he had long struggled with hating himself and feeling horribly guilty about his brother who is very disabled and has had a very hard time of it lately in the juvenile justice system. He described the terrible pressure he puts on himself to build himself up, become successful, save his brother, and prove himself a hero and not a failure. He described his agony at displeasing us. We read the letter, and for a moment, he let me cradle his head, and kiss him on his ear, and tell him that none of this was the end of the world.

Ever empathetic, his bestfriend, who had been close at hand throughout, then invited us all to watch an inspirational TED video about a woman who recovered from her struggles with addiction and went on to establish a youth empowerment program. At this point, the rarified theatrical atmosphere of our small home had started to seem absurdly funny, as if we were all in a stage play, perhaps Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, if it had been about, not middle-aged alcoholic academia, but older child adoption, teen drama, and the aftermath of childhood trauma.

As soon as the video was done, T asked her to fire up his favorite Motown oldies, and the kids danced around and sang loudly together for awhile. Then they colored a picture of a flower (T loves to color in coloring books, strictly botanicals, to calm himself, and he colors with great veracity and deep attention akin to meditation) and slipped it under the door of our neighbor, a glamorous fashion designer on whom he has long had a crush. She slipped a very sweet and appropriate reply under our door just a few minutes later.

At this point, nearly catatonic with the extraordinary emotional range of the evening, Tim and I retired to our room to stare at the wall and wonder at our lives. Never far behind, T found us. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk, he mostly just wanted to stare at us for a few minutes to reset our connection, as is his unique habit.

I did gently inquire whether he had noticed that he tends to get depressed around the holidays, and observed that when he is depressed, he tends to act out like he’s got ants in his pants, as if to outpace what’s haunting him.

“As you tell me that, I feel very funny inside,” he said, gesturing to his heart, or maybe his stomach (perhaps both at the same time), looking at me with his huge, mournful eyes. “That’s enough truth. We don’t have to talk about it anymore.”

Fair enough.