Our lives as parents are always filled with firsts. Finding out you're pregnant with your first child, feeling the flutter in your belly for the first time, seeing a newborn with a squishy face and a crooked nose and hoping that will work itself out. The firsts keep piling up as our children grow, each stage of development bringing new milestones we capture with cameras, scrapbooks, videos, and social media.
We anticipate or dread those firsts, sometimes both at once. The first steps bring delight at the accomplishment itself along with fear from the dangers this new mobility will bring. The same can be said for those dropping their children off at college in the coming weeks, if they are allowed on campus, another milestone savagely ripped away from so many during this pandemic. We as parents are a bundle of nervous energy, a juxtaposition of emotions ready to laugh with immense joy and cry with bottomless sorrow and pain.
The night she comes home we experience firsts. She shares the pictures her friends drew, her favorite anime characters and the story-lines behind them, the activities from group therapy. She wants to join a gym with a pool, so she can swim laps to reduce her anxiety and keep her body healthy. She wants to try aromatherapy in her room, something she did as a part of her group for relaxation, peppermint being her favorite smell so far. She messages her friends, shares on her social media that she was with an inpatient program for a week but that she’s working on her mental health and focusing on getting better. She is brave and fearless, and my heart smiles.
And then, like any movie or script or grand story yet to be fully finished, there is conflict. The one issue that spills into others and boils over into a rehashing of old arguments of the past. A déjà vu experience that throws me back to when we first found out about the cutting. Back then we asked her why, and like any teenager, she spilled her reasons and threw her parents under the bus and drove over them at full speed.
She dreads the coming fight just as much as we do, and when her father picks her up from the hospital she thinks it will happen during the car ride home. It isn’t until a few hours later that the tension breaks. Under the direction of her therapists and in consultation with us, she is given the okay to write out a letter to the boy. It is supposed to be a one-off contact, an apology for what she put him through followed by a statement that she is receiving the help she needs and the hope that they can still be friends. She shares the note with us, the wording is fine. The issue is the fashion in which she wants to deliver it.
Her therapist tells her a text is fine, we prefer a physical letter in his mailbox since he lives around the corner. Either way, the ball is in his court. He is a young adult moving on to the next stage in life, heading to college, dealing with more than someone his age should, and she needs to accept her role as a friend, her relatively low status on his totem pole. For teenagers, friends are their life, and this friendship, relative to her others, is the one requiring fixing, so righting this wrong as soon as possible is important to her.
Events overlap, lines are drawn in the sand, stubborn child against stubborn parent. I am the weaker, always, and my husband knows it. I am compassionate and empathetic, naive by nature, willing to forgive. I have limits, they do exist, and there are lines and boundaries, but I pick my battles during the day when he's at work. I need to present a united front with him, because it undermines him as a parent when I don’t, and I don’t want him to be perceived as the “bad guy.” But this is all new territory for us. We are adrift in unknown waters, surrounded by an endless sea with no landmarks upon which to get our bearings. But we are lucky, because our daughter is still here with us while we navigate. When my teenager is not thinking like a child, when I trust she is not suicidal, when she proves she is putting herself first, when we repair our relationship to form a new normal, I will allow myself the pleasure of being compassionate yet firm. We are not there yet.
The end goal is the same. Sending him a contact one way or another, whether it is a text or a DM or a letter dropped in his mailbox is no longer the point. Maintaining contact with him isn’t even her call anymore, she just needs some response from him, anything to calm her, to let her know she has repaired the damage she caused. So I call one of my mom friends, one who’s raised a stubborn daughter, and at that moment I am most grateful that we, as women, as moms, have others who can draw from experience and use it as a guide to offer possible answers. This is my first time in the teenage trauma trenches, but I know someone who’s been here before me, and she helps me find a ladder.
By the end of the night, and into the next day, I find solutions come in many ways. They come as a gracious and caring young man who has almost nothing left to give, but gives my girl the gift of accepting her apology, replying with a short, simple conversation between friends, like a wave between neighbors. Answers are also found between me and my girl shedding tears while sitting on the kitchen floor, backed against the dishwasher, with two spoons and Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie Ice Cream. I guess in my earlier post when I talked about eating the bowl of soup, what I meant was ravaging through a pint of chocolaty goodness is the way to deal with one's feelings of sadness and devastation.
Solutions come in a pillow, its thickness decidedly more than the mattress she had to sleep on, and with a solid night’s sleep that doesn’t involve having someone shine a light in her face every two hours. They came the next day with apologies in calmer moments and binge-watching shows with her father, a lingering stroll with a best friend. They will continue to come with therapy, not only for her but for us. And with that, the first step in our healing journey as a family has begun.