As routine sets in, so does the realization that I now have a full time job as a chauffeur. Moms the world over live this daily. During the school year, minivans pour into the drop-off lane in a steady stream of rolling stops, kids spewing forth with musical instruments, binders, and Egyptian pyramid dioramas. Depending on the mom, it’s off to work, pre-school, the gym, the grocery store, or the five loads of laundry waiting to be washed followed by dragging the dog to the vet and then back to school to grab your kid for his orthodontist appointment, and I’m not even including the evening activities, rehearsals, sports, scouts, lessons, or practices.
All those pre-pandemic of course, before the coronapocalypse, before our kids lost not only a few crucial months of educational learning and their friends and their teachers, but many lost their "thing." It's that one piece of your child that comes to define him or her at this point in life. The athlete, the dancer, the actor, the musician. Those parts of our kids have disappeared along with our sanity and there’s no telling when or if either is coming back.
We are still servants to appointments and schedules and activities, however meager the offerings, and we multiply it by two or three or four depending on how large our families become, assistance arriving when the oldest finally achieves a level of independence with a driver’s license. Of course, relief comes with an uneasy concern, the gut twisting fear of sending your child out on their own onto the roads where danger lurks and accidents happen and sometimes lives are lost. So you love and hate your chauffeur job, knowing it will one day end, and that you will be both deliriously overjoyed and yet terrified simultaneously.
My new job allows me nearly an hour of travel time each way, in the morning and afternoon, to restore a bond with her. Driving her to activities was always the highlight of my time with her when she was in middle school. I get all the updates, the juicy bits, the inside scoop on the immature antics of that one boy in the jazz band, the lunchroom drama, the teacher the entire grade level can't stand. We have those deeper conversations in the van too, the ones about the birds and the bees, and God and taxes and colleges. But as the quarantine drags on, and depression moves in, that open window shutters, the heavy curtain drops, guarded and covered, preventing light from seeping through.
Part of me needs to admit my role in not doing more to open the window, to lift the shades and let in the light. But force would not have worked, you cannot force an open relationship with someone who does not want to share, from someone who makes a hobby out of acting, from someone who is afraid of getting in trouble, who does not understand unconditional love and what that actually looks like in practice.
Part of what led us toward the darkened path, the one which seemed unending and useless, was insufficient communication. My theatre girl is a talented actress and theatre is one of her coping skills. To compensate for her low self-esteem and self-worth, she pretends to be someone else, someone more confident, more perfect, more outgoing, more everything that she believes she isn’t. It’s all pretending, theatre, and as long as she’s acting she is safe. She can hide her damaged portrait and pretend it isn’t torn to shreds. She can close the blinds, hide away from the light and put on a show as a character of herself, the one she wishes she could be.
Her attempt was a cry for help, not a play for attention, and thankfully it was one that did not end in disaster. She still must come to grips with the reality of “what if” and the gravity and weight of what that would have done to her father and to me, her brother, her friends and community, her family. She has plenty of guilt, the kind she assigns to herself over what she has done and put people through, and she will work with her therapists to weed her way among all those feelings, get to the root of them, understand them.
We are slowly building back trust, opening the blinds which prevented us from truly knowing how deep the claws of her anxiety and depression had sunk during this time of social isolation. Through therapy and communication, in the van, before bed, at the dinner table, with each text sent from one end of the house to the other, we encourage her to open the curtains and share with us the things we cannot easily see. Out of the darkness, there will be light.
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