Category: Parenting

Getting Back on the Horse

Truth be told, I did not ride a horse for the first time until I was fifty-three (if the feeble Barney even counts as a horse). All worst-case scenarios scared me too much. How embarrassed would I be if I couldn’t keep the horse on its designated trail? What if the horse got spooked and threw me off? Would I get the independent-minded horse who was in the mood for a joy ride? With so many possible things that could go wrong, I avoided the experience all together.

Now at fifty-six, I find myself at a 2023 crossroads that feels an awful lot like pushing myself to get on a horse. Only this time, my hesitancy involves a blank canvas or even worse for a writer, an empty page. It’s a version of writer’s block that has inhibited me from writing my own story and I know I have plenty of company in this predicament. Not just other writers, but anyone who has ever had to take care of a sick loved one.  It’s an all-consuming task that can strip a person of so many different things – including their own identity. 

Watching my daughter lose her quality of life at the age of twenty-six is an experience that I am slowly starting to recover from. Spending months witnessing her in a debilitating state without knowing the cause was horrifying. I would find her passed out all over the house during the day, while sleep would elude her at night. Thankfully, she was able to use her insomnia as an opportunity to scour the Internet, leading to her best guess that she was suffering from a form of chronic fatigue syndrome brought on by a candida yeast overgrowth. A specialist in New York City confirmed her diagnosis and began administering treatments that are now leading to a slow, but full recovery. 

After almost three decades of being a mom, I took pride in my role as the superhero who could be there for my children no matter what the circumstances. Of course, I discovered my limitations long ago, but I never expected to feel completely helpless. There was absolutely nothing I could do to make my daughter feel better, so my daily life became fixated on the things that I could do. I spent most of my time running errands, cooking meals and shuttling her to doctors’ appointments while losing sight of the fact that I wasn’t doing anything for myself. I didn’t even want to tell my closest friends what I was living through as if not talking about it made it less painful. My coping mechanism became walking through life without giving in to my frustrations or fears. My daughter and I were both in survival mode, even though she was the one fighting the illness.

Thankfully, my experience does not compare to anyone who has had to watch a loved one slowly slip away from Alzheimer’s, cancer, or any disease that ultimately robs a person of their life and dignity. The scars left from those battles rarely fade, but eventually every caretaker will emerge from a journey that is highly personal. They will have faced an experience that came without a handbook or roadmap and found their way to an ending that comes attached to a new normal. 

After taking care of someone with an illness, life can never return to being exactly what it was. The loss of consistently being needed often leaves a person with an emptiness that becomes difficult to fill. A sense of quiet replacing a constant state of worry might feel more unsettling than comforting. Even putting yourself first for the first time in ages could create an irrational sense that you are doing something wrong. In many cases it takes time to find a way to reset and catch up to a world that has now moved on without you. 

As the new year begins, I’m so grateful to be able to tell my caretaker story in the past tense with my daughter’s recovery now in progress.  Not everyone gets so lucky and yet I know I am in plenty of company when it comes to struggling to fill in my next steps. There are moments when I almost feel like the little girl who was leery of mounting the unpredictable horse. As I compare those fears to emerging from this experience, I am struck by the similarities. I successfully navigated my way through being derailed from what I thought was my designated trail, I survived getting spooked by an illness that felt at times like it was taking me down, and now I have been gifted the independence to take my own joy ride into the future.  Apparently, I really am ready to get back on that horse and embrace the journey forward.

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Finding Enlightenment Instead of Blame When an Adult Child Goes to Therapy

We all know the stereotype — starting therapy puts a person straight on the path toward blaming their mother. So, when my 20-somethings decided to explore their lives through a psychological microscope, I braced for the impact of mother wounds starting to come my way. Hindsight had gifted me with a dose of unpleasant self-awareness, meaning I had taken ownership for my helicopter mom moments, mama bear confrontations, and enabler missteps. I figured it was only a matter of time until my culpability caught up with me and then something unexpected happened. 

Whose Eyes Were on Who?

As my babies grew into adults, I always counted on my maternal instinct to help me guide, nurture, and love them. Motherhood for me was beautifully all-consuming, which apparently skewed my vision away from the fact that my kids had their eyes on me too — taking in the ways I treated them, others, and especially myself all while I thought I was supposed to be watching them like a hawk. I understood my place as a role model, but the magnitude of that responsibility never fully registered until my kids started therapy.

Looking in the Mirror

As a young girl whose lineage included women with extra meat on their bones, I knew that if I ever had a daughter, she would most likely inherit the same gene pool I had. Being chunky (as we always called it) was something I struggled with until high school. And because those extra pounds were given the power to define me, I became especially sensitive to my daughter’s experience. Between mean kids and critical family members, I found it challenging to navigate the fine line between encouraging healthy food choices and pushing my daughter into an eating disorder. I wanted her to have higher self-esteem and self-worth than I did at her age, but what I didn’t realize was that no matter what I said to her, my actions were negating what I was working so hard to preach.

Years of therapy helped my daughter realize she disliked what she saw in the mirror because every woman in her family felt the same way. “I’m so fat” was probably the most overused sentence passed through the generations. We were taught that we had to be cognizant of our bodies — meaning that we had to hide them. Even after the baby fat had been shed, the distorted self-image remained and that’s what I had been teaching my daughter. Not through intentional words, but by setting the wrong example.

What’s Wrong With Wanting Them To Be Happy?

Raising my children with higher self-esteem than I had experienced was only part of my goal. I wanted them to be happy. When the teen years arrived, we started to have conversations about dating and choosing partners who would bring joy into their lives. Enter another therapy lesson that opened my eyes: What is the real meaning of happiness? Is it finding someone to share your life with or is it finding happiness within yourself? 

As someone who pleads guilty to always rooting for the fairy tale ending, it upset me to find out I had been leading my kids down the wrong path. Painful rejections and the pressure to be in a relationship became more destructive than helpful. I had always encouraged them to love themselves, but once again my actions were not meshing with my words. It took their therapy to teach me that being happy in their own skin should never have been devalued by the lack of a significant other.

No One Is Perfect

These are only two examples of the things I have learned through my children’s therapy experiences. The irony is that I have only been blamed once for the things I thought I did wrong. And when my son’s therapist called me an enabler, he defended me so fiercely that I thought her head would spin. I learned two things that day. Therapists are not always right and if my children don’t see my parenting choices causing harm to their lives, then no other opinion will ever matter.

Years into this experience, I can say I’m happy my kids grew into young adults who choose to work on themselves. As they benefit and blossom, I have let go of waiting for the blame. I welcome their lessons and my own. Because what could be better than all of us being enlightened together?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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School Refusal: One Mom’s Battle With The Irrational Mind

Everything I did with my first two kids never failed to deviate with my third — new play gyms, preschool teachers, and an overall sense of life in general. My first two kids were Type A, but my youngest child seemed to be Type Z. The two older kids went full steam ahead, while my youngest usually went quite unwillingly. I later found that this unwillingness was due to his anxiety, and that I would have to learn to be his advocate. 

I Wasn’t Prepared To Parent a Child With Anxiety 

When my youngest hit third grade, his anxiety began to bubble up to the surface and take control. Yes, we did have a family history so I couldn’t claim to be completely shocked, but I was definitely unprepared. Suddenly, I found myself flying by the seat of my pants with no playbook, no experience, and a whole lot of emotions to keep at bay while I plunged headfirst into navigating a very challenging new normal.

School Refusal Became a Regular Thing for Him 

Anxiety can take many forms in a young child. All three of my kids experienced textbook moments, but of course my youngest had a family trend to continue. Nine years ago, school refusal had just started gaining traction. Thankfully, we were lucky enough to be part of a school system that had put some support in place. Today, after two years of remote learning, I can’t begin to imagine the number of children refusing to go to school every morning. As someone who lived through it, I can say with certainty that it’s more of a nightmare than any words could ever describe.

The biggest thing I learned through therapy and frustration is that there is no reasoning with the irrational mind. It was a head-shaking phenomenon to have my greatest moments of logic stopped in their tracks by pure illogical will. My black was his white and so it went, right along with my emotional stability and a good chunk of my sanity. 

I Had To Be More Than His Mom — I Had To Be His Advocate 

As someone who felt comfortable flying under the radar, it was a daunting task to become more proactive and confrontational. I found an adolescent therapist specializing in anxiety and reluctantly put my son on medication. The stresses of everyday life became a little easier for a short time, but eventually my son became a regular in the nurse’s office. I could no longer relax, even on the days when I got him to school. And by the end of middle school, he was on the attendance radar screen of both the administrators and his peers, leading to classroom ridicule that only made the truancy worse. Yet somehow, he managed to get good grades and make it to high school.

When My Son Entered High School, It Didn’t Get Easier 

When my son entered high school, he struggled. For two years, he repeated a cycle: missing class, falling behind, and then getting too stressed to catch up. Checking the school portal for his grades made me sick before I even opened my computer. Waking him up in the morning was also an exercise in terror because I never knew if he would get out of bed. And during his sophomore year, I had people coming to my house to either prod or threaten him to go to school. Even the principal argued with me that I wasn’t doing enough, as if I had the physical strength to force him into the car or the magic words to talk him out of his irrational state of mind. Every single day was awful.

We Moved Him to a School Better Suited To Meet His Needs 

After an unsuccessful sophomore year, my husband and I thought we had found our miracle in the form of a school refusal specialist (who knew such a thing existed?) and a local private school that specialized in children who needed a different learning environment. We were set to make the move until our district refused to pay for my son to attend. We hired a lawyer and were forced to sit in a room to discuss my son’s issues as if he was a chess piece that could be strategically controlled and manipulated. My family held our ground and the district finally agreed to move my son to a school that could help him. 

We spent the next three years navigating the path to graduation with the help of some of the best people I have ever met in my life. They got it. They were flexible and willing to work with me, even on those days when I still couldn’t get my son out of bed. The right people also understood that anxiety and school refusal can take down an entire family. I didn’t need to be scolded, I needed someone to assure me that everything was going to be okay and to support me in helping my son.

The Bottom Line 

When graduation day finally arrived, it almost felt like an out-of-body experience. It had taken five endless years plus two summers to get through high school. And along the way, he had gotten accepted to his first-choice college, which was a joyous relief. If I had been given the chance, I would have stood at the podium and thanked the numerous therapists, special mentors, and amazing human beings who supported and guided us through a challenge like no other. I often told my son that he had taken an off-ramp leading from the highway onto the back roads, but that the destination remained the same. A boy seemingly fated to follow a different route even before he was born had conquered debilitating anxiety and paved the way to what had seemed close to impossible — getting out of bed in the morning, feeling strong enough to face a new day.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Posted on by Shari Brauner 0