Big Conversation with Little People

When big things happen in life, we always have a choice to numb or acknowledge. When we go through a bad breakup, face conflict, lose a job, lose a person or hit rock bottom… we have the opportunity to look carefully at the state of things and live within it or to find the closest comfort and leave it to live around us but not truly within us. I actually stopped blogging and writing publically when my life blew up after a bad break up about 10 years ago. It felt too vulnerable at that time. I deleted my facebook, I opted NOT to go to my high school 10 year reunion and I dug a little hole for myself to hide away in for a while, allowing people in only as they felt safe to me. My dad passed the following year and the sudden nature of his death brought emotions that simply felt way too real to deal with properly. These two experiences (probably them being quite close in time didn’t help) gave way to my relationship with anxiety. She’s a part of me, anxiety, I guess always was. With these new experiences layered on top however, she looked different and it took me a while to process things and grow into the person I am now.

When you’re a parent and bad things happen, you have a second choice to make. You have to decide how honest you are going to be with your children about the ugliness of the world. One of my very favorite scholars on the topic of Autism, Barry Prizant, said once on his podcast “The opposite of anxiety isn’t calm… It is trust.” I come back to this phrase all the time and its truth is why I decide to be as honest as possible with my kids at all times. Kids… no, people…. are scared of what they don’t understand and if you leave kids without an answer, they WILL come up with one on their own and their answer will likely be a lot scarier than the truth.

As I drove home from work on the day that we were informed of Grandma’s brain injury, I felt the a similar panic to the evening I drove to my mom’s house to find the firetrucks lights on in front of my porch, the night my father died. Those moments when you have time getting to what you know will horrible; getting ready for a funeral, the moment you are meant to hug someone goodbye you know you won’t see for a long time, the last minutes with your pet before you have to allow the doctor to deliver her final shot. Strange moments that sort of suspend time and fill you with this fast moving fear within you as you search for what you might say or do, or just sort of freeze.

The first thing I did when I walked in the door was hold Matt and tell him how much I loved him. The second thing I did was talk to Mya. I told her that Grandma had gotten sick on her vacation and that everyone was sad and worried for her. I told her that people were going to be coming over and they might cry or act different. I told her that she didn’t have to do anything about it but if she wanted to hug them or ask questions she could. I told her that sometimes when people are sad they want space and that they probably wouldn’t want to play games or dance today. I told her she didn’t do anything wrong if people acted different and that they were just upset and scared. I told that it was okay if she still felt happy and it was also okay if she felt sad today and that I would be there for her and sister no matter what. She asked me if Grandma was going to be okay and I told her I didn’t know but that I hoped so.

She’s asked a lot of questions since then, particularly about sickness. She used to get really worried when Matt would get a cold or start to cough when we talked to him on the phone. We had to explain how Grandma isn’t sick with a cold and that her brain got hurt. She asked a lot of questions about brain injury. We had to explain a lot about how the skull protects your brain from little bumps and that it is very uncommon to go into a coma. She asked a lot of questions about comas. We had to explain a lot about how Grandma is awake but not awake and the difference between sleeping and being in a coma. That she can’t talk yet but that she will open her eyes. As we got nearer to the dates where Mya was going to be able to visit her in the hospital I even showed her what it might look like by laying down with my eyes open but not attending to her words/actions for a bit. We explained you could still talk to her and touch her and be with her. We had to explain that we don’t really know how much she can hear us, understand us, remember. She asked a lot of questions about death. She asked if grandma is going to die, if mom and dad are going to die and if she was going to die. She has asked me a lot about questions about my dad and how I feel about missing him. We told her that all living things die one day and it is our hope that we all live as long as possible. I tell stories about my dad and tell her often that I miss him or when I feel sad about not having him here.

And you know what? She’s taken in all of that information… that HARD HARD information with the same calm inquiry and innosense as she does learning about most other topics we talk about. I forget sometimes that these toddlers of mine are encountering endless new information about the world every single day. Their first butterfly, their first time seeing the garage door opener, the first time they walk past a spooky skeleton in the store and it makes a haunting giggle. They are fitting in all these new, strange puzzle pieces around them into the context that will continue to shape their view of the world. The questions she has asked and how they have evolved over these last months reveal to me an understanding of what is going on.

If I hadn’t answered those questions she could have easily filled in gaps about illness, brains, sleep, doctors, death, old people… the list goes on and I cringe at the ideas that her brilliant little mind would have accepted as truth had I not provided an answer. And somethings simply don’t have a good answer. She misses her dad. I miss her dad! She has notably struggled with saying goodbye to people she is attached to or even toys she becomes attached to since he’s been gone. Goodbyes are hard for her now. We keep talking to her about when dad and grandma are coming home but until they actually do, I don’t think she fully believes us and I think then that she holds some distrust around my language when I say “We will see them soon.” or “You can have that soft stuftie when we get back.” We’re still working on it. I definitely don’t have all the answers. Some days suck. I am sure though that she trusts me and her dad completely to tell her the truth. I can confidently say that she would ask us anything and that she feels comfortable sharing her feelings with us. I’m sort of putting all my eggs in that basket and hoping that the opposite of anxiety is truth. It feels right.

Also from my work with Autism is a strategy called co-regulation. Essentially, it is when a person does something dysregulating WITH a trusted person who is able to remain regulated within the environment in question. It’s like having the flight attendant not only within eye-shot but next to you, explaining why all the plane sounds are normal when the turbulence kicks in. I try to co-regulate for my kids as much as possible. When their tops fly off, I know I have to get calm, quiet and on their level. I have to be regulated in order to provide the sense of safety that their bodies can’t access in that moment.

But the truth is, the type of work that I have invested in doing with Mya through all of this and now that Morgan is getting older, with her as well; that work is exactly the work that I should have been doing with myself to process the traumas of my past. I should have been working with calm inquiry. I should have been asking myself and others the questions I had. I should have realized when I was filling in my own gaps with horrific, untrue truths. I should have talked with the people I love more about the thoughts within my mind and heart.

I started seeing a therapist a few months after Morgan was born. This has been my first experience with a therapist and I actually haven’t been back to see her since Grandma’s injury because, well I tell myself it is because there is no time; it feels like there is to time. I’m sure later I will realize I’m again not taking my own advice and hiding from my scary too-real realities. I was talking to her one day about the night of my dad’s death and how I get this sense of absolute dread any time I see firetrucks now. She told me a phrase she would come to tell me repeatedly over the next few months. “You have to start interrupting that thought.”

I started to become good at noticing when I was in one of my patterned thought loops and I would say to myself, “I know you created this story to protect yourself in a scary moment but that isn’t true information.” and then I would fill it with the truth of my situation in front of me. I don’t get that panic anymore from firetrucks (or even fire anymore but that’s a WHOLE different trauma story from Cambodia). That anxiety circle was born from a gap I filled in with information. I saw those lights and the fear of what I was going to experience in the next moment was written on me so deeply. Imagine if before that moment, someone could have told me what I was going to experience and walk me lovingly through it a bit. What if I could have co-regulated with someone? Maybe the whole horrific evening wouldn’t have left its mark the way it did.

I know that at the end of the day, the tricky conversations we have or even the single parenting position I’ve been handed from life these days are not the central issue or hardship. The real bad thing that is happening to us is that Grandma is sick. A person we love so much is sick. The ripples of that hard thing though echo throughout our days in so many ways and instead we end up dealing with that hardship through attachment to a stuftie or frustration at the clogged drain. I say this because I don’t want my writing to come off as self-obsessed and overly focused on parenting as if I am forgetting that this is really Diana’s story. I never once forget that this is her story.

The truth is though that her story is our story. It is a human story filled with the tangles of complex relationships and unanswerable questions. I can’t wait for the day Mya asks dad “When are you coming home?” for the millionth time and he can actually tell her “Tomorrow.” I really can’t wait.