Hanging by a Thread
When our children are suffering, we suffer. When our children aren’t hurting, parenting can be difficult enough. Sometimes it feels as if we are hanging by a thread.
Kids fighting with each other, temper tantrums, “I’m bored!” teething, fussing, illness, sleepless nights, long winter days, dark rainy days, days when we are feeling low, tired, trying to meet different needs, balancing, juggling work and family and a hundred other things, peacemaking, coming up with yet another creative idea, or uncreative idea, or even dinner… by the end of the day I (mkz) am feeling exhausted, exasperated, tremendously limited, and confined. My world has become too small. I feel an overpowering urge to run outside, to get some air, some distance, some space.
When the weather doesn’t allow for outdoor activity and we are cooped up inside for long stretches of time, that’s when I become most acutely aware of my own limits as a person and all the skills I never acquired and thus can’t teach my children.
I’m also very aware of the limits of our culture. It seems like all there is to do is to consume in some fashion. Whether it’s shopping or eating or going to the movies, so often it all feels empty and lifeless. Where are the centers in our towns for dancing and music, storytelling, and conversation for all ages?
They say it takes a whole village to raise a child. But where are the villages in our society? We still see important vestiges of the village of old in extended family, community centers, support groups, cross-generational friendships, and communities of faith. Nevertheless, all too often parents find themselves isolated and alone. This may be especially true for single parents, who may not be able to share their day-to-day struggles, get a different perspective, or just have someone to commiserate with—although from another vantage point, it might be said that sometimes partners can be unsupportive and create more work. Even with friends or supportive partners, the hardest times usually happen when we are on our own. Parenting can be lonely work.
We need community to round out our individual resources and necessarily limited skills, provide a critical mass of ideas, enthusiasm, and life experience in the form of people with a variety of backgrounds and talents to back us up when our own repertoire feels exhausted. As parents, we have to provide the bedrock in the family, but we can’t provide everything ourselves.
As our children enter the teen years, with all their complexity and problems, having babies and younger children may seem simple by comparison, and we may find ourselves confused, discouraged, even despairing at times. As we have seen, it can feel as if we are losing our teenage children as they pull away from us, influenced more and more by their peers, and are sometimes drawn to potentially self-destructive behaviors. We also understand that in some way, we are losing them as they move out into the world. We feel anguished by their vulnerability and our inability to protect them, and sometimes angry at the ways they express themselves—or don’t.
The intuitive, elemental, and very physical parenting we did with young children is no longer appropriate. We may find that our physical exhaustion gives way to mental and emotional exhaustion, in part because we are continually adjusting our roles as parents, as our adolescents struggle with their needs for autonomy, connection, love, and meaning.
They grow and undergo metamorphoses in various astonishing, unexpected, and sometimes trying ways, and we are called upon to grow and change as well. As they become independent and need us less, we can find ourselves slipping into a business-as-usual routine where they are concerned, which can feel superficial, unsatisfying, and disconnected to us and to them. They need more time alone, more space from us, and a different kind of sensitivity from us. In some ways we are irrelevant to them, and we are also not irrelevant to them.
It can be hard to see that they still need us when they are angry and critical and closed off from us, and even harder through the veil of our own anger and worry. Refusing to disappear and completely disconnect from them when we feel marginalized, confused, frustrated, and despairing takes tremendous intentionality on our part.
Inevitably there are times when adolescents find life is unsatisfying, when their innermost needs are not being met, when they are unhappy and questioning: “What’s life about? Where is the meaning? Isn’t there more to life than this? Where do I fit in?” They may become moody and withdrawn, and feel more distant from us than we could ever have imagined when they were little. They may actively push us away with hostile, angry behavior. We see them hurting, but it’s hard to reach them.
When they are feeling alienated and alone, they need to feel that we are still with them. We may see them looking at us as if from across a large chasm. Reaching them can be difficult. The gulf can feel scary, to them and to us. We may feel powerless in a way that we never felt when they were little. They inadvertently give us a glimpse of our own fragility, our own doubts and fears, our own feelings of vulnerability that are often buried deep inside of us and shielded from daily examining.
When our teenagers are questioning the authenticity of feelings, of people, and even of themselves, we would do well to locate a place within ourselves that is authentic, grounded, simple, and real. At such times, we might take a few moments to focus inwardly, bringing our attention to our breathing, to the body, and to our feelings. We may not feel very connected or close to our child in such moments, but we can be a sympathetic presence and reach for any threads they may be holding out to us, however thin.
We might also extend some threads of our own, however tentative and delicate, if appropriate. It might involve just listening and acknowledging the reality of the difficulties they are experiencing, or their pain and uncertainty. Or it may call for something more dramatic, such as taking them off by themselves for a day, or a weekend, or a week. This may not be possible or feel possible, but truly hard times call for truly creative solutions. Choosing something they might like to do, and making some time to be together in whatever ways we can, can remind them of the deeper meaning that resides below their busy and sometimes monotonous everyday routines. And stepping outside of our everyday lives, even if precipitated by a crisis, can serve the same function for us as well, and can help us renew our connection with them.
There are times—when our older children are feeling stuck, limited, unhappy with their lives—in which taking some action may be appropriate and necessary. This is particularly true when we sense that they are leaning toward doing things that are dangerous or self-destructive. They need to know that we are concerned about them, and what our concerns are. They may need us to problem-solve with them, or even advocate for them, helping them find ways to make their lives more satisfying, more meaningful.
Teenagers often have their own clear insights into the heart of the matter. But there are also times when they know something is not right but don’t know what it is, and at those times they may need us to bring whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our own life experience to the problem at hand. It takes a long time for children, for any of us, to understand how the world works (do we ever fully “understand?”) and how to make things work for them.
Helping them in any way may be especially hard to do if we are seen as part of the problem. Although we can be open to making changes in our own behavior, we may or may not be able to help them make changes in their lives. We may or may not even agree on what is needed or even what the problem is. But sometimes, just acknowledging the hard time they are having can make the difference between their feeling isolated and feeling connected, between feeling judged and feeling cared for. When they feel concern and loving acceptance from a parent, it can give them a more meaningful context within which to view their difficulties.
There are times when our children, no matter how old they are, seem to “regress” to a younger age. A friend’s sixteen-year-old boy had been emotionally withdrawn from his family and got very sick from an infection about the same time. His parents could have chosen to see his sudden illness as purely physical, having nothing to do with his emotional state or the difficulties he and the family had been experiencing. Instead, they were able to view his illness within a larger context, and began to examine the stresses, both physical and emotional, in their son’s life and within the family. They then made use of this time in which he was sick and convalescing to promote a broader healing. They accepted his need to regress by being at home—slowing down, turning inward for a time, eating special healing foods, and reconnecting with his family—and recognized the restoring and transformative benefits of this to him and to their relationship with him.
Regression is a word with strong negative connotations. It usually connotes maladjustment, failure to act one’s age, going backward to a more infantile stage. But there are times when children, not just young children, need a period of being cared for, read to, sung to, a time in which to go inward in order to be able to move outward again. Responding with kindness and acceptance and without judgment when our children are needing such a time nurtures that part of them that is struggling to grow. It ultimately helps them to move on, to shed an old skin. It can be a true gift to them.
Being able to give this kind of time is not always easy, or even possible. Work and other demands may make it difficult or impossible. But it helps if we can remember that what our child is presenting on the outside is not all that there is. Perhaps, with reflection, we can find a way to trust that some kind of inner transformation may be unfolding and make space for it with kindness, as best we can. Over time, we may come to some understanding of what our child is struggling with.
When a child is unhappy and out of balance and perhaps regressing, he or she can be very hard to live with. But when we take the difficult behavior personally and wall ourselves off, put on our armor, get stuck in our own fears and hurt feelings, the walls between us just get thicker and higher. These are the times when it helps to see with eyes of wholeness. This means viewing what is happening in the largest possible context, with an intention to examine, to be fully present, and view it within the seemingly paradoxical framework of both distance and compassion. When the crisis has passed, if we can let go of any hurt, resentment, or anger we may be feeling, we have the possibility of moving into a truly new moment with our children.
At the end of a day that felt like it was filled with unending criticism and negativity directed at me (mkz), one of my daughters, at the age of ten, snuggled up to me and told me very sincerely that she loved me. This wonderful capacity to be fluid, to let go of anger, changes as children get older. They need us to remind them through our own behavior that it is possible to be aware of ongoing issues at the same time that we meet each moment with a willingness to start afresh.
Ultimately, it is not our ideas that will count the most. Rather, it will be the authenticity of our being and our embodiment of caring that we bring to the gut-wrenching moments all parents find themselves in and that make us question everything.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
MARY OLIVER,
“WILD GEESE,” Dream Work