Change – Parenting Lark

I Parent Well

Back in the time when I was afraid of my child
Back in the time when I couldn’t say no to him
Back in the time when I would do anything for a few minutes peace

I said yes
All the time
To all the things

I said yes to spending real money to buy fake things on the PlayStation

Once I started saying yes it became harder to start saying no
So I continued to say yes

All the while I ignored my budget

He would ask how much he had in savings
I would say, honestly, I don’t know
The lack of knowledge was another reason to say yes
So I continued to say yes

Eventually I crunched the numbers
Found where we each were financially

He had overspent by at least €100

I was so down trodden, so beaten by life
I couldn’t say “You are in debt to me”

But I could say “You are broke
You have spent all you had
There is nothing left”

Now is the time when I delight in being his parent
Now is the time when we can talk openly about everything
Now is the time when time spent with him is a few minutes peace

He told me today that he wants to buy something
That he really wants the something
But also doesn’t want to repeat the PlayStation thing

He doesn’t want to go broke buying fake things with real money

That time was 5 years ago
That lesson held firm

I parent well

Wonder

Once upon a time I was afraid that he would get bigger and stronger

I wondered what it would mean in my life

5 years later he is 3.5″ taller than me and today I started teaching him how to lift weights with a view to being stronger

I am full of wonder for what the next 5 years will bring us

Capability and Desire

I was listening to Tarana Burke in an interview today and she was talking about when she realised that her expectations of her mother’s love for her were not in line with her mother’s capability to love her.

It reminded me so much of “Humans do well when they can”. I have taken that mindset and applied it to all aspects of my life but have only ever heard it used in relation to explosive children.

As I approach the 5th anniversary of meeting Marie I continue to explore the early part of my journey with her by my side, the part she asked me about many times, the “why did I keep going?” part.

Capability and Desire helps to describe it a little.

My capabilities to love him, to parent him, to help him, were limited.

My desire to find a new way of loving him, of parenting him, of helping him, was not.

I had looked over and over before I met her. I looked over and over after I met her.

I desired it.

I did not have a fixed mindset that the way we were was the way we would always be.

I wasn’t capable.

I wanted, however, to learn how to be more capable.

Looking at the sentence “I want to learn how to be more capable” I feel inspired.

As much as I love inspiring other people, I adore inspiring myself!

Grown Folk

During the Summer I was asked to speak at this year’s NVR Ireland conference. As a result of the pandemic the conference was to be online and I had a 10 minute slot. I can talk for hours. I have great difficulty talking for 10 minutes.

I played with many ideas for what I would talk about. The remit was “The Parent’s Experience” but that didn’t really narrow things down for me.

When I finally started writing something, 48 hours before I was due to speak, I knew that I needed to condense my lived experience into 10 minutes.

I am now the Grown Folk. I am one of the ones that has survived. I am one of the ones who has taken this program and made it their own, made it a way of life. I am one of the ones who can now sit down and say “let me tell you what I did. Let me tell you a way that it can be fixed”.

So I spoke of my experience. I opted for dignified honesty. I made some people cry. I made more people hope.

I showed up. This is what Grown Folk do.

Rose Coloured Glasses

We all look at things through filters. We all have different filters. We get our filters from our past experience, from our expectations, from those around us, from society. Very often we have no idea what those filters are until they come to our attention, but that doesn’t usually happen until we have already made a judgement based on the original filters.

We are in the middle of a pandemic. Everything is different, and everything is now filtered through an additional set of pandemic filters.

Is that person following the local/national laws & guidelines?
Is that person behaving safely?
Is that person behaving less or more safely than I am?

Just before the last one is where the filter kicks in and we are no longer pretending to analyse facts but instead are freely casting judgement.

A friend recently told me that they were going to go to “have a few beers and play board games with friends”.

Visiting friends, in their own home was within the local and national guidelines.
My friend is over 18 therefore is old enough to drink beer.
Board games are a standard adult activity.
My friend had already mentioned their hand washing and use of hand sanitiser,

That meant that according to their report they were following local & national laws and guidelines and behaving safely.

Cue the filter!

With a pandemic filter firmly in place “beers, board games & friends” = “house party” = “super spreader event”

Then I freewheeled into judgement. My friend was behaving less safely than I was. They were going to a house party and I decided not to comment because it’s a pandemic and I was busy filing them under “let’s not keep company until there is a vaccine” because I am safe, and they are not.

I didn’t stop to ask. I didn’t ask for more information. I didn’t ask for details. I didn’t inquire after names, or a location, or the intended games.

I judged, and then I based everything after that on that judgement.

I have done this with The Boy. I haven’t done it very much in the last few years, but I have done it. I have judged him based on ideas I already had.

If I had stopped and asked my friend those questions I would have discovered that they were having a Chinese take away with a 2 adult + 2 child family and would be playing UNO.

So instead of a house party, my friend went to a family gathering and I had to dig myself out of the judgemental hole I had planted myself in.

How Will They Know?

Do I want my children to grow up to be like me?
Do I want them to grow up to question their choices and boundaries for the sake of someone else?

How will my children know how to live their best lives when they grow up if I don’t show them me living my best life?

I have always been called too much. They weren’t always the words used but the message remained the same… Be less, I don’t like this much.

I talked too much
I was taller than everyone else
I loved too much
I cared too much
I thought too much
I knew too much

So I started to live the idea that I was too much

I held myself to higher standards than other people
I dialed myself down
I tried to make myself small
I was a worse critic of myself than anyone could be, plus I got in there first

I tried to be normal. I tried to fit in. It never worked and I didn’t know why. People just vanished out of my life. I had no idea why people liked me or stopped liking me. I lived a life confused by the messages from without and within that seemed to be constantly in conflict.

I decided to stop being too much. Sideline the desires I had, not express my preferences. So I did that and it didn’t work.

I decided part of recovering from The Time That Went Before would be to stop trying to be normal.

When I got into my last relationship I thought “I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do” and I dug my heels in. I am going to show my children that healthy boundaries are not only possible in a relationship, but are good for the relationship. Unfortunately I did that with someone who reacted really poorly to other people having boundaries and had none themself so yet again I was too much.

No boundaries = too much
Healthy boundaries = too much

How was I supposed to win? When would the world stop thinking I am too much?

As I sit here today I realise that it doesn’t matter what the world thinks about how much I am. I can only be myself. I am this much. I am the goldilocks amount of much. I am M Class.

I love well. I love from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. I love in ways that don’t use the standard words. I love with the volume dialed way up.

Some people may know all the ways to see, hear, feel that love without needing me to be something different so that they can love me too. Other people may not and that is about their skills and abilities, and nothing to do with my lack of ability to be “normal”.

Part of this job of parenting is to show my children that they are M Class. They are the goldilocks amount of much, however much that much is.

I can only show them what M Class looks like by being M Class myself.

Through What Lens?

I have had a friend for almost 30 years. We have met 7 times over the course of those years. When you get past about 15 years friends become family, although some of them graduate long before then. He is very definitely family now.

This morning he had his second cataract surgery. A week ago he was “too blind to drive”, today he can read fine print again.

He sees the world now through lenses that were chosen for him, to give him the best chance at doing his best for as long as they last him, or as long as he lasts them.

3 years ago I made a decision to see The Boy through a different lens. I had been looking at him and seeing that he was a list of negative words, words that influenced how I thought about him, what sort of future I saw for him. The change was to seeing him through the lens of “Humans do well when they can”. At any given moment he is doing as well as he can. Admittedly, sometimes “as well as he can” looks dreadful, but it is always as well as he can.

I don’t remember the hour or the day that that new lens slotted into place permanently. Sometimes the lens gets a little foggy, similar to when glasses wearers come in out of the cold and their glasses get all steamed up, but I wipe it clean and we are back to where we belong. I know most of the people around me didn’t have that lens change, and as a result don’t see him the way I do, but I cannot change other people and so I will continue to model what I believe is a good way to see the people in my life.

It does lead me to wonder what lens people do see him through. Do they see the kid he is now, looking through today’s uninfluenced lens? Do they see him through the lens of his past wrong doings? Do they still hold the same opinion of him now that they formed then?

This occupies more of my mental energy than I would like it to. I worry that he will, for some people, be forever tarred with the same brush, that they will never get to see the wonderful human being he is growing into.

Conversation: It’s Been Three Years

Me: Dude?
Him: Yes?
Me: Three years ago this week I told you I was reading a new book that would hopefully help me help you feel better.
Him: Yeah?
Me: You asked if it had tips or just stories and said that you hoped it had tips.
Him: <nodding>
Me: It had tips. And that is what we live now.
Him: <more enthusiastic nodding>
Me: We did OK, didn’t we?
Him: Yeah
Me: And we’re doing ok, right?
Him: Yeah we are.

For years, when people foisted their parenting opinion on me in relation to my 11 year old (the usual – a good smack, put my foot down, stop being so soft, punish him more… you all know the list) all I could say was “He doesn’t have a formal diagnosis and doesn’t meet the criteria for anything in particular. He just strugggles with the world sometimes”. The important bit in there was “sometimes”. That “sometimes” excluded him from treatment by the first psychologist he saw, excluded him from a diagnosis (and treatment) from the mental health service he was referred to, got him diagnosed from the play therapist… and on it goes.
I have sat in so many rooms with so many specialists trying to get across to them that he directs his frustrations at his brother and I, and “performs” in public. Each and every time I was told that the problem was with me. I got that, I get that, but no one could even point me in the right direction on how to help my kid who appeared to explode for no reason.
2 weeks ago, when school went back and one of his best friends went on holiday, his previous even keel disintegrated. He started exploding more often and included threatening to kill first his brother and then himself. Suddenly services are interested. Child protection social worker wants him seen by the GP, GP said “why bother, I can’t do anything”. Play therapist is willing to see me but my kid is not willing to see her. He told me during the week that he is not going to talk to anyone else because none of them listen to him and none of them help. Well of course, if he can hold things together in public then they don’t think he has a problem and it is all put down to a personality clash.
I foresee the whole exercise being an opportunity for the play therapist, the GP, the social worker etc to shame me for my poor parenting.
A friend recommended The Explosive Child and I read it during the week. I told my kid I was going to read it and he said “Is it just stories or is there tips in it? I hope there is tips”. He wants to not feel the way he does but MAN ALIVE he is so fragile at the moment there is no time to have proactive Plan B conversations and any time I have tried he has gotten frustrated and I’ve switched from Plan B to Plan C. So many things have gone into the Plan C column this week because I need things to be calmer around here in general so that we can have some peaceful time.
I hope his friend returning on Monday and doing some work with him to help him cope with the physical symptoms of ongoing age appropriate growth will also help to settle things down.
I have started a shopping list of things that frustrate him and I feel a little overwhelmed. <snip> it is the first time in a long long time I feel there is a light on the horizon.
The Parent, September 2016

Conversation: More and More

More and more often I am reminded that the work was worth it.

During the Summer, on a Friday night while I was out of the country and The Boy was with his other parent, I got a text to say that for some reason he had run out of data on his mobile phone. I saw no benefit in investigating the reason because it wasn’t going to change the position we were in right then, and the risk of the perception of assigning blame was high.

I explained that one night in February, because of something I left running on my phone, I ripped through my 4Gb allowance of data and *another* 5Gb for which they charged me by the meg.

So… his concern was he had no data on his phone until Monday, mine was the cost of data add ons.

In the process of laying out the concerns he came up with a possible cause of the data usage, and admitted that it may be his own fault. I thanked him for thinking about the reason, and said that while I was interested in his discovery, the reason for the data usage would not change what I was willing to do going forward.

I asked him how much data he thought he would need before we saw each other (and he got back to WiFi) on Monday. He said he thought 1Gb would be enough, and asked if he could get that add on. This solution met both of our concerns. I thanked him for being so clear in his messages. He got the add on, said thanks, and was gone.

The next night, about 24 hours later, I got “I think I underestimated how much data I would need”. I told him that he could get up to 4Gb of data total but that my expectation was that he would not get all 3 (he had already used 1 over the last 24 hours) at the same time. I thanked him again for his communication and his openness to hearing my expectations. He said thank you again, and was again gone.

Roll forward to Monday and we had a chat about data going forward (he has another 2 weeks with his other parent within the billing cycle). We agreed that we needed more information before we made a plan.

Information sources:

1. Reach out to the phone company and check that he got his full allowance (he thought he hadn’t)
2. If that came to nothing, ask the company if they could sell us a bundle (ideally with a discount)*
3. If they couldn’t then buy the data 1Gb at a time**

* at this point we would have to figure out how much he would need
** at this point we would have to agree to a spending limit

Then, knowing that he was in a good place I said…

Me: Who do you think should be liable for the cost of the extra data?
Him: I don’t know
Me: (I obviously asked the wrong question) Do you think I should be liable for the cost of the extra data?
Him: I don’t know
Me: (Wrong question again) Do you think you should be liable for the cost of the extra data?
Him: I don’t know
Me: (Wrong question again) Do you think we should share the cost of the extra data?
Him; Yes

I thanked him again.

I chatted with the cell phone company, keeping him in the loop throughout. Yes, he had been given and used all of his monthly allotment of data. No they do not sell bundles larger than 1Gb and yes, each Gb would cost €3. Then they suggested pulling forward his renewal from the 28th of the month to today… this way he would get his monthly allotment (again) for the monthly renewal cost which was about 1/5 of the cost of the same amount of data if we bought it by the meg.

It is essentially buying an extra month mid month and it meets both of our concerns… enough data for him, not a huge amount of money for me.

Me: Your monthly rollover has happened
Him: Cool
Me: So the whole thing came to €24 and I am proposing we split the cost 50:50
Him: I was thinking 10:90
Me: That is awesome that you are willing to pay for 90% of the cost
Him: Psych. Yes, 50:50 is good.

We shook on it and I asked if I could give him a hug, which he willingly gave. I thanked him again for his willingness to work with me to find a solution that worked for both of us.

3 years ago that <key moment> would have gone a different way, and it would have ended up with him having a meltdown 2500 miles away from me. This Summer it moved to shared experience, empathy, gratitude and problem solving.

Once Upon A Time In September

Once upon a time there was an adult. They were the most adulty adult in the room. They were also exhausted. You could see it on their face, you could hear it in their voice, and you could certainly see it in the eggy bread they had decided was a good enough dinner today.

For the life of them they didn’t know why they were so tired. They were getting the usual amount of sleep and they were no longer having to juggle childcare which is a nightmare for so many parents in the Summer holidays.

Then they remembered that
– transitions are hard for grown ups, even the most adulty adult of grown ups.
– returning to the term time schedule is wanted, but still hard to do
– it is OK to be kind to themself
– soon it will be more familiar and therefore easier
– a good enough dinner is better than no dinner

Long ago they learned that the most adulty adult in the room should be strong and strict and not show any weakness, but they decided that it is load of codswallop so they sat down with their kids and said

WOAH! September is rough. Getting back to school is tough for all of us, isn’t it. I bet by the end of the month we won’t even remember how tired we are right now. Let’s check back in then to make sure all of the big problems have gone away or been solved.

Then the most adulty adult in the room kissed their kid’s heads, complimented them for their ability to roll with the punches and drank in the warmth of the hug that followed.