All my parenting pieces should begin with three words.
Parenting is hard.
Frankly, the rest of the page should remain blank. Writers, however, seldom leave a blank page. The writer feels compelled to write, the unavoidable pull to explain, define and elaborate. I am no exception. As National Eating Disorders Awareness Week 2021 draws to a close, I’m writing to every parent in the trenches. Your family’s Hard, may be eating disorders, or it may be another mental health diagnoses or could be something altogether different.
Whatever your struggle, please know, you are seen. Today your life is terrifying, hard, and lonely. Your life may be in free-fall and you see no light on the horizon. Hear me when I say this,
Life will get easier. When, I can’t say, but it will.
Crisis Parenting is the hardest most excruciating parenting there is, and I have been through some foolishness. Nothing has been harder than getting our daughter healthy while we managed the unique needs of her older autistic brother. Did I know with complete confidence we would get here? No. Each day, we moved forward, with hope and fear, because doing nothing, or kicking the can down the road had dire consequences. With my husband Jeffrey, we have done it, and I tell you this with my whole heart—if we can do it, so can you.
When your family finds stability; the gratitude never fades. Your eyes will still sting when everyday moments take your breath away. You delight in what can only be described as a normal life. You marvel at how grateful you have become for simple tedious irrelevant issues and garden variety teenage problems. Normal teen issues are fantastic, and you welcome them! You relish family dinners that fall apart in tears—tears of laughter, where you linger just talking, and sharing your day. Meals that just a few years ago were filled with flying food, agonizing tears, and each of your family members running for the exits.
You will meet individuals in your life who have never faced Crisis Parenting. These well-meaning people will urge you to look for the silver lining in this journey. I will share the warm sentiments my husband offers.
There aren’t any silver linings and Fuck you for asking...
As you can see, Jeff is firmly in the no silver lining camp. Honestly, I have yet to find one either. However, my family’s pain has become the fuel for my advocacy. The words of Maya Angelou have become my mantra,
Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
As a family, we did our best, made mistakes and learned a great deal and slowly got better.
You will make missteps, even mistakes. Try not to be discouraged, because if you aren’t making and acknowledging your missteps, it may mean you are settling and not moving forward. I tried to look at them as steppingstones getting us closer to wellness. Norah’s first dietician, therapist and pediatrician are no longer part of her team. All were experts and highly qualified. Did we spend too long with each? Yep, but with each mistake it becomes clear what we need, and what the right fit looked like for our family. The new therapist and doctor are the ones who saved her life.
When I binge watch a show, I want to see the previews, and I want to know how the story is going to unfold. This tendency annoys my husband, which is why we don’t watch shows together. The desire to know the ending is fine in shows—it is not healthy in life. It is completely normal to want to know when this will all be over. When can we get back to our life? Try not to do this. When your team tells you recovery will take 2-5 years, think 5 1/2. If it arrives in 18 months, cry tears of joy. Please don’t be the family that thinks:
We are experts, our family has resources, will get this sorted quickly.
With this over confidence, you then plan a dream vacation six months later as a reward for all you have been though. Your beautiful child is a month out of a residential treatment facility and isn’t well. Your life is still a s-show, and now you have to cancel the entire trip. You now have a guilt-ridden sick child; other angry family members and your disappointment is so palpable your relationships and mental health suffer. Be very suspicious of anyone who offers you specifics. This process takes as long as it takes… It just does. And trust me, you will know when you are in a solid good place.
When you Crisis Parent, you get an unwanted gift—a newfound bottomless pit of anxiety. In which you will spend hours of your day worrying about the other shoe dropping. The next unfolding catastrophe to befall your life. I know this one intimately, from battle tested experience. Here’s the thing about the other shoe. It will drop, and often. Why? Because the path to wellness isn’t a straight line. It zigs and zags, it is two steps forward and sometimes four back. Your goal is to have more good days than bad. That is your metric, keep your eye on that. Hard stuff is going to happen. Every. Single. Day. One of the smartest decisions my husband made was an electronic file with weight, calories, and newfound behaviors. In the early days it was how we tracked in real time what was working and what was definitely not!
At this stage, you also need new tools to battle the weary and horrible feeling that you face every morning and every night as you carry your weary body to bed. I will gift you a new assignment, your first Kathrynism. Your job is to,
Drink Champagne on Tuesdays.
Are you thinking, YES! An endorsement for day drinking? Umm, no. This Kathrynism originated in my childhood and the tip I give all newlyweds. Our next-door neighbors were madly in love, an older retired couple. One day Mollie and Herb had spent hours working in their yard. Later that evening, I watched them dancing and laughing on their terrace drinking an expensive bottle of champagne. The following morning, I asked Mollie what were you celebrating? She smiled and said, Tuesday. I thought they were magic, and they were. At the ripe old age of 16, I promised myself, when I married, I would never save champagne for special occasions, I would celebrate small joyful moments.
Now I understand, when you are in the throes of Crisis Parenting it is hard to find joy, let alone wins, you will have shoes dropping everywhere. When this happens and you are feeling discouraged, it is time to reframe a win. A win can be your child took meds, got a shower after a week, went for a walk, they spoke in therapy, completed an entire meal without a supplement, there was a day of no screaming- them at you or you at them, you met your calorie goal. Your child gained weight or grew. Whatever your success, take it… A small win is still a win. Not every day will be worthy of champagne. But when the win is a good one, you better celebrate. My husband gave us a win every day, because as he kissed me goodnight, he would say…
Kathryn, we lived to fight another day, we got this, and I love you.
Some days that was the win. I took it and held on tight.
For a variety of reasons, you will often need to stifle the urge to throw your phone across the room. (Small tip, it is expensive, a pain, and you are far too busy to replace your broken phone.) Let me be clear, all of them will be justified. In this specific case, you are for the second time this week siting in the waiting room of your child’s therapist. While you wait for your child, you begin scrolling social media where you stumble over photos of a friend and her family living their best life. It will be a big life moment, a graduation, birthday, college drop off. It matters not, you will suddenly feel the tears inadvertently leaking out of your eyes. As you wipe your eyes, you are angry at yourself for being jealous, your life is stable-ish, you aren’t in the hospital, you know families much worse off than yours, you tell yourself to immediately stop and pull it together.
Hand raised. Yes, that has been me.
And when I’m truthful, it has happened more than once, and it is the worst. In this moment, it is absolutely ok—not to be ok. I wish I had given myself more grace. A ton more grace. If it is healthy for you, this is when I will encourage you to finally, pour a large glass of wine, take a long hot bath, and watch Pride and Prejudice. Give yourself several hours to be sad. This is hard, hard stuff.
I will tell you this, after you have your sad. Social media is a lie. For every beautiful photo-op, there is the hidden unfiltered world that isn’t so perfect. We all have stuff, and no doubt your stuff may be harder than others today. That said, I have yet to meet the perfect family. Just saying…
If you were to ask me what the most important outside tool was to our family’s success, I would tell you, Therapy. Norah’s therapist is our family therapist. I did therapy. The children did therapy. The family did therapy. Sometimes each of us alone, sometimes all of us together. Hours and years of therapy. As a family we learned tools and skills in our sessions, which we then took home. Our therapist knows us and all our foolishness. I mean all our ugly and messy. In therapy, we made goals, held each other accountable and made progress. We would not be here without it. Do families get to the other side without it? Absolutely, if that is your family, great. I say, you do you.
Let’s be honest, no one likes to ask for help. In this journey, you will need expert advice. Full stop. Other times, you may just realize you are exhausted and overwhelmed. When things get rough, ask for help.
This one is difficult; especially for mothers, we often try to go it alone. We tell everyone,
I’m fine… We are good. We have this.
None of us can do it alone. You can’t keep your child alive if you make yourself so ill you can’t function.
For those of you in committed relationships, its even more nuanced,
When life is hard, don’t turn away from your partner- turn inward.
What does that mean, you need to lean into your spouse. You are an unbreakable team and unified force. YOU CAN NOT FIGHT BOTH YOUR PARTNER AND ED. Do not let ED get between you. I refer to anorexia as shape shifting, just when you had a good look, it changes. It will confuse you both, but know this, your partner is hurting too. I’m going to generalize about men. They like to fix-stuff, it wrecks them that their baby is ill, and they can’t fix-it. On the rare occasions that I could actually see my husband’s pain. His visceral reaction to the s-show that was our life, I cried in the shower. It is an ache that still lingers.
Jeffrey and I have been married for nearly 30 years; we have a strong marriage. We not only love each other- we like each other. Crisis Parenting will test you. Your marital cracks will show, so whatever your issue, you need to own it, share it and fix it fast. You also need to love each other through it. A little grace goes a long way.
Clear expectations are critical. You need to learn to be very explicit with your partner. What do you need? Don’t make them guess. Tell them. Jeff does the grocery shopping, I told him,
Our house can never be without potato chips, classic coke and a healthy orchid plant. And if I’m watching Jane Austen in bed, it better be VERY serious for you to interrupt me.
And in the same breath, I knew what Jeff’s list included. We also had a code word, when used the other needed to step in. Our hardest conversations were about refeeding. Early on, anorexia could play Jeff, not all the time, but enough that it made me, how shall I put this. Not pleased. Did we have a few private conversations, where we exchanged our different points of view. Oh. Yes! We have never been a couple to raise voices or slam doors. We didn’t start. But, I will say that it was as exasperated as we have ever been with each other. Parental fear goes both ways. And our therapist was extremely helpful.
Jeff…. Kathryn is 100% right on this… Norah needs to do this…
Now, here’s the catch, as Norah got better, it was Jeff who lovingly told me,
I know you are afraid; she is ok… Let’s give her some space.
And you guessed it, our doctor, therapist all agreed, and lovingly told me to stand down. And yes, it was scary and no, I didn’t like it. When they have more good days, it gets easier.
At one precarious point in this journey, I called my mentor and deepest confidant. She took my call from a hotel lobby as she was preparing to a give a presentation. For five minutes she listened, I shared that our life was falling apart, we were a year into the crisis, family members were ill and dying. Norah was a mess; our son Ian was too. I felt like a complete failure. After I finished, she asked me one question.
Ok, Kathryn. Do you feel better?
And I responded,
Seriously Pat… did you hear a single word I said?
And I could feel her loving smile…
Kathryn, I haven’t seen you wield your red pen in a long time. With that pen, you seem to be grading yourself with an extremely critical eye. I’m not so sure you are deserving of a failing grade. Let me tell you what I hear and see….
And for the next ten minutes, my dearest friend and loving mentor made a conference room wait while she advised me of the litany of successes, I was unwilling to see. I pray you have a Pat in your life—I lost her tragically a few months later. This call along with her many life lessons have guided me in this journey.
Pat’s call was the push I needed to completely change my perspective. We were making progress, I just wanted it faster and easier. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way. ED especially, doesn’t work that way. You will feel like a failure some days. As I shared in the beginning, Parenting is hard. This is a long road to get your children well. But they do, you can do it and life is all the sweeter when you get there.
Thank you for accompanying me and I am humbled to share our story. I hope there are some nuggets in this post, to help you on your journey.
Peace / XO
Kathryn
PilgrimageGal
(photo credit: PilgrimageGal)