If the child you adore has phased to someone unrecognizable-seismic moods, willfulness, disrespect for the family’s rules and traditions, even experimentation with harmful substances, here are a few suggestions for riding out the storm.
Make Home More Pleasant Than Ever
When my son went off grid for awhile, I, too, was figuratively off grid, involved in a professional project that had practically swallowed me whole. Things like regular dinners on the table, well-ordered, clean spaces in which my kids could work and play, and a general sense of organization had gone out the window. I’ve realized that children of every age thrive in a well-run environment. Now, that’s never been my strong suit. Those of us with artistic temperaments may struggle with the daily grind that involves things like cleaning out the fridge, keeping on top of laundry (and I don’t mean sitting on top of a six-foot-high pile), maintaining kids’ schedules. I’m still no pro. But when I had a child in crisis, the first thing I began doing was cooking. I wanted the house to smell heavenly. My rationale was that if I could make my home more appealing, my son would want to linger there instead of heading out with the friends who had derailed him. Food equals so many things: nourishment, comfort, opportunities for family bonding, even a sense of predictability, if it’s served regularly. Never one to want to ‘bind’ myself to a schedule, I seldom had meals on the table at the same time every night. Given all that my children are involved in both in school and outside of it, the supper-on-the-table-at-six thing still has me in a bit of a tangle.
Curiously, one of the first things my son did when he began to ‘come back,’ so to speak, was sit down at the table to eat dinner with us. To anyone else, this might have seemed like an inconsequential thing; to my husband and to me, it was epic. Having all of our children around the table once again was vitally important to us not just on a personal level but a symbolic one as well: his choice to join us signaled that he was ready to slowly venture back into the bosom of the family.
Get the Heck Out of Dodge
If the problem is scary enough, consider a move. I’m dead serious. We were worried enough about our beautiful boy that we picked up and moved. Just like that. From the time we found out what was going on to the time we were on the front doorstep of a rental house six hours south of the town we had lived in, it was three weeks. People wondered, How could we just leave like that? Pick up and go? It wasn’t easy. We left with the hope that we could grow our business in our new area, which proved more difficult than we ever imagined. Eventually, we sold our interest in the business and began something else. If you have the means to pick up and skedaddle, consider doing it. There were naysayers in the town we left-people who reminded us (unhelpfully, I might add) that the things causing us problems where we were would also be plentiful where we were headed. My attitude was, Yeah, but we’ll get a fresh start, which will buy us some time. And it did. In fact, it not only bought our son the opportunity to see who his true friends really were, it saved him.
Decide Which Battles You Can Afford to Lose
One morning after a particularly caustic exchange with my son, I decided to call a wise friend of mine, a woman who had already raised several children who were, by anyone’s standards, successful. I rehearsed to her what was going on, she repeated it all back to me to make sure she understood, and then she said the words that literally changed my life: “You cannot be in conflict with your child,” she said. That simple. If he was truly injurious to himself or the family, then we had to decide what we planned to do about it. But, she added, if that was not the case; if in fact this was more like rebelliousness than all-out self-destruction, then I needed to decide once and for all that, regardless of how he treated me, I must treat him with respect and love. That didn’t mean there didn’t have to be rules or that the rules didn’t have to be enforced. She nevertheless pointed out that I was probably the one person on Earth who could show him the kind of true, healing love that would help him weather his own self-made storm. At that time, he had sworn he was moving out of the house the day he turned eighteen. “Then you’ve got nine months,” she said, calculating forwards from his birthday. “Nine months to be his link to the kind of love he no longer remembers anything about.”
I wept openly as we talked, resonating so strongly to what she said that the moment felt like a true epiphany. From then on, I vowed to show him the truest form of mother love I possessed and to strive to treat him with dignity even though he wasn’t behaving with any. That doesn’t mean there weren’t some big bumps in the road, but coincidentally, it was around that time that he began to relax, the tension in our home began to ease, and he began to allow us to reclaim him.
Flood the House with Music
During the entire time our son was off grid, I literally flooded our home with music. I went out to Frye’s electronics, bought a slick Bose docking station for my iPod, and kept music playing nearly 24/7. Since it was my music system, it was my playlist, and I determined what sounds filled our home. I grew up on an eclectic mix of everything from Handel to Gordon Lightfoot, and I knew very well the way in which music both creates and sustains a mood. Endless classical and jazz music sounded throughout the house. I began playing the piano again, especially at night, as a way of winding down my day and my children’s. And something about the music allowed all of us, including our rap-loving, angry boy, to breathe. Ironically, he now selects his music from a wide variety of genres and has parked himself for the moment firmly in two: sacred choral music, and West Coast jazz.
My choice to take control of the music in the ‘public’ air space of our home also benefited our other children, who strongly disliked what he was listening to. This two-year experiment with music education turned out to be a success in every way. We actually sing together now. Don’t get me wrong. We’re not the Von Trapps. But in addition to singing as a family, all my children currently are members of a critically acclaimed choral organization, and guess who’s taking voice lessons from a prominent teacher? Yep. Mr. Rap himself.
Never, Never Give Up
You love the child who is thrashing about. No, you adore him or her. Often, we say we’d do anything for our children. When the stakes get high enough that it’s appropriate to do anything and everything, trust yourself. The phrase that kept coming into my mind even before I actually knew what my son was involved in was, “He needs nourishment.” Really. I knew in my head and heart that somehow he had been depleted; I knew it before I ever knew how or why.
Yes, you may be in for a ride. Maybe for a long haul. But that’s what love demands-that you be there day in, day out, especially when the winds pound and your child rails. C. Terry Warner, author of Bonds That Makes Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves, reminds us that wrapping our own sense of victimhood around us like a cloak distances us from the task at hand, which is to hold a constant picture in our minds of that difficult child (that difficult anyone, for that matter) as an individual worthy of love and respect. I tried to do this, often disciplining myself to picture my son as his best, most vibrant self. Seeing him that way in my mind changed the way I looked at him and even treated him. I’m convinced that that’s why he so often reached out to me in the late hours, wanting to talk. There were nights I would think, I can’t do this tonight, I can’t stay up again until 4 am. But I did. And inevitably, the son I had pictured would appear in those moments, inhabiting his truest self and learning slowly that we, his family, were not his enemies. One night last spring, when he was a stone’s throw from graduation, we were up late together working on homework. I caught him looking at me, and when I turned to meet his eyes, he said, “You know how I’m going to pay this back?” “How?” I said, curious. “By doing this for my own kids,” he said simply.
No act of generosity is ever lost on a recalcitrant child. If you’re still in the throes-and you may already have been there for a while now-strive to picture that child as you know him or her to be deep down. Half the battle of loving a seemingly unlovable child is imbedding that bright and beautiful picture both in your thoughts and in your heart, which, broken though it may be, nevertheless possesses the power to move mountains in order to restore a fullness of love.