Month: October 2024

Pants on Fire

“I am sure I put the chocolate bars on the shelf,” I insisted.

My wife and I stood in front of our pantry where, only hours before, I had placed two chocolate bars that I bought from the grocery store earlier that day.

“Maybe you just thought you did,” my wife quipped.

I called out to our son who was in the kitchen.

“Hey, pal, did you take the candy from this shelf?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, a little too quickly.

As we scanned the pantry, my son suddenly said, “I’ll be right back,” and headed into the basement.

I had seen that move before because I’ve done that move before. I headed down to the basement and saw him standing at the side of the couch.

As I stepped towards the couch, I offered him another opportunity to answer my question.

I could see the anguish on his face as he thought about his answer. “Yes, ” he said. “I did take them.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“Behind the middle cushion,” he answered with his head down.

I moved the cushion to find a stash of wrappers. Not only were the remains of the two candy bars in question there, but wrappers from other candy I had bought weeks ago that I had convinced myself that I hadn’t purchased when I couldn’t find them.

On the positive side, I’m thankfully not losing my mind. On the negative side, we’re noticing a pattern of lying with our son, and my wife and I are both responding based on our childhood experiences with lying. Those experiences come from two different extremes.

My wife came from a world of never lying, so our son’s lying, especially after she defended him, felt like an ultimate betrayal. She feared that the lying was a sign of his condition and that he wouldn’t be able to survive in the real world.

I came from an unsafe childhood and lying was a survival tool. I would lie to avoid dangerous consequences and to hide my overwhelming feelings of guilt and anxiety. While I logically understand that my son has a very different childhood than I did, I feared that my son was feeling unsafe in some way and that he would find himself on a similar path as me, wearing guilt and shame and anxiety like a heavy coat.

For both of us, our trauma led to fear for our son’s future, which caused our extreme responses to the situation. That obscured the reality that, during adolescence, teens go through a range of developmental changes, including a growing desire for independence, privacy, and autonomy. These factors can sometimes lead to lying or bending the truth.

In other words, lying is normal and doesn’t mean he can never enter the real world or that he’s carrying the anxiety and shame the same way I did. It means he is developing and trying to figure out his world.

Of course, there should be consequences, but they should be based on the incident and not distorted by our history or fear of the future. He doesn’t have those fears, but using language that makes him feel unfit for independence or acceptance will give them to him. Instead, consequences, yes, but open communication, clear expectations, and being a trusted source of guidance are how we help him navigate this stage of his development and come through it much better than we did.

Perceptions of Time

A nurse led us into the recovery room, where the first thing that struck me was the stark change in my son’s appearance. His familiar Bryce Harper haircut had been replaced by a closely shaved head, but it wasn’t just the missing hair. As we rounded the bed, my wife and I froze. There, across our son’s skull, were the sutured incisions, and beneath the skin, the faint, raised outlines of the leads that connected deep into his brain, extending down to the generator implanted in his chest.

We both gasped, instinctively reaching out, trying to bridge the chasm between shock and reassurance.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe nothing could have prepared me for the reality of seeing those physical marks—a visceral reminder of just how serious his condition is. It was more than jarring. It was a harsh collision with the truth that no matter how much we try to normalize life, this—his reality—is never far away.

Seeing him reminded me of the last time he was in a recovery room after having his VNS implanted. The visible signs of that surgery were less intense. However, it was still our little boy sleeping on a bed in front of us who had, only hours earlier, been sedated and opened up on an operating room table, then carefully stitched back up after inserting a few extra parts.

The DBS and the VNS were only two of the many procedures that our son has had at this hospital, the same hospital that saved his life and the same hospital that continues to look for ways to improve it. He’s had almost every type of scan, given gallons of blood, taken piles of pills, received tons of therapy, and otherwise been poked, prodded, and tested in every way possible.

After he woke up, he was moved to the neurology floor, which had been our second home for a long time. Once we settled into his room, a wave of comfort washed away the shock and anxiety of the surgery. With that comfort also came the familiar change in the perception of time.

Time on this floor doesn’t pass the way it does in the outside world. Inside these walls, it feels suspended, each moment stretching out between visits from the doctors, nurses, and support staff. We’d sit on the blue couch that doubled as a bed, gazing through the windows at the city rushing by below. We’d try to fill our time with distractions—phones, TV, bingo—but no amount of distraction makes the intervals between visits any shorter.

Minutes stretched to hours stretched to days as they monitored our son, and we waited our turn for the final scans he needed before we could go home. To our real home, not this second home. To the real world, not this isolated, supportive, comfortable world. To the place where we would now wait, again, for our son to recover and to see if the procedure and the device make a difference.

Looking at the past, at everything that happened to get us to this point, time passed in a flash. In the hospital, in our bubble of comfort and support, time stood still. Looking at the future, waiting for another answer, time stretches out for eternity.