Tag: family

More Than Survival

When I was young, I didn’t have a lot of support learning how to manage big emotions. When things got hard, I would go internal, like a turtle pulling itself into its shell. I’d get anxious and scared, pulling my extremities closer to my body to make myself as small as possible until the danger passed.

That was a survival skill, but while it helped me get through the danger, it didn’t address the fear and anxiety that remained. I never learned to regulate my emotions and nervous system. As a result, I spent much of my life being an anxious, introverted, scared little boy and hiding from the world.

I developed other skills to compensate. I found the courage to join the Army. After the army, I started a career, got promoted, and led teams. I got married and started a family. That’s when those compensatory skills began to fail, and I reverted to the safety of going internal, which had worked for me. Still, it didn’t work for deepening a relationship or dealing with difficult situations together.

The stress of starting a family is real, and it was terrifying to bring another life into the world and be responsible for keeping it alive. I knew I wanted to give my son a better childhood and life than I had, which felt like a huge responsibility especially considering I had no reference or idea what that meant. It was easy to do the fun stuff with him, but the stress and anxiety brought some of those survival skills back to the surface which created distance between me and my family. But we managed.

The bigger test was when we moved to Pennsylvania. We moved across the county into a new city for a new job and, within a few months, my son also began having seizures. Within that first year of moving, we spent nearly six months in the hospital trying to get his seizures under control, dealing with side effects from his medications, behavioral issues, and the fear of losing him, all in a new environment where we had no support.

Again, those survival skills that I learned as a child came back in full force. I forced my emotions down inside my shell and focused my energy on the logistics and on getting things done, rather than dealing with the fear, anxiety, shame, and despair that were trying to make their presence known.

That could be what was necessary. I needed to keep my job, maintain our insurance, put food on the table, and create a sense of normalcy in an unstable and unnatural time. While the crisis was happening, I needed that focus and detachment. But afterward, when the danger had subsided and what was left was the rebuilding of our son, that detachment became a divide, a chasm I couldn’t reach across to connect with my family.

I’ve spent a lot of time since then to cross that divide. Therapy, self-reflection, and the hard work of being present have brought me closer to my son, and I hope they have also set an example for him on how to balance survival with connection. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it because my son deserves more than just survival.

He deserves me.

Alone Together

I don’t know where you’re going, but do you have room for one more troubled soul?

That’s a line from the Fall Out Boy song Alone Together. The title itself is an oxymoron. How can someone be both alone and together at the same time?

There are a lot of ways to interpret it. Some people hear it as being about drugs. Others think it’s about two people in the same physical space, but still feeling isolated and apart.

That idea feels familiar. During the pandemic, my family and I were together in the same house, but often living separate lives. We ate in different rooms. We passed each other in the hallway with only transactional conversations. We were together, but we were also alone.

Sometimes, that distance can feel easier. It can be exhausting to be emotionally available all the time, especially when there is no break or separation. But if that becomes the norm, it’s a dangerous road. The road to ruin, as the song puts it, “and we started at the end.”

There’s another way to look at the phrase, though. You can also be physically alone from the rest of the world, but emotionally together with someone else. That’s how I often feel with my son. We are separate from much of the world—by circumstance, by hospital stays, by the realities of epilepsy—but in that separation, we are together. Us against the world. Not really alone at all.

That’s the tension at the heart of the song. It’s also the tension I feel as a parent and caregiver. Lonely, but not alone. Together, but sometimes separate. Finding connection even in isolation.

Let’s be alone together. We can stay young forever. Scream it from the top of your lungs.

The Cleverness of Me

“Oh, the cleverness of me.” (Peter Pan, Barrie 1911)

In Peter Pan, after teaching Wendy and her brothers how to fly, Peter proudly declares, “Oh, the cleverness of me.” It’s a line that sparkles with the joy of discovery but also reveals the limits of his childlike perspective. Peter delights in his own ingenuity, yet he lacks the maturity to see the risks or responsibilities that come with it. That mix of brilliance and blindness captures both the wonder and the danger of living only in the moment.

I am constantly amazed by my son’s ability to devise clever creations. He often comes up with inventive workarounds to the challenges he faces, ideas that make me marvel at the way his brain works.

He made a custom case for his phone using cardstock and markers. He created a marble run by tracing pieces of track on paper and taping them together. He taped a “lock” on his door so that he could use the key that Santa gave him. And he finds clever ways to win the games of skill at the arcade.

But like Peter, he doesn’t always have the executive processing or life experience to recognize when those solutions carry risks or could be dangerous. He figured out how to use my wife’s devices to disable the screen time and parental controls on his devices. He installed different browsers on his computer when he was blocked from visiting inappropriate websites. And he finds interesting places to hide the evidence from a candy binge.

Eventually, though, he gets discovered and we have teachable moments as I expand the ways I need to monitor his behavior as he expands his bag of tricks. In these instances, his behavior is generally age-appropriate, although the technology makes it easier for him to have access to inappropriate content.

But it also makes it easier for him to find himself in dangerous situations. The websites he visits are also full of predators and scammers looking for teenagers to manipulate and extort, and the reality is that my son is more susceptible than a typical teenager. His emotional immaturity and challenges with executive functioning often prevent him from fully understanding the dangers associated with using his cleverness to bypass the safety measures that we put in place.

It’s a reminder of how thin the line can be between brilliance and vulnerability, and how much he still needs us to guide him.

However, I struggle with striking a balance between celebrating his cleverness and protecting him from dangerous things, and celebrating creativity when he lacks the maturity to recognize its limits. Most of the time, I lean too heavily on protectionism, and it feels as if I am constantly criticizing him or pointing out the flaws in his creativity. I tell him how his idea won’t work, or how to make it better. I don’t spend enough time encouraging him to experiment with his ideas and continue trying to figure things out.

He will need that cleverness to adapt to a world that wasn’t built for him. He will need that ingenuity to navigate challenges that most people will never have to face. My job isn’t to stifle it in the name of safety but to help him learn how to use it wisely, to guide him as he figures out when to leap and when to look first. It’s not easy to let go of protectionism, but I know that if I can nurture his creativity instead of only policing it, that cleverness—the same spark that sometimes gets him in trouble—might one day be the thing that helps him fly.