Tag: Joy

Teenagers VS Toddlers

February 2010

Tuesday night. A full table. They’ve run out of chairs. A bar stool is pulled up for a late comer. This family dinner of friends. Laughter, as they struggle to carve steaming chunks of bread baked too late in the day. Flour, salt, yeast, water – left to their own devices. It is magic. Their jousting and joking voices trip over each other like clear water over ancient rocks.

If I could bottle the alchemy of this teen mealtime I’d decant it into two bottles. The first I would hand to the naysayers whose eyebrows migrated towards their hairlines, when I was in the mind-numbing grind of toddlerhood and they sniffed ‘Just you wait ‘til they are teenagers. Now that is hard.’

I’d offer the second bottle to a newish mother swamped in those merciless early trenches. I would say ‘Just you wait ‘til they are teenagers.’ Then I’d tell her ‘That is when it all makes sense. The guessing games of early childhood will be behind you. They will have the words. And you will have had more than a decade to discover exactly who they are.’

I’d choose a day with my teenage children over a day with them as tiny kids every time.

Babies and toddlers might be adorable… in small doses… when you can hand them back to their parent. But as the parent amid baby and toddlerhood, my joy was tinged with claustrophobia. When overwhelm threatened, you might get to leave the room. But not for long. Parenting very young children is a lot of basic problem solving (Hungry? Tired? Wet/dirty? Sick?) and accepting things you cannot change. Repeatedly for long stretches of time.

Warning young parents that everything gets worse in the teenage years is a bit like smugly telling pregnant women birthing horror stories. It doesn’t serve a purpose. And it is NOT a truth universally acknowledged by those who are living through this life stage.

Most teens sleep through the night, can go to the toilet independently, feed themselves, book many of their own appointments, and organise their social lives without parental involvement.

As my children fly towards their own adventures, I don’t feel loss. They are doing what they are meant to do. The snippets of time I get to share with them mean a lot to me. Our conversations play between the silly and the serious.

And they are comfortable enough to share their experience of childhood with me. The good, the imperfect, and the ugly traumas that were borne of challenges even their adult parents had no control over.

They articulate things I was deaf to in the early years. When I was so rigidly set on giving them a great childhood that I was unable to accept that sometimes my best would not be good enough for them. When I couldn’t see that putting in the effort and not intentionally harming them would have to be good enough at the time.

Some of those days remind me of managing a catastrophic abdominal wound. One with organs protruding through ragged edges, open to infection. A good surgeon won’t immediately stuff everything back in and neatly stitch the skin back over the disaster. They will flush everything, control the bleeding, and then they will pack it all with laparotomy sponges. They will dress the wound but leave the abdomen open. It won’t be pretty, but it will be good enough at the time. They will come back when the patient is less critical, when dead tissue can be excised, when it is clean enough to close safely. Their patient may end up with a big scar, but they will have survived.

For me early parenthood was complicated. It included not making it home with my first baby until she was four months old. Post-natal psychosis followed by the beginnings of bipolar 1 disorder meant we spent this time in the mother baby unit of a psychiatric hospital. Since then, bipolar episodes have landed me in hospital for weeks or months every 2-3 years.

Our family is open about mental illness. I have excellent insight into my symptom pattern. We have always had supportive family and friends to help during my hospital stays. My access to good mental health care means that in between episodes my mental health is better than that of many parents without a diagnosis.

I used to think – naively – that doing all of these ‘right things’ meant my children would make it through maybe with skinned knees but never wounds nasty enough to pack at the time and close later.

Yet here I am. At times confronted by the scar tissue my teenagers show me. But I am also deeply grateful to be in a season when they are old enough to have the words and the trust in me to speak their truth.

They bombard me with joy, and noise, and friends around for an impromptu dinner on a Tuesday. They head into the world and return at odd hours. And my heavily medicated sleep is no longer broken by the cries of babies demanding everything of me all of the time.

If you enjoyed this post, you can find more of my writing at the links below:

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Gentle Shoots Of Hope

I entered this year softly. Sparkling into it from one minute to the next, without expectation. But finding joy on the other side of the second hand.

I could now spend a paragraph on the 2020/2021 disclaimer for happiness, the guilty acknowledgement of everyone who may be suffering, that feels as though it has become mandatory whenever you write or talk about anything remotely good happening to you in pandemic times.

But I won’t, because in this moment it feels disingenuous. The events of the last couple of years may have thrown it into sharper relief, but virus or not there have always been people who have it worse than me and those who have it better.

So – no disclaimers. We’ve all had challenges from the dung heap of life thrown at us. I don’t believe bad things happen for a reason. But I do believe that it is the rubbish times that make magic moments shine when we happen upon them.

I spent New Year’s Eve last year (2020/2021) in hospital – just one day in a holiday package that started with an admission on Boxing Day. I didn’t feel well enough for people. Including my husband and children. Dinner came with a serve of ‘seasonal vegetables’ leached of colour and boiled into malodourous oblivion. Dessert was my nightly mouthful of dry medications washed down with tepid water. Long before midnight I was obliterated by that medication and happy to be so. Joy was not part of the equation.

When it came to thinking about New Year’s Eve plans for last year, I had only recently discharged from hospital after another Bipolar flare. A brief 3 week admission starting in late October that bled well into November.

I juggled the idea of having friends join us for what is a special evening for me.

From the ages of six to thirteen I grew up in Germany, in a culture that celebrates New Year’s Eve joyfully and raucously. I remember towers of champagne glasses filled and overflowing with bubbles from the top tier down. There was music and animated conversation, which gave way to the fireworks at midnight. People bought their fireworks from the supermarket and let them rip into the newborn year from their snowy backyards.

On New Year’s Eve 2000 I introduced my (then new) husband Michael to this way of celebrating. We were living in the UK, but had travelled back to Germany for the holidays. We spent that New Year’s Eve with Sandra, one of my closest friends, and Thomas – her partner, and their friends. We had raclette, lots of drinks, and laughed so hard. Just before midnight, we climbed into our coats, boots, hats, scarves, and gloves and walked, stumbling ever so slightly, down to the beautiful lake Sandra and I had spent childhood summers swimming in and childhood winters ice skating on. It was freezing. Too cold to feel our faces. The whole village was there. The air smelt of nothing but fireworks. We were in our twenties and euphoric.

Thomas died barely six weeks ago. The loss of someone we loved has been compounded for me because I can’t hug his wife – my lifelong friend whose hand I used to hold as we jumped into a New Year.

New Year’s Eve in Australia is different. It is the hot afterthought to a showy Christmas. The vibe around New Years for many Australians is ‘Meh – can’t be bothered.’ or it’s a night of heavy drinking that culminates in a headache on New Year’s morning and a set of resolutions, which won’t last past January.

And yet I celebrate the ending and beginning of years…when I can. In part it is fuelled by nostalgia. It is also because I have learnt to celebrate things while I can, because there will be times when I have no choice whether I get to celebrate or not. There are times when I am too unwell. Times when it’s overboiled vegetables instead of home cooking.

Not celebrating can also be a missed opportunity for making memories. Memories of joyous hours, which become part of everyone’s narrative. Memories that become unspeakably precious in hindsight when we have lost those we shared them with.

And so, I sent out some invitations and had a beautiful night.

There were candles and sparklers and laughter across an increasingly messy tablecloth as the night moved on. We ate pistachio baclava with mint and rosewater syrup and white peach sorbet for dessert.

By 2 am the house was buzzing. I had picked up my older child and two of their friends from another party to join the other couple of kids already at home for a sleepover. In the early hours of this New Year my house was steeped in happiness.

For me, 2022 has started with love and energy, and out of the losses and difficulties of the previous year I sense gentle shoots of hope are emerging.

One of the positives of 2021 was that my memoir Abductions From My Beautiful Life was published. For an excerpt and more info click here Book

You may like to check out how some of my other years have gone in these posts:

2020 Ends In Hospital

Covid Lockdown In A Psychiatric Hospital

2018 – The Year I:

Deciding To Hope

To hope or not to hope?

In one week my immediate family and I are leaving for a holiday on Heron Island. That was a difficult sentence to commit to. Not the sentence, just one word.

‘Are’

The certainty inherent in those three letters. Articulating it feels like I am going to jinx it, like I will alter the course of history, even though I know that’s impossible.

This is our third attempt at this holiday. The first was over Easter 2021. I almost needn’t follow that up with any explanation. To use a recently much reworked cliché -everyone was in the same boat…or in our case not in the boat bound for our holiday destination.

It was a time of global holiday cancellations. We were all still invigorated by the adrenaline of the early days of a pandemic many believed could be conquered and left behind.

We rebooked our holiday for Easter this year. But in a twist of acutely painful timing our city was locked down. Ironically only for 3 days. But they were the exact 3 days we were meant to travel to Heron Island.

By the time that little lockdown ended, everyone else was off to enjoy their Easter camping trips. We were left feeling slapped, as though we had been singled out by the universe to miss out on our holiday.

But we rebooked again. For next week. Knowing it might not eventuate this time either.

And about three weeks ago doom crept into the family. We began to censor ourselves and each other. Snapping ‘If it happens!’ if anyone dared mention anything to do with the holiday. We shot each other down with sarcasm and repressed feelings as though expressing any plans, hope or joy associated with this holiday would save us the disappointment if it had to be cancelled again.

So, just under three weeks ago our family decided – that instead of clenching everything, and white knuckling it through this will-we-wont-we time, we would allow ourselves to feel the joyful anticipation of this holiday.

We began to talk about what snacks we’d take on the car trip. What we were looking forward to most. We wondered if we would see clown fish. We started making packing lists.

Don’t misunderstand me. This is not about mindlessly Pollyanna-ing the reality we live in. All four of us are abundantly aware that things can look like they are going ahead one day only to have them snatched away in a minute.

While it is true that right now we have no control over whether our holidays or special events will be cancelled at the last minute – it is also true that we never did, we just weren’t as acutely aware of it.

But we can choose how we feel in the lead up to planned events. We can choose to anticipate disappointment or anticipate joy. Whether it ends up being disappointment or joy is almost irrelevant because it isn’t about the eventual outcome. It is about how we feel right now.

We can choose to scrunch ourselves into a ball of anxious negativity. But for what? Being able to say ‘See I told you it would be cancelled’ if it is cancelled? Like a sort of sick Schadenfreude directed at ourselves.

Or we can choose a more relaxed, positive attitude that coexists with the knowledge that it may be cancelled, but that the anticipation is pleasant. If the holiday goes ahead we will have had a much nicer lead up to it, than having to spend the first few days unclenching from the negativity.

If it doesn’t happen, we’ll be disappointed, but we won’t have wrecked the preceding few weeks with dread.

Choosing to have low expectations in an attempt to avoid disappointment is not only flawed, but in these times of immense uncertainty it doesn’t serve us well. It robs us of joy. The brave thing to do is hope in the face of uncertainty regardless of whether that hope ever grows into reality.

That said, I have two disclaimers for the hope approach.

The first is that the ability to conjure hope relies on reasonable mental health. Someone experiencing symptoms of mental illness, especially those featuring depression or anxiety will no more be able to think themselves into hope than a diabetic can think their blood glucose levels into the correct range. They will need the right treatment for them before hope can become a choice again.

The second is that if you are attempting this with children, they need to be old enough/emotionally mature enough to understand that the hope does not guarantee the holiday.

For today, everyone in my family is well enough to hope that by mid next week we will get to see those clown fish and soak in the endless blues of the sky and the ocean surrounding our tiny Island destination.

You may also like to check out:

On Uncertainty

Covid Year 2: Timing Your Perspective

Razor Blades In Mud: Laziness Or Depression?