You Never Know

About a week ago someone gave my wife and I some old photographs of my son Evan (Laurens twin brother) and Lauren when they were four months old. WOW, the first thing my wife said was “We look really tired”, ha ha, I agree.

Looking at these images brings an avalanche of memories and emotions. At this moment, with the perspective of hindsight, I see things I did not notice before, maybe because they are actually there, or perhaps because I now project the things I know onto the images. I can’t really answer that question, but I do feel, in many of Lauren’s images there is a hint of pain. Not always, in fact in a slide show of her life in images – we played it at Lauren’s Memorial Service – you can see lots of fun times, but often enough there is a sadness. You can view the 5 minute video we made for the Memorial Service here .

LaLa started her life with a bit more physical pain than some kids do. For the first six months of her life she struggled with an undiagnosed Gastroesophageal reflux problem. For this type of a reflux case it was quite severe and unlike many children, Lauren never outgrew it (over 93% of children outgrow reflux by 13 years of age). For a long time, we were told she had colic. As new parents, we just accepted that was the case. Then one holiday weekend Lauren literally stopped eating. We brought her back to the doctors yet another time, only to be told that it was colic. Thankfully a nurse we had never seen before came into the examination room, puttered around in the corner for a bit and said as she was leaving “Have you ever asked the Doctor about reflux? It might be a good idea.” When the Doctor returned, I asked him about the possibility of  Lauren’s symptoms being reflux. He didn’t seem to think it was, but performed, what seemed to me, a simple test that confirmed it indeed was Gastroesophageal reflux. Lauren was immediately put on a liquid form of Zantac and it was like a miracle took place. She started eating a lot better and seemed more pleasant. I’ve always wondered if her struggle with reflux in any way contributed to her anorexia.

Outside of the above there was never any reason why we could imagine that our daughter’s life would one day go in the direction it did. Why would we? She always enjoyed being home with our family, was active and adventurous as a kid, and lived what we felt was a fairly good life.

There was one occasion when she was a tweenager that Lauren had to have a procedure done relating to her reflux. I believe that she may have been given morphine during this procedure, but I am not sure. When I sat with her in recovery (ironically something I did a lot of in the last year of her life), I could tell she was very high from the medication. Her speech was nearly unintelligible, she wasn’t making a lot of sense, and she had a funny little distortion in her expression. I am ashamed today to confess that I laughed and thought to myself: “Boy, I hope she never ends up doing drugs because she looks kind of goofy when she is high”. The possibility of that ever happening in her life was nowhere on my radar, I am not laughing now.

Heading through her teen years Lauren began to demonstrate some behaviors that we considered to be very rude or disrespectful. Then in early High School she struggled a lot with social awkwardness. She felt she wasn’t liked, often she would not want to go into the cafeteria and eat with the other kids. She felt she didn’t fit in. At the time we thought she was struggling with the challenges that most middle school and early high school kids face. As the years unfolded, once we understood how dramatically anxiety was impacting her life, it became easy to look back and realize that some – maybe a lot – of Lauren’s inappropriate behavior may have been poor responses to trying to cope with her anxiety. One of the things that helped incredibly was coming up with a plan that allowed Lauren to respectfully pull away for a while. If she began to feel overwhelmed in a given situation, or because of what was happening around her, she could say to us “I need some time to process this, can we talk about it later?” The only requirements were: One, she had to do it respectfully, and Two, we had to revisit the discussion when she was ready, we couldn’t let it fall through the cracks. It helped a lot in our relationship, and I believe it was very beneficial for Lauren.

Relationships are not easy, they are sometimes messy and take work, especially with the kids we love so much. Most of us want the best for our children, we want them to be happy, enjoy fulfilled lives and be contributors to the world they live in. We would never do anything to intentionally hurt them.

The best hint I could give any parent today is to be open to the possibility that there may be something deeper behind an action or behavior that you are seeing in your child. Not always, we certainly don’t want to be the parents that are rushing our kids to a therapist or counselor every time they are disrespectful, or we think something is going on. My wife and I never imagined that LaLa was struggling with anxiety to the degree she was as a child and into her early teens. I am grateful that in todays atmosphere people are slowly becoming more understanding of the impact and reality of mental health issues. Schools are working at implementing programs that help kids cope with the world in which they live in healthy ways rather than slipping into one of the many forms of self-medication or disengagement that exist.

An interesting program available for parents is the Raising Resilient Youth Program, which is a multiple 2-hour session program. In some cases, it can also be hosted as a one day event. The basic premises of the program are:

• No one can control someone else’s behavior 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• We may influence children through open and honest communication, including listening, sharing, and modeling. We can also share knowledge, information, understanding, and love.
• Responsibility is learned through practice.
• Pain is a natural part of life. It is normal to feel pain.
• When a person hurts, it helps to express feelings.
• Everyone needs feedback from others to know and improve themselves.
• We teach and promote self-esteem in our children by listening to their thoughts and feelings with interest, respect, and understanding even when we disagree.
• Children respond to opportunities to contribute to their family through responsible behavior only after years of practice.
• Developing expectations and consequences is very different from setting rules and exacting punishments because the focus is on teaching and modeling responsibility rather than appearing to be retaliating for parental disappointment.
• Children need and deserve unconditional love, i.e., no misbehavior can cause the absolute loss of love, respect, nurture, support, or compassion. You can read more about this effective program here.

Raising Resilient Youth is a program worth looking into. You will find it is often hosted by Local Prevention Counsels, Schools or Community Service Agencies. You can also speak with a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Licensed Professional Counselor or Licensed Addiction Counselor, all of whom may be certified to teach the program. The best way to start is to do a search on Google in your local area to discover what options are available hosting the program.

We never know what might be happening below the surface in the lives of people around us, even those who are very close to us. Sometimes there may be more going on in our children’s lives than we think. If that is the case, I know each of us wants to be sure we are making available every possible tool to help them.

This weeks featured image is called “Battle at Cliffside Hill” by Brooke Shaden. It captures for me the reality that people around us may be hurting , even those we love deeply, and we don’t see it.