Storm Clouds

They all start here! Eager to learn and grow, filled with joy, curiosity, delight, adventure, openness, trusting, happiness, and wonder.

As often happens – always happens – the storm clouds of life come, and based on temperament, life experience, personality, DNA and who we are as human beings, every person responds differently to the pressure life and their experience puts on them.
A well-known addiction researcher/specialist, Gabor Mate, says it this way in his book “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction”. “All children (all people) have vaying degrees of sensitivity to life and the world around them. By that he does not mean they are too sensitive but rather that the impact of the environment and life around them has a greater effect on them. That impact may be the regular day to day decisions, challenges, and obstacles we all face, all the way up to the extreme trauma that, sadly, too many children and people find themselves in today. All of us respond based on how much impact our sensitivity can handle. There is no right or wrong regarding this.

For our beautiful daughter Lauren, life was not always easy. As a child she went misdiagnosed for severe reflux for many months. Actually, unlike most children, she never outgrew it. We could not understand why she had such difficulty eating. We tried every kind of formula we could think of with minimal effectiveness. We were often told that she was just colicky until one Memorial Day weekend she decided to stop eating. In a very unusual series of events someone suggested to us that we ask our doctor about the possibility of reflux. When we did a simple test was initiated and LaLa (Lauren) was put on Xantac, almost instantly she started eating well and, in many ways, became a happier baby. You can read the full story in the post “You Never Know”.

As Lauren grew and she headed into middle school, dark clouds began closing in on her. The clouds had horrible names: Anxiety – Anorexia – Addiction. They did not move in all at once but rather slowly over a period of several years.

In middle school she began to struggle a great deal with social anxiety. As parents we thought this was the normal stuff kids struggled with in finding their place and building confidence, but for LaLa it was more. Often, we would try to encourage her, she would respond with statements like, “Your supposed to say that your my parents.”. That statement was so untrue, she was all the things we tried to say, “You are beautiful, smart, well liked”, (several girls from her school shared with us how LaLa went out of her way to make them feel welcome when they came to the school as a new student) she just could not “hear” it.

There was no handbook for this, as her loving parents we were in many ways trying to figure it out. When the symptoms of the anxiety started showing up, we did not realize what was happening. I think Lauren would sometimes be overwhelmed by intense conversation, lots of background activity, or just need a break. This became very obvious as she began using heroin. Of course, in the beginning, she did not know what this was or how to respond, consequently, many of her words and actions would be rude or disrespectful, which would cause us to react to those actions. When we learned that a lot of it was her not being able to cope with the anxiety it helped us respond differently.

Nineth and tenth grade rolled along, and our children were moving from being children to young adults. For Lauren, a lot of this centered around the “Crown” she had been bestowed upon her in the school community. She was the most petite (and in my mind beautiful) girl in the school. As girls started looking to Junior and Senior Prom/Banquet events how they would look in their beautiful gowns became important to them, something I never knew about, it became an obsession for LaLa. As a result, she began restricting her eating. Laurens doctors had always told us “Let her eat whatever she wants, which we did, but now her diet started changing, she announced that she wanted to be vegan or highlight some other big change in her diet, in the end she was just trying to find ways to cut back on her eating. What she did not realize was the cut back on calories was wreaking havoc in her nutrient starved brain. Her eating morphed into full blown anorexia. Her life became controlled by a constant stream of numbers through her mind.

This image by Chris Sampson depicts his perception of anorexia, you can read more about him in the post “I Never Expected That”. As always, her anxiety was growing, but now it was reaching barely manageable proportions as she hit senior year in high school.

Then, halfway through Lala’s senior year in high school, the hurricane came into her life, it was called heroin! You can watch a 5-minute video about LaLa’s path to addiction here. Someone asked her if she wanted to try heroin at a party and she said yes, it was a choice I know she regretted. As always happens to people that combine a mental health issue with a drug like heroin, it initially helped. Lauren, I am certain discovered that “Hey when I do the heroin, I do not have to deal with the raging anxiety” but that never lasts, soon the monster turns on you. Ultimately it crushed her. In a PM to a friend, the last week of her life, Lauren told her about her addiction and said this “Once I started doing heroin, nothing else mattered”.

When you lose a child to a senseless yet changeable event like an overdose, you can not help but constantly second guess everything you did: “Was I too hard?” “Did I do things that weren’t helping?” “Why did I miss so much”, and on and on and on. Many of those questions I can not answer, but I can say my wife, my son, and myself did everything we could to help LaLa move toward recovery with what we knew. Since then I know we all have discovered things that would have helped, we simply did not know them then, but you can!

They all start here, shining bright and looking to the future! Part of our job is helping them realize dark clouds, sometimes very dark, come and help them find ways to effectively manage life.

This weeks featured image is by Anna Bruce entitled “Running from the Storm”.