Subdue, Crush, Scatter
When my kids were little, we ate sandwiches and apple slices inside forts constructed of bedsheets. We went to story time at the library, especially when Miss Jane was there, because she did the silliest voices for every character. I packed picnics and pushed my little ones on park swings until their heads felt funny, or until they wanted a snack, or until they decided to take several more trips down the twisty slide.
I loved summer days most, when my school-aged kids were home, and we were all together. We passed full days at the pool, sometimes never leaving the water. Other days we camped out on lounge chairs and read books all day, occasionally dunking ourselves underwater just to cool off. One overcast afternoon, we sat on our towels and nibbled pretzels into letters, laying each one out until we had the entire alphabet. It was nothing short of a masterpiece.
I took those early years day by day, because that is how a mother must take the exhausting work of care, routine, and endless questions. Most days were lovely, but of course, there were mornings when petty sibling arguments had me counting the hours until naptime. There were afternoons when I was certain one more conversation about sharing or kindness would break me in half. There were evenings when the bedtime process pushed me to the end of myself. And there were long winters—several of them—when I swore my sanity would be lost completely if my sleep was interrupted one more time by a child announcing they’d thrown up somewhere between their bed and the bathroom.
My eldest entered high school before my youngest entered kindergarten, so I was still elbows deep in reading logs and school dress-up days when small doses of teenage troubles came my way. I’d expected depression would be part of her journey. I’d intuited other teenage difficulties, too, and when they came, I faced them, “fixed” them (adorable), then went back to my sweet spot of little-kid problems and little-kid questions. I had a high-school graduate before my second eldest started middle school, giving me license to figure—wrongly, of course—that rearing three teens for another decade would be easy-peasy. At the least, I figured very little would surprise or unsettle me.
But then the darkness came for my second eldest, and as much as she tried, she could not control the heavy thoughts and suffocating emotions. We sought professional help for months, then one day, we were through the thick of it. When the darkness came for my youngest, it came with a tighter grip, dragging my child and our family through hell for years on end. Eventually, the darkness came for my son. There were no little-kid problems left. No glimpses of light. Just hope in the darkness.
Read the hopeful ending here.
