I never felt alone again after someone else admitted to me that she didn’t know what to do.
By the time Sammi was three, I had established a work-from-home-parent setup in our new town. Her big sister was in the early years of grade school, and Sammi’s visits to the school every day by stroller brought both of us into a brand new world of other human beings. Living as we had in seclusion for the first years of her life — both due to medical necessity and then the secondhand isolation that came from it — I was unprepared for the beauty that came with speaking to other adults every single day. Many of the people I met were like me, pushing strollers with younger siblings to the playground each morning and afternoon. Our walkable public school made for a glory of impromptu social gatherings. It was only a mile from our previous home but may as well have been another country from it in terms of the effect it had on my own mental health. I was able to connect regularly with a variety of other parents for the first time.
Also for the first time, I heard complaints about their children that echoed my own. One winter afternoon when I had managed to cram Sammi into winter clothing and push her rickety stroller the four blocks to the first grade exit door where her sister would come out, another parent with a baby in a stroller and a three year old boy dragging behind her waved at me. Her daughter and my older daughter Ronni had established a mutual admiration society which would eventually lead the way to one of the best friendships of our family’s life, but truly, it began for me when this mother answered my “How’s it going?” with the following lightning bolt of connection:
“How’s it going?! I’m done. I give up. I’m taking him in to be assessed for sensory issues. I can’t take this craziness anymore.”
Her son refused to wear boots. Or a coat. Or socks. I may have the details wrong, but I heard in it the same line of edge-balancing I felt in my time alone at home with Sammi. Sammi would not get dressed. Sammi would not go to sleep. Sammi would not eat. Sammi would not leave a place we were, or enter a place we needed to be.
She was also, like my new friend’s son, breathtakingly cute.
I couldn’t see the struggle in my friend’s son’s round, gorgeous face. No one could see my blond angel for the often furious child she was at home. It was invisible and, as a result, so was my real state-of-mind most days when I entered that playground. I waved, I connected, I made plans, I shared bags of grapes. Under the surface, I was desperate not to go home to another evening of screaming tantrums that reminded me so terribly of the sleep training that nearly killed her, and me.
Sammi’s tantrums regularly included self-harm. She smashed her head, over and over, into anything she could find — hard edges, hard floors, wood tables, toys. I wondered if she was trying to finish what her crazy cardiac anatomy had started.
That friend’s admission that she, too, fought the demons in her head — and the one small demon who lived in her house — changed my whole approach. When I found that she had years of experience in mental health services and even that didn’t keep her from feeling the level of frustration I did, it cemented in me the need to reach out and have things assessed. Once again, I called in the experts. Once again, I admitted that I couldn’t fix things.
Only this time, I was not alone.
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