Today is World Suicide Prevention Day

This week is National Suicide Prevention Week. Today is National Suicide Prevention Day. I'm not sure how I feel about these kinds of days when we should be kind and vigilant and aware everyday. I don't know how I feel because a day, a week is not enough. Nothing seems like enough. But it's something, right? And we need reminders. We need wind in our sails. We need momentum. So these kinds of days are good for something, right?

I decided this morning that if I wait until my thoughts on this are formed well enough, lined up neatly enough, settled and clear enough, to write something direct, tight, and lovely; I will never write anything. So, these are thoughts as they fall on the keyboard.

Two years ago, around this time, my teenagers felt their second loss of a peer to suicide. We did what we could to walk them through the complex thoughts and feelings, the grief, loss, anger. We told them that no matter what, that there is nothing that they couldn't come to us with. We told them that there is no shame in this family. We told them that we would walk them through any darkness they encountered. We told them to come to us.

A year and a half ago, my teenage daughter called me into her room. It was the day after Valentine's Day, the day after a great dinner with their friends, the day after the last words I said to them as I went up the stairs were, "It's really hard to be a parent. Sometimes I have no idea what to do or say,  but I'm learning. I'm so lucky to have you. Thank you, for teaching me. Thank you, for making this easier than it could be." They smiled, shrugged, called me silly, and were clearly embarrassed that I'd said this in front of their friends. I told them I loved them, and went to bed.

Anyway, she called me into her room and said, crying, "Mama, I'm not okay." I was relieved that she was talking to me. I'd been worried. I hinted, but never asked directly how she was, never pushed in, tried to give her space to be herself. She just kept saying, "Mama, I'm not okay." She looked terrified. My immediate thoughts went to pregnancy. She had the same boyfriend for over a year, and I didn't think they were having sex, but what else could have her so riled up? I asked her what was wrong. She just kept repeating herself. I told her I couldn't help her unless she let me know what was wrong. Then she told me. She had purposely overdosed, an attempt to leave us, and I would find out later that this was not an act of momentary desperation, but part of a plan she'd had for some time.

Enter ambulance, counseling, surviving, and new eyes for all of us regarding our family, depression, and suicide. She was depressed. I thought I knew what depression looked like. I'd seen it plenty of times before in friends, in family, in co-workers. We have mental health issues coming down like rain in our family, so I was being vigilant. I thought I was being vigilant. For her, depression looks like a girl who is generally pleasant, funny, and engaged. Then exhausted from the effort. This is what depression looked like: an easy kid, generally pleasant, straight A's, good friends, healthy relationships, cross country practice every day after school, a good diet, exercise, journaling about life, making lists of things to be happy about and grateful for, a loving and supportive family, ... she was doing everything right. None of it was enough to keep her hanging on.

I thank all that's good and holy, every single day, for her last minute choice to stay with us. I'd like to say that I learned so much in the last year and a half and that there it's been a path of sunshine and roses and each day getting brighter than the day before. It hasn't been that way. Healing happens. Good days outnumber bad days. Absolute panic still sometimes set when she decided to sleep in or she starts spending a lot of time alone.

Now, I follow her -- I push in. I don't worry that I'm being a pushy mom. I need to be a pushy mom. She talks to us. She checks in. We check in. We are all working it out, and things are a lot better. Before, the funny thing is that she seemed so perfect, so happy, but it was a lie. Now, that she's getting the help and support she needs, she's kind of a little shit. haha. She is moody, funny, loud, angry, sad, happy -- typically stormy. She isn't the "perfect kid" on the outside that is suffering profoundly on the inside anymore. She is the perfectly perfect typical mess of teenager, slashing and skipping and stumbling and sashaying her way toward adulthood.

When she stumbles I want to catch her -- every time. But I know I won't. I know I can't. So it's incumbent on me to teach her to catch herself, to do what I can to build resiliency, to assure her every moment of every day that she is never a burden. To force her out of her comfort zone and comfort her through it.

She hates counseling. She has to go. She makes progress. She hates making safety plans, but uses them. We are moving, inch by inch.

I tell her that there is no shame here. And there isn't.

I think that's my little post for Suicide Prevention Day. There is no easy fix. We will not always win these battles. But maybe we can work toward erasing the shame.

I am terrified to post this. It's private information. It's so culturally shameful that I worry about my reputation among my friends, peers, co-workers, ... But see, that's the problem. That's what keeps us from talking about it. That's what kept her from telling us. We could assure her all day long that there is no shame in our home, but she didn't want to worry us. She was embarrassed. She was actively hiding how she felt.

She told us while she was in the hospital that there was nothing we could have done. That she was hiding it. That she thought she had it under control. That she never thought it would go that far. I'm going to say that again. She thought she had it under control. She never thought it would go that far. She didn't want to bother us with it. She was embarrassed.

We need to be willing to be bothered.
We need to be willing to bother the people we love by being concerned.
We need to let go of shame.
We need to tell our truths, so others are emboldened to do the same.

There is no magical or simple solution to the complex problems that lead to suicide. I'm thankful every day for the two people in my immediate family that have survived their attempts. I'm thankful I survived mine, or the world would have six fewer amazing children in it. We need to be watchful, we need to look after each other and ourselves.

Here are some nifty links:

Stay Here with Me -- this site has a lot of personal stories. It's pretty effin' inspiring.

The Madness Vase -- Andrea Gibson -- this poem, and a lot of prayer and light from friends and family, and more and more, helped us through our really rough patches. I have cried more tears and blown more tissues full of grief-stuff while watching this poem than just about any other video on this subject.

Suicide prevention -- this is a good link -- good stuff.

Hey, please, please, hang on. You are so amazing. The world needs you. Always.

I painted my bathroom!

So Mondays are my project and improving my little space and life days. Yesterday, I painted the bathroom. I don't have a before picture, but these are more like a during pictures as I'm not finished yet.

You can't really tell exactly what I did with the paint here, but I mixed grey and white as I went, so it's really streaky looking. I did that on purpose because, at least in this space, and during this time in my life, I'm really enjoying an aesthetic that reveals the human, reveals the work, shows the brush and roller marks. I am going to paint the cabinets green and then do like a thin whitewash over them.

But yeah, look at that! I did something. I'm moving forward! Sometimes by millimeters, sometimes by miles, this time by a few yards. I am often very afraid to get stuff done because I feel like I haven't planned enough or done enough research and fear that I will mess it up, and everyone will hate it... down the rabbit hole I go, so this new idea of embracing the human in the work we do is good for me.

So, I just jumped in, one two three go! Slapped a bunch of paint on the wall, so there would be no turning back.

I'm really happy with how it turned out. I want to put the kids to work making shadow boxes, one for each of them, and hanging them up in the bare wall that faces the mirror. That way they can put trinkets from vacations or things that make them happy in them, shells, rocks, dinosaurs, whatever. That way, they have something happy greeting them in the morning when they are getting ready each day and when they make pit stops throughout the day.

Also, they can change them whenever they want, so I can kind of see their evolving interests and aesthetics.

I'm excited!

See my clean (thanks Zach!) and painted bathroom! Woooo hooooo!

And I didn't buy paint, just experimented with what I had around the house, so that makes me happy.

Organizing, Moving Forward

The last five years have consisted of mostly small, sometimes medium sized, tweaks in trajectory. They have been exhausting. Our family has grown from a state of unsustainably fucked up -- spiraling out of control -- to extremely bumpy and unpredictable, to very very emotionally unhealthy with no idea how to begin to heal, to the slow beginnings of a healing process, to focused on healing but little else, to just squeaking by, to disconnected but working toward connecting, to sad and angry but loving the heck out of each other in our own admittedly awkward ways, to beginning to look at the financial devastation that the storms wrought on us and realizing we were deeeeeeep underwater, to finding the surface and not seeing a shoreline, to seeing the shore but being simply incapable of moving toward it, to finally moving by inches toward a distant notion of stability,...

I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I say things have been more challenging than I ever imagined they would be. 

This semester, a brilliant change has finally happened. The wee ones, my baby boys, are no longer "babies," and my oldest three are more than capable of managing a typical, or even a tumultuous night, on their own. This change in the competence and responsibility of the kids has allowed me to go back to my old schedule of working two twelve hour days and one day in my office while they are in school, so I will have a couple of weekdays off from work regularly for the first time in five years. This is significant because before this, I worked all day when they were in school and on the weekends until lunch time, leaving me no time at all when I was neither at work in the classroom or at home tending the tribe. No days for personal catching up or planning. So things repairing a broken wall and painting a room were epic undertakings rather than day projects that could be completed while they were at school. Things like sitting down with my bills and calling creditors to work things out were virtually impossible undertakings of trying to talk over the transition of children coming home from school and needing me for a million things, like signing papers, helping with homework, preparing snacks... so I would have to try to talk to financial folks in the midst of kid chaos or run out of time because banks close by the time life settles down. This problem was exacerbated by my squishy-spined inability to discipline the kids well.

Discipline is another arena in which we have all be growing. Five years ago, when the kids' dad split, our children and I had been living in a culture of fear and shame for nearly a decade. They had grown up in it. Frankly, so had their father and I, so as my therapist says when the waves of guilt start to pull me under, "how could it have been any different" when neither of these children's parents had a model for anything else. So when their dad took off, I let too much slide, became an overly permissive mother who didn't provide enough structure. Books and blogs and friends and doctors have helped firm up my skills there, and I now am capable of doing things like making them clean or complete homework without begging, giving them too much wiggle room, and ultimately giving up and doing the chores myself or letting them slide with unfinished or half-assed homework. I can do that stuff now. I'm even good at it. Now, to be consistent. There is still so much work to be done, but as I see my children responding positively to firm yet loving discipline and more structure (though there are a hell of a lot of growing pains) I am fortified. 

Anyway, these are the things I'm working on (in no particular order):

• a better schedule and more structure around here
• better discipline
• getting out of debt
• restoring my house
• building community with my friends
• writing

That's where my little blog comes in. Now that I will have more of a routine, I plan to update it. I'm not sure if it will be of any interest or benefit to anyone other than me (to organize my life and chart my progress) and it will not attempt to be anything like an "advice" thing. It's more of a place where I can watch changes, and maybe my family that's far away and maybe a handful of my friends who have been amazingly supportive can see positive results. At best, maybe it can be a site where people watch our little tribe grow and get some ideas and some empathy from and for people who are just everyday folks trying to get by in some kind of crazy circumstances. 

I'm thinking that I'll probably update it on Mondays and Fridays, so today is an anomaly. I just had a little time and decided on writing out this little sketch/plan for how I'd like to organize my weeks:

Mondays -- deal with finances, small projects at home, maintain the house.

Tuesdays -- work all darn day

Wednesdays -- work all darn day, catch up at home

Thursdays -- work all darn day

Fridays -- work on writing, trying to produce, organize, and publish work -- go on adventures with the family when they get home from school.

Saturdays -- work in the morning, chill in the afternoon, work on outside of the house stuff OR go on adventures with the family.

Sundays -- work in the morning, fully prep the family for the week, including making sure we are stocked on everything (groceries, school and art supplies, clean clothes...). Sundays will be stage the week days. 

So, stay tuned on Friday for what my family adventure plan is and what kind of writing progress I'm making. 

Kids at Festivals

Comfest is this weekend, and I was just thinking of making a little post on a social media site about how I wish someone had given me some advice on how to "festival" with kids a long time ago. Then, I remembered that I have this blog, so I thought I'd write it here and then link it. We'll see how it goes.

I'm about as far from a Pineterest mom as it gets, but I manage to have a good time with our little tribe at festivals (it took a lot of miserable outings to figure these little things out).

Some stuff that works for us:

Before we leave the house:.

• I remind them "no touching ANY dogs, even if they are nice and the owners say it's ok. Leave them alone. They are overstimulated."
• I remind them to stay with me -- all the time. "If you wander off, we will leave -- even if we just arrived, we will leave."
• I remind them that if they DO get lost, they are to find the volunteer booth and / or a family with babies to help them. (When we get there, we will decide on a meeting place). If they get lost, they need to get to it and don't move. "You stay in one place. We will be looking for you. Let us find you."
• I explain the budget.
• I explain how the day will go.
• I assign each little kid to a big kid "buddy" (or remind them who their buddies are and give them a chance to switch if they want). After buddies are established, there is no switching during the day. They are responsible for each other. If one gets into mischief, both have consequences. 
• We work together to pack our picnic stuff and other supplies.
• We decide the things that everyone really wants to see. 
• We commit to the idea that each person will see at least one thing they have really been looking forward to. E.g. A wants meat on a stick; Gogo wants to play the drums; Fluff wants to dance to a specific band; Supah wants to see if anyone has cool phone covers; Lulu wants her face painted; Lali wants to make sand art... we PLAN this stuff.
• I quiz them about what we just went over. 
• We keep our expectations for the day realistic. It's never gonna be like the movies or like nostalgia makes us think it once was.

Once we're there:

I am willing to pay for decent parking (if that's an option)
I'm cheap. Like really cheap. But after a day in hot sun, epic kid-meltdowns on a long walk back to a vehicle usually result in lugging a sweaty child on my hip or back while forcing an older child to carry our cooler or whatever while everyone sweats and moans as they limp the lengthy distance to our van. I'm willing to spend up to 10 dollars (usually I can find parking for five) to park close enough to avoid sweaty, limping, squalling kids.

If decent parking is not an option, I could maybe use public transportation or a shuttle or something. 
Bigger festivals in smaller cities usually have a shuttle service. I use the heck out of that stuff. Comfest, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't, but the public transportation on High St. is relatively predictable. Park in a Park and Ride lot somewhere, and ride in. The only real problem with buses and shuttles is that I can't bring a wagon, and I kind of feel like a wagon is reeeeeeally important. Maybe, one of those wheely shopping things would work if public transportation is the only option. Hmmmm. Yeah, probably, but you can't put kids in it. 

Bring a Wagon
Wagons are amazing. My youngest kids are like 8 and 9 now, so they don't really ride in it anymore, but when they were little, the wagon was perfect because I could fill it with supplies for the day, and the kids could pull it when they were still fresh and excited for the day. Then as we used our supplies throughout the day, we emptied the wagon, making room for sweaty, tired wee ones to be carried back to the van. Also, wagons are a good way to contain them if they get too rambunctious or wandery.

Supplies / Budget
I have six kids. If I buy each of them a darn lemonade and a pretzel, I've already spent as much as I spend on a midweek run to the grocery. A whole day's worth of festival food is not even remotely possible on my budget. We do only a couple festivals a year, so I can kind of save for them. I give each kid a set amount of money to spend as they want. I help them make choices, like consult, but if they decide they want to spend their whole budget on a cool hat, that's fine. If they decide to spend it on funnel cakes, also fine. I pack sandwiches, tons of fruit, cups, several pitchers of lemonade or tea, and some kind of sweet treat. So we have plenty of food, enough to eat and enough to share. By the end of the day, the very full wagon is usually empty except for the containers we brought. 

Also, I bring a big blanket, hand sanitizer, changes of clothes (when I remember), sunblock, a long scarf (though maybe some kind of rope or something would do) and paper towels. They are all important.

• big blanket - to stake my claim on some ground, set up camp, have picnic food...
• hand sanitizer -- because festivals can be gross and the porta-potties can be even grosser.
• change of clothes -- kids spill stuff, pee themselves, roll in dirt... whatever. Some adults do too. If someone messes up their clothes, I'm always tempted to just buy them some, rather than let them walk around with blueberry goo on their shorts or something. If I bring a change of clothes, I save money.
• Sunblock -- We almost always stay longer than we'd planned. Sunblock needs to be reapplied. Also, I can be the hero of my pink shouldered friends who forgot or didn't realize that the sun burns us for crying out loud. ("Here, have some fruit and some tea, and some sunblock!")
• A long scarf -- I wear them a LOT because I can take them off and make them a little rope for all the kids to hang on to in big crowds, I can put them over my head or someone else's to give us a break from the sun, I can carry stuff in it, I can wipe up a messy face with it, I can tie it on a kid's wrist if that kid is being too wandery, I can use it to measure boundaries for my older kids when we are watching a band or other entertainer. "Our space is as far as my scarf stretches in front of me. Here, grab it and walk. Notice where you are? Don't go beyond there."
• Paper towels -- because mess, because scrapes and scratches, because sometimes potties are out of tp. 

Home base

I find a place that looks like it might be shady all day and leave my blanket there. I have never had a blanket stolen -- rained on, yes -- stolen, no. But obviously, I use blankets I don't mind parting with. I stake a claim on some ground and leave that blanket there all day. We return to it frequently. We don't just wander the festival all day. Having a little home base gives the kids a little port in a sea of stimulation. A place that is away from loud stages and easy to find is pretty ideal. I usually find one. We go back to our little home base frequently. In fact, we often spend about half of our time there. We see what one person wanted to see, take a potty break, and return to homebase for some fruit and drinks. There, we can talk about what we've done so far and what we plan to do next. Breaks are important for all of us, but especially for the little ones. If we take frequent breaks and are intentional and deliberate with how we spend our day, everyone really appreciates what we see and do, and the kids aren't freaking out over being dragged from thing to thing.

Wandering

Wandering and browsing is really awesome and relaxing for adults, but my kids have a pretty low threshold for it. I have found that the following two strategies (both of which demand that I set my own way of doing things aside and be willing to sacrifice a little to accommodate them and interact with them) have helped them build and endurance for browsing and wandering:

• Browse in bursts -- They cannot handle all darn day! They can't. So I can either have a miserable time while forcing them to have a miserable time while I adhere to some idealized pattern of wandering established in my adolescence, or we can all get closer to enjoying the day by my simple willingness to accept that they do not have the patience for wandering from one thing that doesn't interest them to another thing that doesn't interest them. Soooooo, instead of trying to do all my wandering at once, I chunk it out and try to be attentive as I can to when they start to struggle, so I can tell them that they are doing a great job and after we look at this "one more thing," we'll head back to homebase. Then I HONOR that promise and go have some fruit or crackers or something. Then we can head out again in a little while. See, that "one more thing" increases their attentiveness and endurance and gives them a tangible end to this chunk of time in their lives. If they have no sense of when this wandering around will end, it will feel endless. They will whine. I will get angry. We will establish a pattern of "browsing means misery." It will never be fun.
• I let them lead me -- If we are going to walk around several times, for like 20 - 45 minutes each time, why not let them take the lead? It gives us all empathy for each other. And it lets me see what they are actually interested in, how they make choices, how they manage crowds, etc. (here's another moment when my nifty scarf comes in handy).

Going home-

I use that wagon for darn sure!

Also, even though I always promise myself that I'll make dinner, I'm always wiped out. I used to take them to fast food or something (because that was all I had money left over for), but now, I take them to a small grocery store and give them each like five dollars. They then decide if they want to pool their funds with one or more of their siblings or if they want to buy five dollars worth of food on their own. Most times, they pool money and make choices together. After they check out, we have a picnic at the tables in front of the store. THAT simple. Cheaper than sit down, only a little more than fast food, and healthy for them in like a million ways. 

I try (with a good, not great, success rate) to get them home with enough time to get settled in, check out any new stuff they got at the festival, chill out and feel like they are at home before I put them to bed. I find if I put them straight to bed, sleep comes slowly to them and they are cranky the next day. Time to decompress and process their day is important.

That last sentence, "time to decompress and process their day is important" is probably the controlling idea of this little writing exercise, but also, more and more, it is becoming a governing factor in my parenting and in my life. Just like everything, we get more from these days if we slow down, take in fewer things, but experience them more fully. 

Yeah, mostly, for me and my little tribe, successful "festivaling" is about slowing down or stopping frequently, looking around, and naming our experiences. Probably the same for successful "lifing."

Surviving

Briefly, last year, kid 2 nearly died. The last few weeks have been about surviving the anniversary of trauma.

Best strategy

Questions (e.g.) -- what color is her hair? Where is she right now? Where is her bed?...

Answers (e.g.) --  brown, at work, in the basement where she moved her room...

Response to answer: Well then, logic would dictate that she survived and she isn't about to die.

The week went fairly smoothly.

More later.

Jumping Back in.

So, I was shopping in Whole Foods, when one of the friendly folks there came up to me and started teasing me about how I am always in there. It's one of the very few places I shop and pretty much where I get most of my staples. Part of the reason for that is geography. It's the closest store to my house. A bigger part of the reason is that it's pretty easy to find what I'm looking for there. More minor (but super important to me) reasons include that it's smaller than the nearest Giant Eagle, Kroger, and Wal Mart and the smallness along with the colors and organization of the store makes it less stimulating to me.

Anyway, my colleague told me that I should blog about how I can feed my little tribe and stuff and shop there because people are always complaining about how expensive it is. And I was like, hmmmmm, maybe I should write some stuff about how I make things work. So, I'm back at it.