Lesson #6 - Walking, not running.

The top 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 5).

In today's fast paced world we have become so accustomed to getting everything so fast, that it takes us time to realize that not everything in life works that way too.  The instant gratification of so many technological advances has the disadvantage of muddling our mind's perspective of what and how quickly things should happen in our lives.  During these last 12 months I have had to learn to slow down the pace of my dreams and goals as I realize that nothing is worth doing in life unless I take the time to enjoy the process while I do it.  Good parenting is no exception to this rule.

Lesson #6 - Walking, not running.

Would it not be grand if with every child born, a parenting manual would be delivered by the proverbial and mystical stork too?  You  hear it all the time from just about every parent, "I wish there was a manual to this child!"  I have learned that indeed, parenting is probably one of the toughest jobs out there.  Maybe one of the reasons is because by the time we have children at least one generation has transpired in time and a whole bunch of the rules that made sense in parenting in our time, suddenly are questionable in their time.  It does not make things any easier the fact that more and more we are learning that our children are riddled with emotional and sometimes mental illnesses that until recently nobody had even named.  To make things worse, even after they name them, they truly don't understand them.  As a parent, what is it that I should do with respect to this worsening situation?  What is my responsibility and how far do I take on the challenge of understanding and being a part of healing my son's mind?  For the longest time I would spend hours on end digging through books, journals, and the news to find whatever small bit of information that I could find useful in understanding why it was that my child behaved so differently from the rest.  I had him tested over and over again with neurological assessments and counselors whom all seemed somehow willing to go along with the mechanics of discovering what might be his problem, but never taking it one step forward to truly helping him in the end.  Frustrated and confused I joined the club of desperate parents who knew their children had something that needed fixing, but nothing seemed to make that great of a difference in the end to make things better.  So eventually my responsibility turned from research seeker to researcher.  Instead of expecting to find answers in what was already out there, I decided to take matters into my own hand and find as many ways as possible to truly understand and help my son myself.

Amazingly, my own son having such a bright mind, he himself recognized that he was different.  Several times he has approached me with much more insight than I could ever learn on my own of from anyone else.  In many ways that is why I have had to respect him when he has made the conscious choice of not taking the prescribed medications that were given to him at random times.  I feel absolutely zero confidence that the few doctors that met him shortly and in less than 45 minutes decided to prescribe him some mind altering medications truly knew what they were doing.  Last Christmas I was on my way to Puerto Rico to visit my family when I encountered a longer than six hour delay at my final connecting flight.  An older looking and later discovered very intelligent gentleman that sat close to me engaged me in conversation and we talked about many things in those long hours.  Eventually the subject of our children came up and he went on to tell me how he had missed out on much of his years of being a parent because of a mental illness.  When I curiously asked what kind of treatment he was given, he quickly replied with the name of more than a dozen medications that were prescribed to him throughout the years.  Eventually he stop dropping names and he said, "none of them truly did me any good, in fact they all mostly turned me into a zombie making me miss out on most of the lives of my children."  Then he proceeded to tell me how after so many years he finally was able to find a doctor that could help him.  One by one the doctor started to slowly remove each of the medications and a little bit at a time a great haze lifted from his mind.  At the time of our conversation he said that it has already been two years since he was off of all medications and that he had never felt better in his entire life.  He was doing so well that his children where now coming back to him asking him for advice about parenting and to please help them with their own children, his grand kids.  There are definitely reasons to take medications, and I am sure that many mental illnesses can benefit greatly from these concoctions.  However, many of the individuals prescribing them truly have no business doing so without taking the time to help diagnose correctly the patients illnesses.

Why do you think I would take such an attitude about such an significant issue?  Because in the end, my job is not so much to understand the illness, my job is to understand and help my child.  Of course you might probably be compelled to say that by understanding a mental illness one should be much more equipped to understand the patient, and I will agree with that statement.  However, he is my son, not my patient.  So far I have not found a single doctor that has truly been able to help my son.  That is not to say that there is not one out there that can do so, it is just a statement of fact.  So what would make me think that if all of these so called professionals have barely found the inclination to help my son, I should take upon me as a parent the task of understanding their jobs in order to help him myself?  Nope, either because of incompetence or negligence, whichever the reason might be, none of these individuals have done their clinical duty of truly understanding the illness and how to help heal my child and I do not feel compelled to force this duty upon myself, his father.  Neither should any parent under these same circumstances.  I've read it over and over again in the messages that desperate relatives write searching for answers and help because a family member is ill and they feel all alone, abandoned by not just the rest of their relatives and friends, but also by the very same people that supposedly dedicate their lives to understanding and helping individuals with mental illnesses.  I can safely say that if I want to help my son get better, I truly need to understand him, his mental state, his way of thinking, and the things that he feels are important in his life.  Inside his mind is the answer to his healing, not inside the illness in itself.  If I simply medicate him, thinking that this will heal him, nothing has truly changed inside him, so why would he be healed?  Yes, certain medications might help him, if in fact the medical community could truly agree on what his illness is, but playing "take a pill and let's see what happens" is not his or my cup of tea.  So in the meantime, while they truly do nothing about it, I've taken the time to understand him instead.

So how does this work?  What is it that I do to understand him?  How can I help him by understanding him?  It works the same way that everything in life worthwhile works, a little bit at a time.  Instead of hoping for a quick answer that rushes us to the drugstore to find a magical pill, we walk together the path of his life which happens to have an illness inside it.  Mind you, we walk, not run!  There is no purpose in running through any ones life, what would be the point of living?  There is no hurry, we take baby steps in discovering what are the things that make him well, and which ones don't.  One day at a time I have learned to see much more to him than his illness.  In fact, as devastating as his illness might seem at times, it is only but a small part of his life.  It might touch every aspect of his personality, making him different, but not any worse than anyone else.  When I discover something beautiful inside him, I try to encourage it to grow and to flourish.  Music sets the path to so much in his personality, so I let him breath it and use it to grow as an individual.  Reading his books sometimes scare me to no end with so many subjects that are truly hard to grasp and accept, yet one at a time he devours them and surprisingly keeps what truly helps him inside and simply ignores what might hurt him in the end.  It is almost as if he had a mental liver to process the information that he consumes and rid him of toxins.  Yes, sometimes it takes him a long time to consume properly what he reads, challenging me to have to hold back and let him make his own mistakes, but what would be of the bird if when it was coming out of it's egg we intervened?  Would it not be strong enough and perish?  Indeed it would, and so I too have to allow him to walk on his own much of the journey to become well.

Ever now and then I go into my son's room to do some cleaning up and get rid of junk that should not be there in the first place.  If I take more than several weeks to return, it never fails that when I do I always find some drawing on the floor.  In fact, I don't think that I have ever found any less than a dozen drawings and that if not more lyrics to some song he is writing.  Crumbled up on the floor as if it had absolutely no value left to it I keep finding these treasures left behind from a mind that is constantly creating, evolving, changing, and most of all growing.  What originally started as non-comprehensive mumble jumble eventually began to make sense to me.  Not because he was making more sense, but because I was one day at a time learning to understand him better.  So I walk this path of love toward the healing of my child, knowing well enough that I was extremely ignorant when I started to walk with him, but now I truly can see what is inside him a little bit at a time.  Is this not better than changing him?  Would you want to turn off the music if it was such a lovely melody that it entranced you?  Would you not be compelled to understand it better when at times it seems frustrating and scary?  I do, and in fact I cannot imagine now doing it any other way.

The trick is walking, not running.  If you rush it, you won't see it...if you are running, you will pass by it all so fast that there is no way you can understand it.  I can honestly suggest to all of those parents that at this very moment are pulling their hair because their child is doing something incredibly dumb, scary, stupid, offensive, hurtful, and more to take a step back and instead of trying to put a stop to it, which most likely is impossible, take a step back and try to understand why your child is doing these things instead.  Don't cop out and compare him to any other child because this one you know very well in your mind and heart is different.  Find the reasons one at a time and you will probably will find a way to help them stop.  If you can understand them, you can help them, otherwise you will just get frustrated and tired and eventually give up.  Next time your child is being totally disrespectful instead of trying to put a stop to it, try to figure out why, what is the root of his emotion that is making him or her behave this way.  If you are able to figure it out, you are on your way to becoming a much better parent.  This does not come easy.  My instinct is to raise my voice, lift up a hand, and sometimes do and say things that I can't even understand why I would do and say in the first place.  Unfortunately that is what we might of learned from our parents because it worked with us, which did not have a mental illness.  I can tell you with 100% certainty that it will not work with a child that is wired differently.  Once you know this, why would you keep running in the wrong direction with your parenting skills.  Instead, turn around and start walking back to the root of it all and find a way to connect, to bond, and most of all to make sure they can tell that you love them regardless of how they are and their challenges.  I'm not saying it is easy, all I am saying is that it works.

Dad