Getting through a hard time

(facing it instead of running away)

The past few weeks in my house have reminded me of the early days of covid. Our daughter is going through some kind of neurodivergent burnout  and she hasn’t wanted to leave the house. “Hasn’t wanted” is putting it mildly - she expresses her desire to stay home in more certain terms. My wife goes to work, and I stay home with our daughter (ostensibly working from home). I haven’t been able to run simple errands, go to in-person meetings in the mornings, or to meet friends for coffee. I love being home - I am generally happy at home - but there is something about not being able to leave that takes away the serenity and starts to feel confining. That confined feeling is what reminds me of those early days of covid. That, and when my daughter is home all day, and I’m trying to work, things tend to get a little chaotic. 

Whatever my daughter is going through is keeping her in bed, glued to the iPad, watching hours of youtube and playing Minecraft, eating popsicles, pushups, and KitKats, and occasionally having a meltdown that results in overturned furniture, pillows and dirty clothes strewn throughout the house, and wrappers from her diet of junk food along with associated sticky drippings in every corner. I move tentatively through the day, with a constant anxiety about what is happening, about what might happen, and uncertain about what to do. I feel helpless - I have no control, and I have no idea what is going on. Those feelings all remind me of those early days of covid. 

During covid, each day was a countdown to happy hour. Like many drinkers, I don’t do well when I’m not in control. The way I found acceptance was to have a few glasses of wine. The wine didn’t give me serenity, but it enabled me to stop worrying for a bit and to temporarily ignore the gnawing anxiety I felt at my lack of control - my loss of autonomy. If I couldn’t control what was happening on the outside, I could still control how I felt by taking something that would alter my state of mind. I could also control my body by limiting how much food I ate, meticulously counting calories (ignoring the calories from alcohol, of course) and trying to keep below a certain level each day. I also exercised control by getting up at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning and jogging through the park in the safe stillness of the dark. 

Today, as we navigate the hard time that my daughter is going through, and all the feelings it instills, I am - for the most part -  not trying to manipulate the things I can control. I am not drinking, I am not limiting my food intake, I am not trying to escape the reality that I find myself in. I’m not serenely accepting it, either - it’s not that easy. I am still getting up absurdly early in the morning and exercising when the only other people outside are the ones who have been up all night. Keeping an odd sleep schedule gives me some sense of power - and it’s the least destructive control mechanism I have. I still get frustrated and upset. But I understand that my influence is limited. I am thinking about what I can do and what I can’t do. I know that the only way to get to the other side is to go through it. That is a huge change from where I used to be. In facing challenging times in the past, I would try to avoid it, or maneuver around it. I would run away from it, and force someone else to deal with it. I thought I could make hard things go away by pretending they didn’t exist. In many ways, it was an effective strategy. The problems didn’t get resolved, but I didn’t care that they didn’t get resolved because I wasn’t the one who had to deal with them. 

Getting married and having a child were choices that I made that I am fully committed to. Thinking back, I don’t know that I have ever been fully committed to any choices that I made until these two. When I first moved in with a girlfriend, I wasn’t really committed - it was more a matter of convenience. Whenever I moved to a new destination, I wasn’t committed - I knew I could pick up and leave at any time. If I signed a lease, I wasn’t even committed to that. I abandoned the first apartment that I signed a lease for when I was ready to move, leaving a mess for my roommate to deal with. I certainly wasn’t committed to any job - I would say whatever it took to get a job, but I would leave abruptly as soon as it suited me to do so. I believed that in order to survive my number one priority had to be me - my needs, my comforts, my convenience. In many cases, that meant running away when things got hard.

But I knew when I got married that it was forever. It was the first time in my life, I think, that I felt like something was forever. Having a child is of course forever - I never had any doubt about that. At the time I made these commitments, it was easy. Nothing was hard yet. I knew there would be hard times, in theory, but I didn’t really know. I find a great relief now in knowing that I am fully committed to getting through hard times without the option of pushing the eject button. My sense of commitment doesn’t make the hard things go away, but it reassures me that no matter what happens, I can deal with it. I have hope - and faith - that my family will move through this hard time and arrive at the peace and calm that I know is out there waiting for us to find it.