How will I know?

Last week, my son told me he is scared to change. This was miles away from a year ago when he told me that he would never change and no one could change him. Imagine a journey that takes you deeper into yourself? It’s like your innards unclench and you feel what you’re feeling for the first time. This to me is knowledge.

I remember the first time I was able to individuate someone else’s fear from mine. It was during a tumultuous time when my ex was trying to pull Tin in a direction that I didn’t think he should go and my attorney called and started spouting warnings – if I don’t do this, she’ll do that – and I could feel in my body that my attorney was afraid, but I wasn’t. It was such a new feeling that I paused and the rest of what she said washed over me.

I grew up in a very enmeshed family, what my father was feeling the rest of us were feeling. I have come to know this as a common feeling among those in my ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) group. My father was not an alcoholic – he rarely drank – but he raged like an alcoholic. He was an adult who was unaware of his feelings, who, unlike my teenage son, did not know what scared him, so he terrorized everyone around him.

I have grown to divide people into those who have had therapy and those who have not. You have to grow up in a very regulated household, with parents that are highly attuned to themselves to be able to see and hear a child’s needs. Everyone raise your hand if this was your parenting (pause). Psychiatry wasn’t even a thing until the 1800, before that if you just were freaking out, you went to an insane asylum. Other people had dominion over your feelings – if you could’t keep them in check – you were labelled unstable.

I have been on this journey with my son for over a year, and what I have seen are teenage boys who are scared, who don’t feel like they fit in, who suffer from “I’m not enough” ism. And I have seen parents of these boys who are struggling with their own fear, coupled with alcoholism, drug addiction, sex addiction, gambling addiction and egoism and it gives me pause to think wow, how could these boys have a chance given their circumstance? But they do, because they are so damn resilient.

I lament quite a bit about how it has taken me so long to know myself, to trust myself. You don’t learn this stuff in school. A friend said, “Rachel, you’re the most aware person I know.” (Now that gives me pause – ha! – about who she knows.) My son is receiving an education far beyond anything a regular school has to offer him – while his friends go to prom, have girlfriends, and pass Algebra – my son is attuning to his feelings, figuring out how to read the room, learning and individuating, and becoming more himself. And equally important, he is learning how to serve – to take what he knows and pull a struggling peer up.

A friend of mine who went from being a clinical director in a last stop for teenage boys in San Francisco to a life coach for adults told me once – we are all born naturally creative, resourceful and whole. I now say this same thing to my son. He asked me the other day, how will I know I am ready to be an adult? Will someone tell me? Help me? I told him what I know, he will feel when he is ready, and deep inside he will know.

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