Twenty years

 Twenty years ago began the task of parenting my second child. With a second baby there is the knowledge of having done it before. The necessary equipment is already in the house. The patterns of feeding and sleeping are familiar. There has been time to think about what parenting is, the choices parents make, and the values to be applied to those choices. With a second child it was easy to feel confident in the illusion that I knew the path ahead. 

So it was that I embarked on the journey of parenting Ryan with my eye clearly on the dual goals of providing a joyful childhood and all the preparation needed for a successful, fulfilled adult life. I didn't know then that raising Ryan would be the hardest and most wrenching journey of my life. I walked blindly and happily though the early years of motherhood with a curious, easy-going baby boy who offered no hints of the struggle to come, at least none that I recognized at the time. 

As we moved out of the baby stages, I thought a lot about how to help this child become the man he would want to be. How could I nourish and enhance his intelligence and creativity while building the executive function he seemed to lack? How could I make his world tolerable to him now while preparing him to tolerate the world he would eventually have to live in? What learnings would he need? What choices could he afford? Which maternal sacrifices would support him in the long run and which would deny him opportunities for growth? 

I could write books about the futile work I did to prepare Ryan for an adulthood he would never have, but that wouldn't be the whole story.  I fought hard for Ryan. I fought him. I fought his father. I fought a society that insisted he conform. Most of all I fought myself. As Ryan failed to fit into my vision of motherhood, I questioned every belief I'd ever held. In my determination to do the very best for him, I read and asked and researched, always looking for a way forward that was different than where we were. I had to strip away my confidence in familiar theories and open myself to new and challenging ideas. I had to ask myself what mattered most to me and cling to that value against all the forces that pushed me away from it. It took every bit of strength I had, and sometimes more than I could muster. 

This is the kind of soul-wrenching work that no one does because it's a good idea. We do it, or at least I did it, because the alternative is too painful to stand. I built a whole new way of being, not because the new way was so appealing, but because the old way was so disastrous for both my kids and for me. I tore apart my comfortable hold on the authority of familial hierarchy because it was the only path I saw for raising my son into a successful adult.  

It wasn't pretty. It was years of tears and self doubt, money spent and glasses broken, hopeful improvements and devastating setbacks. The effort and the change it wrought in me depleted my reserves, revealed the weakness in my marriage, and left me single, exhausted and hoping it had all been enough.

It hadn't. Ryan didn't make it to adulthood. I'm confident that my efforts added joy to his childhood, but they fell short of launching an adult. I could tell myself that it was all for nothing, but I choose a different story. While I would trade anything to see him grown into the smart, empathic, passionate man I imagined he could be, his absence need not take away the good he left behind. 

I gave birth to a baby boy, never suspecting that the work he would require of me would give birth to a whole new me.

Ryan refused to be obedient. He rejected parental authority whole cloth. When I tried to assert that power over him, he fought me with every fiber of his being. In the beginning I believed it was my job to win those battles, to force compliance, to exert my power over him for his own good. Some would say I won those fights. He stayed in time out because I held him there, but it never felt like winning.  His will was too strong, his determination too great. I could hold those little hands and force them to put a toy away, but I could not force compliance. He was stronger than my behaviorist training. He was stronger than I would ever be. I had to find another way.

That way meant abandoning everything I'd ever known about parental authority and admit that my strategies, however normal and encouraged by society, were harming my son and devastating my relationship with him. I had to forfeit the comforting righteousness of anger and reveal the agony of failure underneath. I had to accept the painful truth that for all my good intentions, my actions were destroying the things I valued most.  There are not words for the pain of that process. Shame, guilt and doubt all play a role. Despair and helplessness feature large along the way. 

I found myself lying on the floor, tears running down into the carpet, lost, desperate, with no plan or path except that I knew, for the first time, that I would never power over my child again.  

By the time I got up, I had the beginning of a new paradigm that would serve me the rest of my life. I had figured out that when I exert power over another person, it always harms them, and it harms my relationship with them, and it harms me. 

It was a turning point, but not the conclusion. I did power over my son again. Sometimes the harm of his dysregulation was more than I could absorb. I restrained the violence when the damage of the restraint was less than the damage of the violence. What never came again was the anger, the righteousness or the oblivious belief that the necessity of my actions prevented their harm. 

I came to understand that I never get to know more about what is best for another person than they know themselves, not even a child too young to articulate his needs. I experience this understanding as a profound respect for each individual. It balances my tendency toward arrogance and keeps me clear that while I may know what is right for me, I can never do more than suggest what might work well for someone else.  

This understanding is the foundation of everything in my life today. My new husband and I have built our marriage on it and neither of us has ever been happier. I've built my work on it, both the content of what I teach and the way I go about teaching it. It's how I change the world, one small bit at a time. I owe it all to Ryan.  

I started out to raise a son. Instead, he raised me.

Changing the core beliefs in our life is never easy or comfortable. It may not even be something we choose to do. But when we manage to do it, whether from courage or fear, or a combination of both, I believe it brings us closer to our best selves, makes us more available for relationship, and brings a safer world for everyone. 

This story doesn't rescue me from failure, on May 31st I will always grieve the man I failed to bring into this world. It's just that that loss doesn't have to be the only story. Grief, however profound, need not stand alone. It lives intertwined the the treasure lost and the good he created while he lived.