The Same Ride, A Different Me

I was happily taking a little trip with two of my girls before the oldest one moved to Texas with her boyfriend. We were staying with my friend Rosie, and on our last morning there, Rosie and I were sitting around having coffee and doing what we do—talking.

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It was a perfectly pleasant morning.

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Then my phone rang.

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It was my son Matthew, calling from jail. He hadn't called in about four days. He told me he had finally gotten his first phone call because he was in solitary. He was going to be there for thirty days, and he wanted me to know so I wouldn't wonder why I wasn't hearing from him.

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And immediately, my mind went somewhere else.

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My oldest son had been in jail at about the same age Matthew was now. He had also been put in solitary. On my 40th birthday, I got a phone call from a deputy telling me they were releasing my son. He had been in solitary for more than thirty days, and they didn't know what to do with him anymore. I remember thinking that was a pretty fucking strange thing for a deputy to say.

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It turned out to be the beginning of one of the most horrifying periods of my life.

After he was released, he spent more than three months in a psychiatric hospital and was in a schizophrenic psychosis for more than two months. He had been abused while in solitary and had spent hours each day strapped to a chair in what they called a “turtle suit.” When he finally came home, I essentially had a six-year-old in a twenty-four-year-old body.

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So when Matthew called me from solitary, my brain knew exactly where it could go.

 

Here we go again.

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Another son. Another stint in jail. Another solitary confinement. Another possibility that I was about to watch my child come apart and have to somehow put him back together. I took a breath.

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Rosie was sitting there listening to me. And I swear, I could almost feel her watching me in real time, like she was taking mental notes. But something was different this time. I didn't go into fight-or-flight. I didn't immediately start imagining the worst thing that could happen. Instead, I started talking to Matthew about how he could frame this experience.

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Matthew has severe ADHD. His mind moves fast, and impulsivity and distraction have been a struggle for him. So, I told him that, as awful as solitary sounded, he had an opportunity he might never voluntarily give himself: quiet. No drugs. No drama. No distractions. No constant stimulation. Just him and his mind. I told him he didn't have to figure everything out. He just had to notice what came up. A thought. A memory. Anger. Fear. Shame. Whatever it was. Acknowledge it. Feel it. Don't resist it. And let it move through him. “Healing is sometimes—and most times—just acknowledging the wound.” I gave him some breathing techniques to use if he started panicking. Then we hung up.

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And I was proud of myself. Not because my son was in solitary. Obviously, I wasn't happy about that. I was proud because my nervous system hadn't heard solitary and immediately screamed, HERE WE GO AGAIN. ANOTHER ONE IS ABOUT TO LOSE HIS MIND. My heart hurt for my son. But I didn't live in the hurt. I felt it. And then I let it pass through me—exactly like I had just told him to do. 

 

Rosie looked at me afterward like she had just witnessed something extraordinary.

To her, this had been a devastating phone call.  To me, it was a phone call from my son telling me some shit was going down again. Both things were true. It was devastating. And I was okay.

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I didn't know what was going to happen to Matthew. I couldn't control what happened in that jail. I couldn't guarantee that everything would be fine. But I realized I didn't have to carry the entire future in my nervous system just because something bad had happened in the past. This was not that time. This was not that son. And, most importantly, I was not that mother anymore. I'd been on this ride before. But I wasn't getting back on the same way.

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And because Rosie is Rosie, while I was having this whole profound realization about healing, surrender, perspective, and trusting the universe, she apparently decided someone needed to keep track of the practical shit. She opened her calendar and marked the date thirty days from then. “Because you're going to forget,” she said. She was right. Of course she was.

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And that's probably the thing about this life I've finally started to understand. 

 

Sometimes we really do end up back in the same place. The same kind of crisis. The same fear. The same people. The same damn ride. But we don't actually go in circles. We spiral. We come back around carrying everything we've learned from the last trip. And sometimes the biggest evidence that we've changed isn't that the shit stops happening. It's that when it happens again, we can respond instead of react.

 

That's some good change that spirals you upward.​​

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