Tag Archives: teenagers

Still No Room at the Inn

A different kind of Christmas story, but some of the characters feel the same. There’s a fourteen year old girl. She’s not pregnant, but she carries a heavy load. There are shepherds scattered throughout this tale, a high school principal, a guidance counselor, a police officer, keeping watch. Like the original story, a journey must be made, lodging and assistance is required and time is of the essence, but the innkeeper in this story is not a busy, distracted hotelier. It is an overwhelmed and completely impersonal mental health system.

Zero in on the setting for this drama- not a crowded, filthy stable, but an empty, windowless cell in the psychiatric lockdown unit of a suburban ER. No manger for a bed, rather a two inch thick vinyl covered mat on a bare tile floor. There are shepherds here also. They wear military type uniforms. They confiscate and lock up your possessions, show you the stance you are to take as you are “wanded” for contraband, and control the door in and out of the unit, in and out of your cell, a door with no handle on your side. They are just doing their job. Our fourteen year old young lady, scared and confused, bears her load with grace and dignity and waits for help.

Like the stable on that long ago night, the lockdown is crowded. Neighbors arrive on stretchers, in handcuffs, sometimes other restraints. They bring their people, just like our young lady brought you. We make a strange little collective, a collage of humanity, the dazed, the raging, the profane, the apologetic, the apathetic, and the sad. The sensory deprivation of the cell, the brightness of the light, the lack of information about what to expect, what to hope for, tests you.

A bed in one of three in-patient units in the city… that’s what you wait for, but like the original Christmas day, you are in a crowded city teeming with activity. Information is fed to you in little scraps sandwiched between thick slabs of boredom spent waiting for more little scraps until you feel like a lab rat staring at your door, listening to conversations in the hallway, watching the activity that passes by. With no clocks anywhere, time doesn’t pass so much as pause. The challenge for a fourteen year old in such a place is to keep her humor sharpened, to wield it defensively as needed, and sometimes to flatten it like a shield across her heart when the impossible looms.

Unlike our young lady, you are allowed to exit the lockdown and re-enter the larger world. When you do, the contrast is unsettling. It is December and all the world is planning a party. Swags of evergreen and twinkle lights drape the hospital doorways. The halls are swarming with cheerful ladies in green jackets selling cakes, cookies, wreaths. Tables are lined up featuring jewelry, bobbles, handmade crafts from around the world. You can barely navigate through the common areas. Even in the hospital, people are shopping.

A wise man finds his way to our girl’s cell, a pediatrician. He is kind, and gentle, but he cannot provide a bed at an in-patient unit. Another wise man, a psychologist bearing gifts, recommends two books to read when our fourteen year old returns home. He is apologetic that he cannot find a room at the in-patient unit.

A day, a night, a day.

It is Christmas in America, and I am looking everywhere for Jesus.

Maybe Christmas is just a holiday for happy people. Maybe the way we celebrate Christmas, the commotion, the gift buying and giving, the lights, the music, the hype and expectation of it all does nothing to invite the sad, the discouraged, the frightened, the lonely. A crowded church full of joyous, well-dressed people singing familiar songs does not automatically banish the demons that prey on the downtrodden. Nothing about a brightly lit tree or a house full of relatives can fill an empty heart. No gift that comes in a box or a bag will make up for returning home to a broken life at the end of the day.

A fourteen year old wakes up on a December morning and isn’t certain she can make it through the day without hurting herself, but like the young woman in Bethlehem whose baby comes early into an overcrowded world, there is no room at the inn for her. It’s a different kind of Christmas story, but it’s the one I lived this past week.

Processing the Latest Development…

Last week, my life took a sudden turn. I’m still trying to think of appropriate metaphors to explain the impact this has had on me, but none of them work. Seismic shifts, blinding storms, whirlwinds, tsunamis, these are all disasters of one magnitude or the other and this change in my life is not a disaster, not for me. Other comparisons, Dorothy stepping from her house into Oz, Wendy discovering Never Neverland, Gulliver meeting the Lilliputians all evoke images of the fantastic, the magical, the otherworldly, and there is nothing remotely magical or otherworldly about this development. So the best I can do is to say that overnight, my life has changed from a much anticipated and long awaited drive in an idyllic countryside to a high speed, rubber burning, bullet dodging car chase through urban streets.

That’s what it feels like at least.

Last week, my husband and I were enjoying scouting the lay of the land as empty-nesters (albeit koo-koo bird empty-nesters, since two of our four kids have boomeranged back home, our youngest, a freshman in college, is home for holidays, our oldest brings her toddler over for babysitting three days a week, and my mother has moved in)…so although our home is not exactly empty, everyone living here is a grown-up. We can leave them. We enjoy leaving them. We leave them on a regular basis. Whenever we want. For as long as we want. Laughing as we go out the door.

Three days ago, Thanksgiving morning, we became the grateful, and greatly fearful, guardians of a fourteen year old fresh out of options for such a short life. She is depressed, anxious, and possibly still suicidal, but I really feel like she is the sanest person in our household. It was her circumstances that were crazy. She is a survivor. Just barely.

I am instantly back in long familiar territory. Braces, morning and afternoon school drops, friends, doctors’ appointments, clubs, sports, three square meals, homework, curfews. I can do this in my sleep. I am also instantly floundering in completely uncharted waters. Suicide watch, pharmaceuticals under lock and key, vitamin deficiencies, cutting, someone else’s child who I don’t know like the back of my hand, whose moods I can’t read, whose inside jokes are outside of our history together. The good news is, maybe we will have some time before snarky, sullen responses and disgusted eye rolling sets in. We have no baggage. The bad news is, how will I keep vigilant enough to know if she’s in danger? I don’t know this child.

I’m trying to live completely in the present. I can’t have expectations of raising her. I’m rooting for her mother. But I can’t be less than a hundred percent in. Her very real and actual life may depend on our commitment. Recovery, reconciliation, and forgiveness- I want these for her, but I also want to protect her from soul-killing imitations. Today I saw genuine and spontaneous joy in one of her smiles. I’m greedy. I want more, but I feel like a thief wanting more. That smile should have been witnessed by another mother. I have been blessed by such a big and consuming family life, that I feel ashamed to throw my whole lot in with another woman’s child. I don’t want to be like King David when Nathan warned him of having everything and still coveting the meager blessing of another. Still another part of me wants my old life back, and knows that when, if, Hannah returns home, I will be relieved. Every day that goes by, these two conflicting emotions will each only grow stronger. How do I live with either one of these desires except to wholeheartedly embrace the present, and trust that every tomorrow is in better, more knowing hands than mine?

Letter to Hannah

Four days until Thanksgiving and my niece is at Johns Hopkins Hospital after overdosing on her mother’s prescription medicine Saturday night. We got the news yesterday morning that she’s been cutting herself, the full length of both her arms covered in slices. I don’t feel very thankful today, and it seems a horror to me for the rest of the family to gather at my home on Thursday to “celebrate” while Hannah sits in the psych ward, broken at the age of fourteen.

I am full of so many emotions that are crying out for expression.

Rage. Where are the grown-ups in this child’s life? I am one of them. Guilt. For over ten years my husband and I have watched this sweet child’s life unfold like a slow motion train wreck. Why didn’t we do more to flag down help, to stand in the tracks of her lonely and dysfunctional life and say STOP THIS TRAIN RIGHT NOW! Incredible sadness. I am so easily satisfied by the joys in my own small world, and so easily ignore the injury and brokenness even in my own extended family. And how dare I? Because I am that child, I was that broken. I had a different train wreck of a childhood, more of a Running with Scissors scenario than a slow motion pile up, but I remember like yesterday the feeling of needing to hold the universe together since the grown-ups in my world were so clearly bent on pulling it all down on top of us.

Hannah, the world has failed you. I wish I could fix it, fix you, but I could not even fix myself and my own world. You might look at me and Uncle Bruce, at our family, and think we have everything. We have so very much, and so much that we’ve tried to share with you and with your mom, with your dad when he was a part of your life. But now I see that none of that, not our love, not our concerns, not our interventions, were ever going to make life right for you.

When I was a little girl I used to pray – to God, to Jesus, to whoever might be listening and responsible for the disaster that was my family. When I became a teenager, I decided that because nothing had changed and things had even gotten worse that God did not exist. In college, I thought that getting away from my family would make things better, and they were for a while. After a couple of years though, I was messing up my own life pretty efficiently and realized that the “crazy” was in me, not just all around me. I had given up on God many years before, but it turns out He/She had been listening all those years. I just didn’t hear back from Him until I was twenty-one. At twenty-one, sitting in a jail cell in Washington D.C., the Creator of the universe reached out to me, and I was just desperate enough to reach back. I can’t explain very well how I knew it was God, but I did.

I wish I could say I held onto God’s hand for dear life and never let go, but I didn’t. I’m just not that smart. I did even more terrible stuff and sank into even deeper despairs, but the incredible, powerful Love that reached out to me that day in jail never shrank back, never left. You will hear people ask why God lets terrible things happen, and I can’t answer for the things that happen to other people, but I know for certain that I would never have reached out and found the hand of God if all the bad things had not happened to me. Maybe life would be just fine if everybody behaved themselves and never hurt themselves or other people, but we seem to be inclined toward selfishness and self destruction as a rule. Hannah, you are only fourteen and the weight of keeping the world safe has already worn you down. I don’t know what lies in store for you today or tomorrow, but I know the power of Love and I know the name of Love. Cry out Hannah. Cry out for Love to reach you, and I will cry with you.

Finally I will be thankful, Hannah. I will be thankful for Love- not the love I have for you or you have for your mother, because our love fails. Our love hurts. I will be thankful for the Love that imagined you and had the power to create you, the Love that found me at twenty-one, the Love that can and does hold the universe together. I will be thankful for your future in that Love, and I will wait in faith and prayer for Love to rescue you.