The Long Haul

Into the Wilderness: Story 24

Residential treatment was the long haul. Months and months of separation, broken up by 5-hour flights to Utah for parents’ seminars. Delayed flights and connections during which I walked the length of every terminal in the Salt Lake City airport over and over. It’s a familiar place for RTC parents.

And therapy. All kinds of therapy. DBT. Behavioral. Cognitive. Group. Dance. Art. Experiential. Family. I dug into the dusty bins of my psyche and my daughter’s. Hours and hours of listening. Or learning to listen- it’s an art form, truly. I learned to manage reactivity, though like most parents I sometimes failed miserably at it (and still do). I learned to hear the horrible. All RTC parents learn to hear the horrible.

Catina was a mystery to me. I traced the metamorphosis from a quirky and curious 5-year-old to a drinking 7th grader and then a suicidal and dangerously maladjusted freshman in high school. It’s a journey I’ll never quite understand.

The turning point, as far as I can tell, was an event in first grade. She threw her lunch box off the balcony of the gym at her elementary school and got detention. When asked why, she said, “I wanted to see what it felt like.” Even then, “uh oh” ricocheted through my head, a warning shot that something was amiss.

We already knew about the ADHD and the pediatric insomnia. This meant she was incessantly active and hard to get to bed, if she slept at all.

We also saw the beautiful. She was, and still is, intensely creative. She could sing and play almost any instrument, a skill she inherited from her biological dad. Vividly, I remember her jumping atop our coffee table- wearing her favorite red cowboy boots and fringed skirt- and strumming on her mini guitar a song she had made up. It was an incredible song and when I asked her where she had heard it, she said, “I wrote it.” I grabbed pen and paper and scribbled it down. (Sadly, I can’t find this treasure.) She could draw. She could dance. She was a creative force.

She is a creative force. Today. Even still. But as with any strength, there is the underbelly, the hidden, the vulnerable, the sometimes darker, “other” side of the good. That, combined with her ADHD and being on the spectrum (which we didn’t know then), meant that she was always pulled between the forces of identity- who I am and what are my boundaries with others- and sameness- how do I fit in? As she moved from from tween to teen, the trauma she experienced compounded it all.

In the long haul, this was the work. And, oh, how painful for us, the parents, who see our children as complete from birth. My daughter’s fragmentation broke my heart. I saw her beauty and wholeness when she could not.

The long haul. The tears. The rage. The fear. Would we ever get to the other side? Would we ever stop feeling shocked by what we learned? We felt so naive and disconnected. It all felt so forever. Would we ever get to some kind of completion? We would certainly never be done with the work. Wholeness is a never-ending journey. But what would signal a settling point? The point of healing that stabilized us enough to be a family again?

RTC parents get sick of therapy. I recently talked to a parent who said, “I can’t do another hour of it.” I remember that feeling well. At some point the ability to do it just gets worn down like the nub of an eraser rubbed over a scribbled piece of paper again and again. We were the nubs whittled down by the scribbled mess of our lives discussed in therapy.

I had reassuring news for the parent I spoke to. Healing happens. Our point of healing didn’t come for almost 2 years. The long haul.

But here’s what is important: we got there. Catina came home. She is whole. She is my beautiful child, and I see her beauty, always. One of the gifts of wilderness and RTC is that they gave me my daughter back. She is the perfect bundle of completeness I held in my arms nearly 18 years ago.

Your child will get there too.