Boogie boarding upside down

I don't know if I have five minutes or five and a half hours. I feel frenetic and overflowing. There's so much I must urgently write about re C, so I'm making myself an outline.

• initiating a conversation re dr; anxiety and night terrors; self-knowledge; access to tools; access to language

• swimming; accommodations; boogie boarding upside down; sunburn and rash

• camp

• sensitivity; feeling a warm breeze vs touching a burning stove

Kaleidoscopes are famous for their beautiful images and what plays an important role in that is the object chamber...a container that holds objects, like beads, and turns them into a vibrant, larger picture. And when you look through the lens, and turn the kaleidoscope in the light, something beautiful is revealed that you had never seen before.

Morgan Harper Nichols

As I started typing the above quote, my phone rang. "C is crying and wants to go home." He made it 42 minutes at camp. 42 minutes! My drive to pick him up was nearly 20 minutes, so really he was there for an hour. I was so proud of him. I tried not to speed on the way there, but I'm here to tell you that laws were broken. When I arrived, he was sitting and reading an interactive nature book with an elderly woman (like, minimum age of 80) sporting white hair and bangin' eyeliner. He was sad but not hysterical or catatonic. We even finished the book together.

Back in the car, I asked him if he wanted to drive with me to the plant nursery to pick up a butterfly bush, as sadly the cold killed the one in our yard this winter. He agreed if I allowed him to play on my phone. Deal. Before we pulled out of the parking lot, I told him that I, too, attended camp as a child, and I, too, hated it and cried for home every day. I did not tell him that the camp I attended was for children born with a silver spoon in their hands - like, kids from NYT wedding announcement families - and the minimum stay was 3.5 weeks. Overnight. It was a picturesque hell. But I learned to get out of a kayak when it tipped over, practiced my swimming, and gained a healthy respect for llamas, so it wasn't all for naught.

We bought the butterfly bush plus a few other plants, which I justified by saying $50 is cheaper than weekly therapy! At home he played in the little above-ground pool we just set up, did chores to earn arcade money, and read Bad Kitty.

It was so much easier today than it was on Monday. Back to my initial outline. Yesterday, while C, B and I were sitting on the deck eating popsicles, C asked if he could speak with me about something. He told me he wanted to make an appointment with the doctor. Sure, I said. What's going on? He tried to explain. I want to tell them I'm having night terrors every night. Oh honey. I gently asked several clarifying questions, because I haven't witnessed any true night terrors in a while, thank god. As I suspected, he's been feeling more anxious, sad and worried, especially in the quiet moments before bed.

My little boy, who just turned seven, is figuring out (1) how to express his feelings, (2) identify a potential solution, and (3) ask for help. Underline, highlight, all caps. Many adults cannot do this. To say I was proud feels insufficient. It's a huge deal. There are several things I want my children to learn before they're grown. Reading is one. Being open minded is another. And learning to listen to their bodies and minds and take care of them is a third.

I didn't tell C that I had already spoken with the nurse the day before and had already started him on a higher dose. Instead, I thanked him for telling me how he was feeling, praised him for asking for help, and told him I would reach out to the doctor's office. I feel comfortable with that white lie. He came to the same conclusion I did, and I want to him to experience feeling agency in finding a solution. I also shared that small tweaks in my own medication, the very same he takes, made a giant difference in my quality of life.

I'm going to travel back in time to earlier yesterday, before he asked me to reach out to his doctor. After we dropped B off at camp, we met our friends at the beach. These are "safe space" friends, so I was relaxed. I packed the sunscreen, the swim clothes, the hat, the towels, the boogie board, the water, and the snacks. I forgot the face mask, the one with goggles and nose cover combined. Big omission. C flat out refused to stay at the beach and got very angry with me. Oh sigh. I'm putting so many miles on our Kia. And then, a miracle - one of my friends brought extra acceptable goggles. The day was salvaged. For the next 3 hours we spent at the beach, he was in the water for probably 2 hours and 30 minutes. Absolutely loved it. Waves bigger than his head, this small person who just learned to doggy paddle last year just dunking his body in the ocean, floating on his back, boogie boarding the waves upside down. It fed his soul. It fed my soul. He played or parallel played with my friends' boys. He asked them to bury him up to his neck in the sand. It was a beautiful experience. And I got to talk and cry and stand in the water with my friends. God we needed that.

It's a never ending struggle to figure out the right balance between pushing and accommodating. I was thinking about how, unlike when I was younger, I can no longer read certain stories of people's pain. I acknowledge the pain, I know it's there, and I want to do my best to help, but it will destroy me if I read the details. I've already read them, anyway, in other iterations. I'm not avoiding, I'm preserving my mental health. I'm learning that we all have different levels of sensitivity. For me, reading about someone who has experienced a Big Loss is like putting my hand on the rack inside an oven heated to 400 degrees. For others, perhaps others with more resilience or different brain chemistry, I imagine it's like scalding your hand on bath water as you try to find the right temperature. That's not the best analogy, and I don't mean to suggest that other people are callous while I am the Mother Theresa of empathy. I just mean that I cannot handle certain things without serious damage. I suspect that C is like me in that way. More than suspect. But how cool if he's able to figure out how to take care of himself while navigating the world. He can enjoy the ocean and even find joy in the battering waves, but he needs goggles and he needs to boogie board upside down.