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Diary of a Thumb Sucker

My son Duncan sucks his thumb. No big deal, but since he’s going to be eight soon, he’s coming around to the realization that it’s probably time to stop. There’s just one problem.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/TraSBSNfpCg

Much of the time, he’s not aware that he’s doing it, which can make quitting all the more difficult.

Duncan usually does it when he’s tired or feeling insecure. It’s the latter part I worry about most.

This is one of the many challenges of parenting this loving, witty and all-around beautiful boy.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve had Duncan evaluated in recent months and have learned he fits all the textbook symptoms of ADHD. He’s still too young for an accurate diagnosis, but we’ve blasted full steam ahead at getting him the help he needs.

He goes to a therapist and loves it. As she talks to him, he gets to make cool things: A pink lizard he made out of beads, for example. He does a lot of writing and drawing exercises, and is slowly learning a lot about himself. He’s also beginning to learn a bunch of coping tools for anger, insecurity and focus.

When school resumes, he’ll be getting help with his fine-motor skills, which will make him better able to express himself through art and writing.

The boy has come a long way since the start of the year, and we’re very proud of him.

This makes me especially happy, because he’s learning things now that I only started to learn after I brushed up against multiple emotional breakdowns and spiraled into addictive pursuits.

Maybe, just maybe, Duncan will be the Brenner who breaks the cycle of mental illness that has a deep history in the family.

Right now, it’s like we’re watching him in his own personal springtime, where his abilities are starting to sprout and bloom. His sun is rising.

There’s still a way to go, of course, and to me his thumb sucking illustrates that. A lot of insecure thoughts continue to swirl around in his head. He sucks his thumb to sooth himself, just like I did with binge eating. I know that after developing coping tools, it takes a long time to master them. Hell, I’m still trying to master them.

The other part of the challenge is that we still don’t have a rock solid diagnosis.

Duncan’s doctor says his ADHD-like symptoms could also be the very beginnings of something much different — bipolar disorder, depression, maybe even OCD like his old man.

I’ve always had the fear that my kids would inherit my defects. I don’t worry nearly as much now, though.

Duncan may have his struggles. Everybody has their struggles. Tell me you’ve never had a wave of depression or been addicted to something and I’ll tell you you’re full of shit.

But Duncan is not me. He’s his own person. And so far, his childhood has been much different than mine was.

He also has a phenomenal mother. Between her strength and goodness and the skills I’ve picked up on the road to recovery, he’s going to do just fine.

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Stuff My Kids Say: Summer Edition

I’ve said it before: When life gets you down and it’s hard to get back up, the best medicine is often the things you hear from children. My kids prove it all the time. Here are fresh examples.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/V1DOcke51iM

–Duncan, after listening to a couple minutes of the 360s song “Deadpan Superstar,” which I have playing on my laptop: “Why the heck would anyone write about a dust pan superstar?”

–Sean and Duncan have replaced high-fives with “high butts,” where they jump in the air and crash butts.

–I now say the following before each sentence directed at the kids: “Thanks in advance for not whining.” It works half of the time.

–Erin is making me and the kids pay 50 cents whenever we leave a light on. Now the runts are teaming up to blame me for every light left on.

–Sean just informed me that he “Just released something nasty from my nasty spot.” Yeah. Nasty indeed.

–I get home and the kids delight in telling me how Erin had to put money in the curse jar for saying a bad word. I ask for hints on what the word was and get this in response: Duncan: “She said d-a-m-m-i-t.” Sean: “You forgot the M, stupid.”

–Sean: “I’m doing this (chore) under protest.” My response: “Aint it grand to live in a country where you can protest without getting shot?”

–My kids get some sensitivity training, Def Leppard style.http://lnkd.in/eP97HE

–Says Sean: “Little Red Riding Hood was a stupid little girl who should have been eaten by a wolf. They made a PG-13 movie about her.”

–The kids requested Cheap Trick for the ride to see Dad and Thin Lizzy for the ride home. My rock n roll child corruption program proceeds apace.

–Sean get’s an education about OCD:

The setting: Our living room, where Sean and Duncan are folding laundry under my supervision. I’m nagging at the kids to get the job done. No getting distracted, I tell them. No complaining. Just get the chore done.

Sean: “Dad, is this your OCD acting up?”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Sean: “You insisting that we get this done right now. Are you having an OCD moment?”

Me: “No. If I were having an OCD moment, I’d get off this couch and finish folding the laundry myself, and I’d be crazy over it because I had to jump in and do it. In this case, I’m making you guys finish the job, and I’m nagging because you two will get distracted otherwise. Then I’ll have to keep staring at the pile of clothes on the floor.”

Sean: “I wish you were having an OCD moment.”

–“Not Christianary.” Sean’s term for doing or saying something that’s naughty.

–Me: “Sean, stop picking on your brother.” Sean: “But Dad, I haven’t picked on him for…minutes.”

OCD Diaries

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You CAN Revisit Your Past (A Trip to Revere)

Erin had an audio conference to record Thursday morning, so to ensure a quiet house, I put the kids in the car and went to Revere Beach, the scene of my tumultuous, painful, angry yet beautiful upbringing.

I’ve written a lot about Revere in this blog. How could I avoid it? But I’ve been short on photos to show you. I fixed that problem with this latest journey back in time. Sean and Duncan had a field day picking up shells and jumping in the water — things I took for granted at their age.

The most striking thing about visiting my old home is that as a whole, Revere Beach is a far more beautiful place than I remember growing up. Part of it is because there was a massive renovation of the beachfront in the 1990s. Pavilion roofs ripped off in the Blizzard of 1978 were replaced, sidewalks were extended to the entire length of the beach and, most importantly, the Deer island sewage treatment plant has cleaned up the ocean considerably.

Here’s the rocks behind Carey Circle, just footsteps from my front door. I used to hide here during moments of anger and depression, chain smoking Marlboro Reds:

The house on the right is where Sean Marley grew up. My house was two doors down. During my teenage years, I spent more time in the Marley house than I did in my own. The house on the left is where Sean moved in after he and Joy got married. It’s also the house where his life ended:

My house, dead center, as seen from Pines Road, across the street:

A lot of dead jelly fish used to wash up on the beach. Here’s the private part of the beach, where the bored among us would blow up the dead fish with firecrackers and, on the fourth of July, the bigger explosives.

 This is the first house after Carey Circle, where the Lynnway becomes Revere Beach Boulevard. Me and my siblings used to hang out in this house in the 1970s and play with the kids who lived there. Their father allegedly had ties to the mob and, sometime in 1978 or 1979, he was gunned down in the kitchen. It was believed to be haunted after that, but I never really took that seriously. The house did creep me out, though:

The trip ended with lunch at Kelley’s.

A good trip, I’d say.

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The Brady Bunch Offended Me

Sherwood Schwartz, creator of “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch,” has died at age 94. Naturally, I’m remembering how I hated “The Brady Bunch” for giving me a fake picture of family life.

Mood music:

I hated “The Brady Bunch” because it made me so angry that my own family was never like that. But then no one’s family is really like that.

I did like the movie adaptations that came out in the 1990s because the films mocked the feel of the original series. You had the family living in the 1990s but acting like they were in the 1970s. Some elements of the family were modernized, though: Alice the housekeeper and Sam the butcher get it on at one point.

When Mike asks Sam what he’s doing there in his robe in the middle of the night, rummaging through the fridge, Sam says, “Oh, just delivering some meat.”

Obviously, Schwartz’s point was to create the perfect picture of family, not because it reflected reality, but because it would be nice if it were reality.

Now that the chip on my shoulder has been filled in by time, experience and hopefully a little wisdom, I see “The Brady Bunch” as a nice idea, however unrealistic. In fact, the escape from reality was a welcome relief to a lot of people whose families were miserable and ugly. A little relief helps you regroup and carry on.

My problem is that I’ve always had a tendency to overthink these things.

I never took issue with “Gilligan’s Island.” As absurd as the show was, I’ve always liked the theme of people with nothing in common getting thrown together — forced to become a new family of sorts in order to survive.

I admit without shame that my favorite episode is the one with the Japanese sub pilot who didn’t realize the war was over; the one who complained that the Chinese stole the idea for water torture from Japan.

Despite how the younger, angrier version of me felt, the older me believes Schwartz did a lot of good for a society that tends to stew in its own, stinking, cynical juices.

Rest in peace. I hope you find the folks in Heaven to be something like the characters you created.


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A Happy Memory From A Difficult Time

It’s sometime in October 2008. I’ve just given given up flour and sugar to get control over a binge-eating addiction.

Mood music:

I’m irritable and sick, going through all the aches and pains that surface when toxins start to drip from the pores.

I’m coming up the stairs from work, anxious to get all the chores that await me over with.

I open the door to find Duncan sitting in his chair at the kitchen table.

He’s wearing a bib and a bowl of soup is in front of him. It’s button soup, he tells me. He made it in school (Pre-K) after being read the book of the same name, in which “Daisy tricks her stingy Uncle Scrooge into making enough soup for the whole town–using just one button.”

“Daddy, have some button soup. It’s on your diet!” Duncan says as I come into the room.

He’s got that big, gaping smile of his, excited as hell because in the magic of the classroom, he discovered something his Daddy could eat. He knows his father needs encouragement, and he’s eager to deliver.

When you really become serious about kicking addictions, God puts the right people in front of you to make the cold turkey period a little more bearable. I truly believe that.

It’s the Grace that helps you move those one, two or three steps at a time.

On that gray, gloomy afternoon, Duncan was there.

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Sean’s OCD Education

The setting: Our living room, where Sean and Duncan are folding laundry under my supervision.

I’m nagging at the kids to get the job done. No getting distracted, I tell them. No complaining. Just get the chore done.

Sean: “Dad, is this your OCD acting up?”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Sean: “You insisting that we get this done right now. Are you having an OCD moment?”

Me: “No. If I were having an OCD moment, I’d get off this couch and finish folding the laundry myself, and I’d be crazy over it because I had to jump in and do it. In this case, I’m making you guys finish the job, and I’m nagging because you two will get distracted otherwise. Then I’ll have to keep staring at the pile of clothes on the floor.”

Sean: “I wish you were having an OCD moment.”

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My Changes, Your Frustration

Recovery over addiction, fear and anxiety has been a miraculous, beautiful thing. I thank God every day. But when a man changes, a whole new set of problems arise.

The changes have been especially challenging for Erin. I’ll let her explain it from her perspective in a future guest post, but I can tell you this much: It’s a confusing, frustrating thing when your spouse acts one way for a bunch of years and then, suddenly or not so suddenly, ceases to be the person you married.

I’d like to think I’m still the guy she married in the most fundamental ways. My heart and most of my passions haven’t really changed. But as the priest who married us said: “You marry the person you think you know, then spend the rest of your life getting to know each other.”

As far as that goes, I’ve been a moving target, tough to nail down.

I hated traveling. Now I like it.

I was terrified of any activities that required leaving the house outside of work hours. Now I’ve filled my time to the brim with involvement in one group or another.

I used to eat everything I could get my hands on. Now my diet is pretty buttoned down.

I used to clam up during arguments. Now I argue back. Only I do it in fits and starts. Inconsistencies in how I argue? That alone must make her wish she had a gun sometimes. Or at least a sturdy, metal ladle.

I used to be a neat freak. Everything had to be just so. Now I leave stuff lying around the house.

I forget to take a shower sometimes. But I’ve always had that habit. Some things never change.

Sounds like a frustrating ball of slime and nails, doesn’t it?

Well, it is. But I’ve put a lot of work into finding the middle speed. Just because I CAN do all the things that used to scare me doesn’t mean I should. I’ve also tried hard to be better at conversation. On that I remain inconsistent to the point of madness.

But despite all that, we love each other. When love is real and you recognize that it takes constant care and feeding to keep growing, you do whatever it takes to stay on top of it. You fail once in awhile anyway, but you get up and try again.

And by the Grace of God, the love endures.

I say all this because I know someone whose husband is working on all the issues I’ve had to work on. She’s probably wondering how the hell she’s going to get through this.

Like I said, that’s a story Erin will have to tell. I only know how I feel and what I’m willing to do.

I also know there can be a lot of happiness between those periods of frustration.

So don’t worry about it too much. The biggest obstacle is the fear of change. Once you put that behind you, anything and everything is possible.

That too can be bad. But it can also be very, very good.

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And The Sea Will Save You

When I wrote a post called “Summers of Love and Hate” last year, the theme was a childhood mixed with joy and rage against the backdrop of Revere Beach.

The memories are still stained with sorrow. But, truth be told, the location of my upbringing is one of the things that saved me.

Mood music:

The sea could be terrifying, especially in the winter. The Blizzard of 1978 is my clearest memory of that. But when calm, it brought be back from the brink every time.

This quote from JFK captures my own feelings about the sea as healer and helper:

I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.

I’m thinking about this after reading some Facebook status updates from an old friend I grew up with in the Point of Pines. She was messaging from Cape Cod, where her family has gone for some rest. It’s a painful time for them, because a friend has been found dead, allegedly murdered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend.

“On the cape awaiting the rest of my children and my honey. We need to regroup, relax and help my girls start to heal. Hug your loved ones, tell them you love them everyday. Life is hard.”

Losing close friends and family is hard. I’ve been there three times. They are doing the right thing, though, going to the ocean for solace.

During the worst moments of my younger years, the ocean was an escape route within feet of my front steps. I would sit on the rocks and think things through. I would walk from the Pines all the way to the other end and back.

The process would usually take about 90 minutes — enough time to process what I was feeling. It didn’t necessarily make me happier, and much of the time thoughts just swirled around uselessly in my head.

But I always came back from the beach a little calmer, a little stronger and ready to deal with whatever I had to face.

You could say the ocean would speak to me, talking me off the ledge.

I live away from the coast now, in a city sliced in half by the Merrimack River.

The river has an equally calming effect on me, and I walk along it every chance I get.

But every once in awhile I go back to Revere or a closer place like Newburyport or Salisbury to get my pep talk from the sea.

I hope my old friend and her family get what they need from the sea this time. I suspect they won’t walk away with any less pain than what they feel right now. But I have no doubt they’ll leave there with the added strength to get through the sadness.

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A Tried & True Marriage, A Blessed Anniversary

Dad and Dianne were married on this day back in 1984, and theirs is one of the most tried and true marriages I’ve seen.

Mood music:

They married months after my brother’s death and, a little over a year later, had a daughter who brought enormous joy to a family that was still trying to get over that death.

They’ve lasted through the many illnesses of their children and have kept a business going together through 27 years of economic highs and lows.

They’ve traveled the world together a hundred times over and are closer today than ever.

This is a particularly special anniversary because Dad is a month into his recovery from a stroke. His mind and body have been through hell, and Dianne hasn’t left his side. Some days I wonder who has had it tougher this past month — him or her.

But the important thing is that theirs is a union that has survived and gotten stronger.

If you want to learn a thing or two about true love, watch them for five minutes.

I’ll end here, and just say to my father and step-mom: Happy Anniversary, from the core of my heart.

Here’s to many more, in sickness and in health.

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Erin’s Avett Brothers Birthday Present, Part 2

This post is for Erin on her birthday.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/3uy4tK5q0KE

I know I gave you your birthday present early: an Avett Brothers concert almost a month ago. But I’ve been thinking about this band lately and realize that one reason I like them so much is that a lot of their songs make me think of you.

A lot of their songs are about love that gets tested only to grow stronger than before, and that’s been our journey.

The song “And It Spread” makes me think about how self destructive I used to be and how you pulled me through it and made me a better man.

There was light in the room
then you left and it was through
then the frost started in
my toes and fingertips

and it spread into my heart

then for I don’t know how long
I settled in to doing wrong
and as the wind fills the sail
came the thought to hurt my self…

then you came back from space
with a brand new laugh and a different space
you took my hand and held it up
and shot my arm full of love

and it spread
and it spread into the world
and it spread
and it spread into the world 

One of my favorite songs is “Head Full Of Doubt / Road Full Of Promise” because of this one section:

When nothing is owed or deserved or expected
And your life doesn’t change by the man that’s elected
If you’re loved by someone, you’re never rejected
Decide what to be and go be it

When I think of your love for me and others and the things you do for everyone — no matter how ungrateful some people are — I think of that song. I hope you feel the same way, that “If you’re loved by someone, you’re never rejected.” Some friends and family will get self-absorbed and stupid sometimes, making you feel unloved and under appreciated. But I know they love you a lot, too. But like me, they just lack the ability to show it sometimes.

“Kick Drum Heart” has a great line that makes me think of my life with you.

There’s nothing like finding gold
within the rocks hard and cold
I’m so surprised to find more
Always surprised to find more

I won’t look back anymore
I left the people that do
Its not the chase that I love
Its me following you. 

I’m always going to follow you, because when you lead the way, we find more gold.

Not material gold. I’m thinking gold in the form of our children and the beautiful experiences we continue to collect.

You fill in all my holes. I hope I’m doing the same for you.

You often make remarks about how you’re getting old. It’s usually after a long day, when your tired and all the aches and pains are amplified.

But as far as I can tell, you’re only getting better. That sounds corny and it is. But it’s true. You left a dead-end job and started a business that’s flourishing after less than two years. Sean and Duncan become more amazing by the day and that’s more because of you than me.

If this is what getting old is about, I’ll take it.

This is just another long-winded way for me to say Happy Birthday.

I love you more every day.