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Duncan at 12: Like Me, Only Better

Yesterday my younger son, Duncan, turned 12. He’s been through a lot, and he makes me proud every day.

Mood music:

I often tell people Duncan is the spitting image of me at that age. He certainly looks like I did at 12. And as I did, he has developmental challenges. As a kid I was never diagnosed with something like ADHD or placed on the autism spectrum. But that was the early 1980s, when kids weren’t regularly tested for such things.

I was sick and hospitalized a lot, and I think people chalked my immaturity and slowness to learn as byproducts of a lot of missed school. As I got older, some teachers labeled me as less than average. In middle school they placed me in the C group for 7th and 8th grade. I don’t think we remember childhood events exactly as they were, but it seems there were more than a few teachers who didn’t think I’d amount to much.

I hope I defied those expectations, but it took a lot of work that didn’t start until adulthood and a proper diagnosis.

Duncan has been through the wringer in his young life, going through neurological testing; switching schools, doctors and medications; and spending many hard hours getting through homework. But in the last two years, he has made enormous progress.

With the assistance of some excellent teachers and administrators — and some great work on the part of the Triumph Center — he has made huge strides. His focus is better, and his social skills have made a quantum leap in the last couple years. I also give Erin a ton of credit for the time and effort she puts in for Duncan every day. Some days can be difficult and he doesn’t always appreciate how relentless his mom can be. But some day he will.

Some things haven’t changed, thankfully. He’s always had a heart as big as the sky, eager to help those in need, including a new student in his class in need of friends. He still has a big range of interests that he works at, most notably cooking and music. And he has a command of vocabulary that’s hard to come by in kids his age. He writes not because he has to — some school assignments notwithstanding — but because he enjoys it.

He cares about all life and has chastised me more than once for killing a fly. The neighbors’ pets love him, coming right up to him when he’s outside. They know his is a gentle, sweet soul. And he’s a dedicated Boy Scout.

At that age, I was usually lucky to get the occasional B or A, often getting Cs and Ds. About all I cared about was going to movies and playing with my Star Wars toys.

Parents dream that their kids will climb to greater heights they they did. Duncan, like his brother, is well on his way to fulfilling that dream for me.

Happy birthday, Duncan. Keep soaring!

Bill and Duncan Brenner
Left: Duncan, 2015. Right: me, 1983
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Metal Dad Scenarios

As a metalhead and father of two children, I found this video amusing and, occasionally, a little bit too real.

http://youtu.be/r7ZnOlVD3Ds

black T-shirt: Make Them Supper

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A Benevolent Dictatorship

My kids learned a new term this weekend: benevolent dictatorship. It’s Erin’s way of describing the way of the household. We’re the parents, we make the rules and the boys don’t get to move the goal posts around. For the sake of Erin’s sanity and my own OCD management, it’s become necessary that the children understand this.

Mood music:

Kids will be kids. Our boys leave their dirty clothes all over the floor and Lego pieces are in just about every room waiting to be stepped on. They have the uncanny ability to sweep the kitchen floor without catching a single speck of dirt and the living room furniture is always at some weird angle. They don’t do this stuff to be mean. Any parent will tell you similar stories.

But my OCD is rubbed raw these days as I adjust to a new job and the resulting changes it brings to the family dynamic. I come home and pick up all the messes they make. I can’t help myself. Seeing chaos in the form of messy rooms makes my mind chaotic, which brings on a craving for order that makes me run myself ragged.

It’s not good for me and it’s not good for Erin, who then ends up having to take care of three kids instead of two, as I revert to an angst-filled teenager in my moments of OCD overdrive.

So we had a family meeting this weekend and laid down the law. We increased their chores lists and told them their allowance will get docked every time they protest having to pull their weight. But we softened the blow by giving them both a raise. All in all, they took it well. They even seemed eager to get on with it. But we know the blowback is inevitable. They are just kids, after all.

I’ve never been particularly good at enforcing the rules. I don’t like to yell at the children, and I often choose the path of least shouting as a result. But I do it at my peril.

Lately, I’m realizing that I can’t be the passive parent anymore, because it leads to me cleaning up every bit of destruction in the kids’ wake and they don’t learn the value of being on the hook for certain responsibilities. If I let them be irresponsible, I’m doing them more of a disservice then when I have to raise my voice. And I’m learning that the yelling isn’t necessarily a disservice.

That’s become part of my education in OCD management: learning how to be a hard-ass without being an asshole.

If I can master it, I’ll be in better mental health. Erin will be in better mental health. And the kids will grow up to be men who have the discipline and thick skin to make their dreams come true.

Or so I hope.

Duncan, Sean, Bill

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Control Freak-Out

OCD sometimes makes me feel adrift even when things are going well. I’m feeling it a lot these days and this post, originally written in 2010, captures the malady well.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:44sz0rNbTA687rs9CYi0IN]

There’s another byproduct of OCD that I’ve described indirectly before, but never head on. A byproduct for my own special blend of dysfunction, that is.

Sometimes, no matter how well things are going — and no matter how good my mood is when I wake up — I’ll sit at my desk and suddenly feel awash in melancholy.

It comes over me suddenly, and it can be even more frustrating than the black moods that hit me when there are visible troubles to spark it. When a wave of melancholy hits for no good reason, I sit here feeling like an idiot.

I start to contemplate doing things that are bad for me, like going and binging on $30 of junk food. It used to be that less than 10 minutes after a thought like that entered my head, I’d be doing just that. (See “The Most Uncool Addiction” for a better explanation of why this used to happen)

Things are going very well for me these days. Yet the blues persist. 

As I sit here analyzing my head, an answer is emerging. What I’m feeling is adrift. Not in the sense that my life is adrift, because it’s never been more full of purpose. The adrift feeling is over things I can’t control.

Why yes, everything you’ve heard about OCD and control freakism is true. People like us crave control like a junkie craves a shot of smack to the arm. It grabs us by the nose and drags us down the road until our emotions are raw and bleeding.

That’s why I used to be such an asshole at The Eagle-Tribune. Every story I edited then went through three more editors and then to the page designer. Along the way, everyone after me had to take a whack at it. I’d hover over the poor page designers because it was the closest thing I had to control. Ultimate control would have meant laying out the pages myself. That would have been a stupid thing to do, mind you. I couldn’t lay out a news page to save my life.

When I was the assistant news editor for the paper’s New Hampshire editions, I was out a week when my son Sean was born. I came in one night to catch up on e-mail and saw the message where my boss announced my son’s birth. In it, he joked that I probably stood over the doctor and told him how to deliver the baby.

I wanted to punch him.

I saw red.

Because I knew that was something I could easily be pictured doing. It hit too close to the truth.

The control freak has emerged in a variety of other ways over the years. Getting stuck in traffic would send me into a rage because all I could do is sit and wait. Getting on a plane filled me with dread because I could only sit there and wait. There was the fear that the plane might crash. But the bigger problem for me was that I was at the mercy of the pilots, the air traffic and the weather. I had no control over the schedule, and that incensed me. Today, I love flying.

So what’s my problem now?

I think it’s that all the cool things going on right now are still in play. The various projects are set in motion, but now I have to sit and wait on others to work through their processes. A more normal person would just take these things as they come and just live in the moment. But I’m not normal.

I have to wait my turn. I don’t like that.

But then it’s appropriate that I should be made to feel uncomfortable about it, since I really have no business trying to control any of these things. Other people have their jobs to do, and I should trust them.

I’m working on it.

I handle it better than I used to.

And this particular strain of melancholy is like New England weather:

If I wait an hour, it’ll change.

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‘This Post Is Escapism and Blame’

A dear friend hated the post I wrote yesterday on how we’re all lousy parents. He found something in every paragraph to disagree with and found the opening particularly offensive.

He told me: “Not all of us were raised by lousy parents. Not all of us ARE lousy parents. No matter how one was raised at a certain point your life becomes your own responsibility. Not your parents. Not your genes. Not your phobias. This post, to me, is escapism and blame. I choose to fix the problem and not the blame.”

Those sentiments were not what I was going for, so let’s clarify a few things.

Let’s start with the opening:

I’ve had conversations with other parents recently that highlight a fear we all share: Despite our best efforts, we’ll scar our children anyway.

I’m thinking my friend took this as me saying all parents suck, period. Not true. I was saying that among those parents I’ve had the conversation with, all of us share the fear of damaging our kids. That doesn’t mean we will. It’s simply something we worry about. He took the title in the fullest literal sense, which is unfortunate because I was being partly facetious. Since those of us who had the conversation are convinced we are imperfect parents, I was lightheartedly saying, “OK, but let’s try not to suck too much.”

The escapism and blame he frowned upon comes from this passage, I assume:

My father could be a brutal teaser and taskmaster when it came to things like yard work and working in the family warehouse. It always seemed like my best was never good enough. Even as a grownup, I would tell him about promotions and raises at work, and when I told him what I was earning, he’d deliver these stinging words: “That’s it?” Dad also doesn’t have a verbal filter. If you put on weight, he’ll look at you, smile, and tell you you’re getting fat. Yet here I am, teasing my kids all the time.

If I had stopped there, it would have been about blame. But I continued:

Like most moms and dads, I always swore I’d do better than my parents did. But the older I get, the more I realize I haven’t been entirely fair to my mom and dad. They made their share of mistakes, but they did a lot right, too. With the help of excellent doctors, they kept me from dying of childhood illnesses. They got me through school and made my college education possible. My father has helped me out of more than a few financial jams. Yeah, bad things happened when I was a kid, but they were often things beyond my parents’ control. They tried to keep my older brother healthy, but he died anyway. They tried to keep their marriage together, but it wasn’t meant to be.

The point is that I blamed them for a lot of things earlier on, but being an imperfect parent has made me realize they didn’t deserve my scorn. My own challenges have given me a better understanding of what they did right despite all bad cards they were dealt along the way. Bitterness and blame were long ago replaced by forgiveness and gratitude. True, my relationship with Mom and Dad could be better today, but I attribute that more to the differences we struggle with together as adults.

My friend ended his comment with this: “I choose to fix the problem and not the blame.”

So do I.

As imperfect as I am, my boys are growing up with love and encouragement. I’m a constant presence in their lives, and when I see myself screwing up, I work to correct it. I’m also as honest as I can be with my children. If I’m in the wrong, I acknowledge it. And every day I tell them I’m proud of them, no matter how badly they’ve tested my patience. That’s progress.

I point out the lousy parts of my parenting because in acknowledging it, I can improve. And in sharing, my hope is that other parents can do the same.
Bad Parent Alarm

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Don’t Let Your Anxiety Inhibit Your Children

The following is a guest post from Jessica Lavery Pozerski, a friend from the information security industry. She was most recently PR manager for security vendor Sophos, and is about to take on a new role handling PR for Vericode. She hails from Billerica, Mass.

Anxiety is something I’ve always suffered with. Even as a child I would become get nervous about a test or walking to school, seemingly out of nowhere.

This isn’t normal childhood fear I’m talking about. I would imagine horrible scenarios in my head, like what if a man in a van tried to grab me on the way to school? Or what if a car swerved onto the sidewalk and hit me or my siblings while we were walking?

After imagining in excruciating detail how everything could go wrong, I’d begin devising a strategy for avoiding the tragedy. I’d come up with a plan for escaping the kidnapper or saving my younger brother and sister from the oncoming traffic.

“What if” was a big part of my childhood vocabulary, and it has remained a consistent theme for me in adulthood.  Even today I imagine terrible scenarios and then come up with a plan for fixing the problem. Go ahead, ask me what my plan is for getting me, my dogs, my daughter, my husband and my brother out of the house if there is a fire or intruder. Some might call this behavior obsessive (it is); I call it be prepared (because I’m a little crazy). I’m a planner, for good things and bad, and my wonderful husband has learned to love this part of me, even if it sometimes drives him nuts.

Given my history of imagining horrible scenarios, I was not surprised to read Shanon Cook’s “When Motherhood Becomes Nightmare” on CNN the other day. It is a great article and one that I could relate to. Since having a child a year and a half ago, I too have dealt with this sudden and urgent feeling of dread that something horrible was going to happen to my child.

A year and half after her birth, this still happens, but I refuse to let my crazy hurt my daughter. I don’t want my anxiety or fears to inhibit her from living a full and exciting life.

So how do I do this when I am terrified that she will slip in the tub and knock out all her teeth or that she will lose an eye when she falls on the playground? Here are a few of my strategies that others may find helpful:

  • I remind myself that I made it through childhood without any major injuries. I climbed trees, used a wagon as a go-cart to race down our hilly street, sledded down steep hills and had lightsaber fights with sticks. And I’m still here. I don’t want my daughter to be reckless, and I’ll protect her from real dangers, but I have to let her climb up that chair herself.
  • I tell myself falling will teach her how to get up again. One of the worse parts of having persistent anxiety is that it stopped me from taking risks. I was too afraid to fail. As a result, I couldn’t accomplish anything great. It wasn’t until I stopped telling myself that my world would end if I failed that I was able to take some risks. I have failed and I’ve moved on; so will she.
  • I’ve seen the results of what happens when parents do everything for their children, and it is scary. Kids who never move out, who can’t hold down a job, who are absolute slobs and don’t know how to take care of themselves, pay bills, do laundry, and so on. That won’t be my daughter. But if I want her to be independent, I have to let her do things herself now.

And if all of that fails, I just walk away — and let her father watch while she does something anxiety inducing. 🙂

Jessica Lavery Pozerski
Jessica Lavery Pozerski and her daughter prepare for some winter fun.
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It’s All Fun and Games Till Someone Breaks an Elbow

Duncan is sporting a pink cast on his right arm again, the result of a tumble off my bed last week. He was horsing around with Sean and took a spill over the side, landing on his elbow and fracturing it.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4A065x9kJt955eGVqf813g]

Duncan went flying when Sean put up his hands to keep his brother from landing on top of him. Now every time someone asks what happened, Duncan points an accusing finger in Sean’s direction. Call it what you will — brothers being brothers, parental fail (I was on the other side of the bed reading, oblivious to the accident about to happen), Duncan being accident prone.

When Duncan came home in another cast, Sean felt terrible about it. He doesn’t like to see his little brother in pain and was equally upset last fall after Duncan fell off a set of monkey bars and broke his right wrist bones.

In addition, there’s a fair amount of guilt swirling around the Brenner house. Sean feels guilty because his reflexive action during a moment of horsing around caused Duncan’s spill. I feel guilty because I should have stopped the horseplay sooner. Erin feels guilty because she was a floor above us during the incident, talking on the phone.

There are teachable moments in all this.

The first is that feeling guilty is pointless; nobody conspired for this to happen. But we can be a little more alert in the future. For my part, the second horseplay starts, I can lay down the law and stop it.

The second lesson is that beating yourself up won’t change the outcome. Bad luck will always show itself in a split-second, before you’re fully able to process what’s about to happen. The tumble off the bed happened faster than the blink of an eye, and that’s the way life is sometimes — fast and sloppy.

As an OCD case, I’ve had to work at that last one. Those of us with clinical OCD are masters at second-guessing ourselves and everyone around us. We’ll replay the event in our heads repeatedly, looking for that quick moment when someone screwed up. But it never helps. In fact, it just makes matters worse because we let the obsession incapacitate us.

The best I can do now — the best all of us can do — is be there for Duncan and help him through it.

Fortunately, Duncan isn’t letting it get him down. He’s still every bit as active as he usually is, and yesterday he even enjoyed a string of bowling.

Despite the cast and sling, he won.

On to the next thing, which will hopefully be a lot less eventful.