My Plate

“My Plate”

            “Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved.  No man is an island.”  Neil Gaiman

            Not long ago I was driving Dermot home from a music lesson.  It was just he and I alone in the car and I can sometimes snatch some precious moments of straight connection with him when it is just the two of us.  We aren’t being distracted by screens, or other people, or noise and he isn’t posturing in front of his little sister.

            Dermot is a verbal kind of guy, but less and less does he open up about the things that are bothering him.  The older he gets and the further into the murky, hormone-filled days of adolescence, Frank and I have to work harder to tweeze from him what is going on behind his dimples and shining eyes when the dimples disappear and the eyes go dark in anger or introspection.  He goes from happy and carefree to stormy and mysterious in a matter of minutes.

            There are some things he will talk to his dad about and some things he will talk to me about and he is starting to realize that Frank and I, though divorced, will ALWAYS work to be on the same page about him and his sister.  We check in with each other about the kids just about every day so there is nothing that they have been able to get by us yet, and rest assured, they have tried.

            On this particular car ride, I asked him about some incident of less-than-stellar behavior he had displayed at his dad’s house and what might have been behind it.  He managed to express to me what had been bothering him and I asked him why he maybe hadn’t said anything to anyone about why he was upset before he exploded and got in trouble.  He essentially said to me that he sometimes doesn’t want to bother me or Frank because we have a lot on our plates.

            Whoa

            I wanted to bring the car to a skidding stop and grab him by the shoulders to both hug him and yell at him at the same time.  I refrained and instead took a deep breath and talked about how I know that both his dad and I are busy people, but that we will always make time for him and for Wren, especially if they have an issue or a problem.  I know we have been consistent in our message to both kids that this is the case and to some extent that this is teen angst coming through, but clearly it needs to be said over and over and it needs to be said louder and louder and in many different ways.

            I told him also that there are things I notice he is more comfortable talking to his dad about and that was fine with me and that Frank was fine with the fact that there are things he is more comfortable talking to me about.  I wanted him to also know that there might come a time when he might want to talk to someone other than us and if that happened I just wanted to make sure that he talked to someone.  I wanted him to know that he just can’t keep things inside, because keeping things inside never helps, it only makes things worse.  I told him to make sure that no matter what you have to a find a person, someone you can trust to talk to.  It doesn’t always have to be the same person, in fact it probably shouldn’t only be one person, but that you should always have someone to confide in… but in a healthy way.

            Then I reiterated that I may have a lot of things on my plate at any given moment, but that if he and Wren ever needed me to, I would gladly push something off that plate.  The only thing I would not push off the plate I told him, was my recovery.  I said that would always have to come first, because my recovery is the reason that I have a plate to begin with.