I heard it first in a call from the school psychologist, summoned to get to the bottom of an eight-year-old’s acting-out behavior in the classroom two months ago (he was only seven years old when this journey began). But I heard it again in a face-to-face debrief meeting with his current teacher and the school principal and the psychologist, and it’s the weight of those ugly words, “I’m not as happy as I used to be” and “Nobody ever listens to me” and “I never seem to do the right thing,” collected during an interview between my son and the psychologist, that burn my eyes and the back of my nose.
I try to blink the tears away before all those other calm-and-composed women notice, but I can’t do it, because it’s my boy, eight years old, and this was not supposed to happen.
Depression was not supposed to happen.
One of the women runs off to get tissues, and I wonder if it’s bad enough to make my eco-friendly makeup run, because it’s easier to worry about the way a face looks than about the way depression looks.
These hormones, I say, with a little laugh.
And even though I’m eight months pregnant, it’s not the hormones, not really. It’s a little boy’s words. No mama expects depression in the boy she has loved and adored and cared for and watched and played games with and read to and hugged and kissed, every chance she gets, for eight years and counting.
And yet, it is here.
///
Once upon a time in this mama’s child life, there was a boy who exploded with anger, who never wanted anyone to see him cry, even though he was a sensitive boy. This boy worked hard, from a young age, to break free from the grip of darkness.
But there were reasons: there was a dad missing from those most formative years; how does a boy learn to be a man when there is no father to show him? There was a missed-one who called sporadically, making promises that he hardly ever kept; the boy believed them all, because he loved the one who had left, and every time a promise stood broken, the boy crawled deeper into himself, and darkness gained another foothold. There was a mom forced to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. There were three moves in three years, three starting-overs, three make-new-friends challenges, three learn-how-to-survive-now changes.
One day, when the boy was eleven, he complained of burning pain in his stomach, and his mama took him to the hospital, and doctors found ulcers eating up the belly of a child. His mama called in the troops, a counselor and his teachers at school and the family he loved.
She did her part.
But depression is a tough disease to beat.
///
I know this. I am terrified of it.
I saw the way depression could twist a temper and send it flying out of control. I saw the way it could whisper irrational solutions into the heart of another child. I saw the way it could send a body to bed for days on end. Sometimes forever.
And now, here is my boy, facing this monster.
He comes from a different background than the boy of my youth, but there are still so many pieces in the puzzle of anger turned inward. There is his intelligence, high above his grade level so he feels unchallenged and different and, much of the time, alone. There is his introversion in a house of four, going on five, brothers, where he is hard-pressed to get a word in edgewise, where he can hardly ever find a place of his own. There is his intuition and his sensitivity and his boredom in a traditional classroom and his dreams and his expectations and his behavior and his big emotions and his inability to do anything acceptable, at least from his own perspective. It’s no wonder we are here.
It’s no wonder he has fallen into this pit.
I am scared to death that he will not be able to find his way back out.
///
One day, that once-upon-a-time boy was riding in the backseat on the way to a counselor’s appointment. He was eleven years old, and he already felt crazy, misunderstood, damaged, and this trip proved what he had known all along. There was something wrong with him, something no one could fix.
What if no one could fix it?
He knew the reason he was here: he’d let it slip that he was going to jump off a bridge, and a friend had told. He didn’t know if he’d ever feel like not jumping off a bridge.
And maybe he wouldn’t have really done it when it came down to it and he peered from the top of a bridge and thought about how much it would hurt to fly, but it didn’t matter, at least not that day. Because a mama had seen the look in his eyes, and she recognized it, and she made sure to help him in all the ways she could. Counseling. Time. Love.
///
It was hard to see it, what my son’s psychologist found. My boy didn’t stay in bed for days on end, and he didn’t lose any of his boy-energy. He didn’t cry endlessly or isolate himself or lose all interest in life. He just had a short fuse, and he exploded in anger and acted impulsively when anger got the best of him.
There were days when he would open wide and let a mama and daddy see straight to his soul, where he wrestled with thoughts like No one really likes me and I don’t belong in this family and I should never have been born. There were days when he sat happily with his brothers playing a game of chess or Battleship or Jenga, and he would crack jokes and smile widely and laugh until his stomach hurt. And then there were other days when he clamped tight, and he sat listening to an audio book for hours on end and immersed himself in creating detailed Twister Man comics and bent over his desk putting together and taking apart and putting together again all those LEGO creations.
It didn’t seem all that unusual, but we weren’t looking for depression.
This is the kind of thing that can smack a parent in the face and heart and deep, deep down in the gut—because there was another boy who fell into the pit of depression, pushed from behind by a broken family. And we’re not a broken family, but we’re all broken parents, and what if we caused it? What if our boy never quite recovers because we are still here? What if healing is too far for our love and support and acceptance to reach?
How do I keep him from doing what those others of my past have done?
I don’t know. Maybe I never will.
///
No one else was up that night I was reading in the living room and the boy from once upon a time slid past me into the bathroom that could never be locked because the door didn’t close all the way.
He was eighteen, I was seventeen. It was another year when a dad had disappeared, just after a call had come telling us he’d been in a work accident, trapped under a tractor that had very nearly crushed him, and then there was nothing, for months on end. We did not know whether he was alive or dead. It was a year when a boy would graduate and life waited and he did not know if he was up to the challenge, even though he was brilliant and talented and could have grabbed any job he wanted. It was a year when a boy would be leaving, growing up, becoming a man, and he wasn’t quite sure he knew how.
He was holed up in the bathroom for forty-five minutes or more, and then he walked back out with wraps around his wrists that he tried to hide. I didn’t make a sound, but I couldn’t breathe from where I sat on the blue-flowered couch. I tried to forget what I had seen, tried to concentrate on the open book in my lap, tried to settle what I knew but didn’t want to know.
Still, the tears came hot and thick. I knew what he’d done, what he’d attempted, and hadn’t I tried it myself a thousand times, in more subtle ways—starving myself, going whole days and weeks without eating not just because I wanted to be thin but because I wanted them to watch me wasting away? It was the easiest way for me to die.
This was the easiest way for him to die, too.
Something about depression wraps around an ankle and grows like the silence of an evening. It never lets you go.
///
This is not what I want for my son.
Two months ago, at the height of his behavioral issues at school, his daddy and I found a counselor for him. Every week he sits in a room full of toys and he plays and talks and maybe, just a little, heals. And yet today, when I am sitting in that school room, with all those women who don’t know him like I do, I listen to them talk about helping him through transitions with a timer and providing him a cool-down place for his big emotions, but all I can hear are those words on repeat in my mind.
My son is depressed. My son is depressed. My son is depressed.
What if?
What if he doesn’t beat it?
What if there are darker days ahead?
What if there is suicide?
All these questions can tie a mama in great big, tight knots, but they are the wrong questions for this day, for today. The question today is: What can I do to help my son?
It’s a question without a simple answer. Spend more one-on-one time with him. Pursue a hobby together. Understand and accept and fully embrace him, without changing him.
Sometimes part of beating depression away, for a time, is teaching an eight-year-old boy what to do with his anger, how to rise above it, how to feel it and not be afraid of it, how to crawl all the way through it and stand back up on the other side. If all we’re told is that our anger is unjustified or wrong or unacceptable, we will do the only thing left. We will turn it inward, and the darkness will get another grip on our heels.
He is a boy with anger huddled somewhere deep inside him, and we must do the work of digging it out, letting it out, dragging out that darkness to the light of day. Every day. Every moment. Every encounter.
We cannot just hope it will change. We cannot pretend it doesn’t exist. We cannot hide it. These hearts of our children are worth more than saving face.
And so we sign him up for that extra help at school, and we show up every week to those counseling sessions, and we do everything we can at home to help heal a heart whole.
And there is Another who speaks life into the places where darkness has swallowed the light. There is Another who carries truth into the hearts of men and women and little boys and whole generations. There is Another who lifts their heads and breaks those chains of depression every time they clamp tight. My son knows and loves this Another.
And there will come a day—I know there will—when my boy will beat this disease. It will not beat him—because he has a future and a hope, and it is good and bright and beautiful.
This is enough for today.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash)
