One day my daughter said to me, “Mom, you do such a good job of taking care of me that I am not really sure if I can ever take care of myself.” This one statement turned a light bulb on somewhere in my sometimes frantic and scrambled brain.

As my daughter moves solidly into young adulthood and contemplates her next moves after finishing her college degree, we find ourselves once again redefining our relationship. I have been thinking about this a lot lately and am offering you my thoughts with the hope that you will read, it will resonate, and perhaps you will respond.

There is a fine line between helping and enabling, as we all know. This is something that every parent of a child with a chronic and often times unpredictable illness has experienced. It contributes to the anxiety that has kept me awake in the middle of the night. It becomes even trickier to know where that line exists when a child becomes an adolescent and young adult. Yet it is still difficult even with a younger child to know when too much is…well, too much! The habits we develop with our small children only grow stronger as they become older. It is important to begin early to ensure that our children understand their illnesses and know how to eventually manage it on their own. After all, the goal is independence.

I am sure that you all have your own examples of times of stress and worry and times that you truly did need to do something beyond merely listening. Knowing the difference between “listening”, “advising” and “acting” is the delicate tango of parenting. One day my daughter said to me, “Mom, you do such a good job of taking care of me that I am not really sure if I can ever take care of myself.” This one statement turned a light bulb on somewhere in my sometimes frantic and scrambled brain.

 So I tried very hard to simply listen and to not offer advice or suggestions immediately. I have tried not to quickly jump in and do something for her. I needed to listen long enough to figure out if it was a crisis that was related to her illness or if it was the stress and strain and anxiety of moving from a teen-ager into young adulthood. Listening in only one setting might not be enough to figure this out. Sometimes it takes listening in small chunks and in coffee shops, in the car, and, for us, in a hotel room late at night. I try my hardest to hold back, hold (bite!) my tongue and keep myself separate from her emotions. 

Of course you likely know that this is extremely difficult, particularly when there is a history of severe illness and a residue of post-traumatic stress. It is very hard to listen and only listen while remembering with every fiber of one’s being of things coming undone and quickly becoming life threatening. I think that we parents want to prevent this from happening so badly that it becomes easy to hang on much too tightly. 

My daughter and I are currently weaving a new tapestry, moving forward from the one we currently had. We have many, many threads and there are places in the old tapestry that are woven so tightly together that it is difficult to discern her threads from mine. But together we are working on this. Talking, listening, and sometimes not “doing” anything but slowly weaving something beautiful from all the history, shared experiences and deep love. Although it is sometimes scary to change the pattern it is exciting to see how it will look, knowing that it will not ever be completely finished but it will certainly be rich, varied, often unpredictable and always so very interesting. With love, Cinda