Someone very dear to me is about to deliver her first child, a son. She is preparing for him; my instinct and need is to prepare her. There’s so much I wish I could tell her about motherhood and parenting, yet there’s no way I could even begin to encompass it all. I’ve winnowed it down to these pieces of advice:

1. For a while you will be the most important person in your son’s life. You will be his world. His eyes will light up when he sees you or hears your voice. His need for you, his absolute dependence on and reverence of you, will be humbling.
2. Your capacity for love will astound you. Your instinct and need to protect this tiny person will turn you into a momma tiger when you sense he is about to be hurt; you will gladly exchange your life for his if you think you can save him.
3. He will believe what you teach him about himself. Do you see him as smart, kind, good? If so, tell him. When he’s a teenager, he may forget these seeds you’ve planted, but the plants will eventually sprout and then bloom and then thrive.
4. Tell him the good things you see in him. Often.
5. Ensure his safety, both physical and emotional, to the best of your ability.
6. Teach him that if he gets lost, to find a mother with children, or to stop and sit down and you’ll find him.
7. Support him in doing whatever it is that he loves. Don’t let him do everything he wants.
8. Don’t stop him from feeling sadness or anger or fear or guilt; these emotions will teach him about himself and about life. It will be hard to see him suffer these emotions, Momma Tiger, but you must.
9. Don’t make him the center of your life. Instead, show him that sometimes he’s the center, sometimes he’s not.
10. Show him the importance of family.
11. Teach him to respect adults.
12. When he’s about 11, his devotion to you will change; it needs to change. For a period of time, his friends will be more important. One day – if you’ve taught him well – his wife or partner will be. This can hurt, Momma Tiger. But you must encourage it to happen … it’s how he’ll eventually find out how much he can love. And this – realizing the depth of our capacity to love –  is the gift of this lifetime.
13. You are grooming him for all future relationships with women. Teach him that we are trustworthy, dependable and strong. Teach him that there will be times when even strong women need someone’s arms around them, saying, “Everything’s going to be all right. I’ve got you.”
14. Love him even when he’s hard to like.
15. Hold him responsible and accountable. This is how he learns that he is.
16. Model for him how to deal with conflict; he will learn this by watching the adults in his home. Teach him to talk it out rather than fight it out, punch it out or numb it.
17. Forgive.
18. Forgive again.
19. Teach him to laugh at himself. This makes life so much easier and a lot more fun. If he’s like me, he’ll have enough material to keep himself amused his entire life.
20. Apologize to him when you’ve made a mistake, but not for setting limits, having an opinion or saying no.
21. Say no.
22. Let him experience the consequences of his choices; this is how he’ll learn what is right and what is wrong.
23. Teach him to believe in something bigger than himself.
24. Help him see his gentleness; help him see his strength.
25. Imagine the man in the boy; remember the boy in the man.
26. Enjoy him.
27. And finally … relax … you’re going to do great.

I think these are pretty good parenting guidelines; I certainly can look back to when I didn’t see the importance of some of them and instead learned them the hard way. I expect I’ll keep adding to the list as life goes on, which probably means a lot more mistakes from me. Sigh.

Looking simplistically at psychotherapy, many of these things are what we attempt to show, teach or experience with our patients.

Imagine the healing and growth that can come when we do.

Knock knock.

Alyssa L. Miller photograph, courtesy of Flickr

Who’s there?

A bereaved parent.

(silence)

Knock knock?

Knock knock?

Knock knock?

Unfortunately, silence is often the response to a parent who has had a child die…silence or avoidance. The death of a child is something that hits too close to home; we don’t want to think that something beyond our control can happen that would destroy our world as we know it. For many people, the pain of a grieving parent feels too intense to even witness. “What could I possibly say?” we wonder. For our own peace of mind, we need to see bereaved parents doing well; we need to imagine that their world returns to normal fairly quickly. So we don’t ask, and we don’t see.

I’ve vacillated between writing this post for those who haven’t had a child die or for those who have: One side of me wants to write it for the former because it is a topic that needs a lot more understanding and awareness. There are a lot of grieving parents out there…every person who dies is someone’s child. Think about it like this: For every one death, there are probably two grieving parents, even though they may be as old as 80. We don’t stop being a parent just because our child becomes an adult.

But the other side of me wants to write it for the latter, in hopes that someone in this no-one-wants-to-be-here category will read it and be able to feel a small measure of comfort in knowing that what they are going through does not mean they are crazy, and that the pain can move from all-encompassing and suffocating to the kind that can turn us into a Velveteen Rabbit of sorts…our sharp edges softened by the buffeting and crashing and thrashing they take.

I’m aware that talking about pain so intense that it can ultimately soften us may lead many who have not “lost” a child (more on this later) to become even more fearful of reading on. I encourage you to stay with me, much as I have encouraged those whom I have worked with to stay with me…to not give up but to trust that we—because I want them to know they do not have to go through this alone—will walk through this together. That anything they have to go through, I will go through with them. When they can’t see the future, we’ll look through my eyes. That’s the message I want to give grieving parents. The message I’d like to give to everyone else:   It’s not a matter of doing, it’s a matter of being.

Words to live by

If you live, work or play with someone who has had a child die…no matter how long ago that child died…say the child’s name and invite the parent to talk about the child. I can assure you that in that parent’s heart, their child still lives. Many years after the death of a child, if you ask a parent about their child, one of the first things you’ll hear is “She’d be ____ years old right now.” They don’t have to stop to calculate the age: They have brought that child with them through the years.

Let me go back now to the word commonly used when a child dies: lost, as in “She lost her child.” Please take this word out of your vocabulary when you’re thinking about the death of someone’s child. The parent did not lose their child; she or he was not misplaced.

And don’t say anything like “He’s better off” or “It was God’s will.” As they used to say in the old West, or at least in my East Texas hometown, “Them thar are fightin’ words.”

Sew your lips shut if you think these words might slip out in your discomfort; if they slip out anyway, acknowledge your mistake. Let them talk, let them talk, let them talk.

Lost, but not alone

Any idea who does get lost? Very often, it’s the parent; sometimes it’s the couple’s relationship that gets lost. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” is often said. So I tell grieving parents, “What’s important to remember is that you can find yourself again only through grieving; your relationship can be recovered and strengthened through the grief.” And “grieving” means that they have to allow themselves to feel the anger and the guilt and the sadness and the fear. So the question becomes, do we let them go through this on their own, all by themselves? If I can’t take their pain, why would they even dare to hope that they can take their pain? If they can look in my eyes (or in your eyes), and see that I (or you) are not afraid of their pain, perhaps they will allow themselves to grieve. This means that ultimately they will heal.

As I’m writing this, I think back to the grieving parents I have worked with: I remember every single one of them. And if I remember the parent, that also means I remember their child. Parents fear their child will be forgotten; not so. Their child continues in every laugh and every tear and every good thing that happens. Grief is not to be feared; it is not ugly. The pain that I have seen makes every one of these moms and dads beautiful and real and made of velveteen.

So if a grieving parent is knocking at your door, please answer it. If they’re not, go knock on theirs.

Donna Lamb is a senior psychiatric social worker with the Hope Program for adults at The Menninger Clinic.