I have two different ways of looking at life that are always warring in my head. It’s kind of a struggle between the feelings of predestination and destiny. In one sense, it feels like there is this path ahead of me, and as hard as I try to veer from it I keep circling back. It reminds me of those old movies when the children get lost- always by this big honking tree- and walk straight for hours and hours and come out by the damned tree again. Sometimes it feels like that- that you can’t miss the train that’s heading for you- you can only delay its impact.
Other days I am certain that what I choose to do not only leads me away from that tree, it takes other people with me. And I suppose either feeling- complete free will and complete predestination- are equally frightening.
Today I was bringing my daughter to help her get her windshield fixed- a little bit of gravel had apparently bounced up from the road and dinged it. This girl has always been a really hard worker in school and at life- she did really well in the lower grades without any urging, always cheerful and fairly well focused. She has epilepsy but except for a rough two year stint in early high school has found the right combination of medication to control it, and we worked through that time without any fear residing in her soul as a result.
She was one of those high-functioning kids that doesn’t need a whole lot of guidance. I kept her from parties that were potentially rife with drugs and alcohol, as I did the other children. When she went to college she gravitated toward social planning for student government functions and playing basketball on the school team.
Then the February after she graduated from college, this child- who always had a firm grasp on her destiny- had a psychotic break- possibly originating from schizophrenia. She started describing how people had set up cameras all around the college and in her bedroom at home, how people had hurt her, conversations that had never happened, all of which I tried to corroborate with her friends and couldn’t. We brought her to a hospital where she was tested for drugs (negative) and probably should have left her there, but she was so completely distraught I brought her home after she promised to get psychiatric care which, of course, she later evaded.
I found out through this experience that an adult can choose to be psychotic as long as they are of no physical risk to him/herself or others. There was absolutely nothing I could do.
Fast forward a year and a half- sixteen months of learning to accept that I couldn’t lead this child out of the forest unless she were to ask for help. This was sixteen months spent trying to keep her for becoming upset or agitated, because that seemed to exacerbate her delusional thinking. And inevitably sixteen months of feeling of feeling completely, horribly inadequate as a parent, with no way to assuage this child’s pain or help her to reconcile her memories inside her head with the reality that kept nudging in- and this was the most traumatic for her.
So today, really, was a great day. She was paying for the ding in her windshield herself, with a job that she started a couple of months ago and really loves- and is able to do, well. She still gets incredibly agitated when something out of the ordinary happens but she is reteaching herself normalcy by observing the reactions of people around her to her behavior.
Will she ever be easy with herself and her circumstances again? I have no idea. Why do things happen the way they do? I know even less about that. I know that if I was in charge of either predestination or destiny- whatever the actual mechanism is- it would probably be both easier on most people.
But I’m not, and it isn’t. So today I am happy that she was able to call and make that appointment, ask me for the help she needed to get her car fixed, and pay for it herself- which in itself caused her a great amount of pleasure.
Just for today, we have stepped out from under the shadow of that tree.
Trees
