I recently discovered I have OCD, but not the normal version, my version is overly controlling disorder. How did I come to this conclusion you ask? By sitting in the chair at our therapist and being told that I may just need to have lower expectations and allow our 15-year-old daughter to fail. Let her fail, like that is the advice I am paying for? Let our girl ruin her life, I mean how does one just throw their hands up and say. “Your choice sweetie, good luck with that!”? Time for a new therapist obviously. Unfortunately this is not the first time I have been told this. My husband, her therapist, my family, teachers, and the list goes on have all said I might just have to let her choose the wrong path. This is not easy to do for any mom I don’t think, but for a mom of a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder I think it is even harder to do. We take our children in and work as hard as we can to give them the tools they need to be able to be functioning members of society, we give up all of our free time, our friends, our own comforts, and our sanity only to have our kids refuse to choose the right path. The question then becomes what was it all for? Why did we work so hard if the outcome was always going to be a devastating one? Then, why can’t everyone around us understand the pure anxiety of just letting them go to make those choices? The sheer frustration of years wasted in a sense, memories lost with the other members of our family due to being left behind to handle the one throwing the fits while they spent the day doing fun memorable things, the one being lied about to all our friends and families, the one being triangulated from their own spouses and looking in the eyes of the one triangulating and seeing the pure satisfaction of your loneliness. Now, I am being told to just let go and let her make the mistakes that will lead to more devastation. Awesome.
”But she is tasting whiskey now!”
Let her make her own mistakes.
”But she is running away and staying gone all night!”
Let her make her own mistakes.
”But she starts high school next year and is headed straight for trouble!”
Let her make her own mistakes.
I have felt like I am on the path to losing my mind as I think back to all the years I promised to do all I could to keep her safe and help her dodge the mistake traps that teenage girls fall into only to watch her search those traps out with pure excitement. Then I found myself sitting in a class listening to the most amazing couple speak about how they had to just let their adoptive son walk his own path even though they both knew it was the wrong path, the dangerous path, the hard path, and the opposite path they had led him to. In their story they referred to the passage that I have heard all my life growing up in church. The prodigal son. Most have always focused on the son and his journey. How he left, he partied, he fell, and he went back. We have all heard of how the father looked for him to come home and excepted him back with open arms. But what really hit me this time was when they said the father LET him go. He knew his choice was not the right one, he knew it would possibly be the last time he saw his son alive, he knew he may never know what happened to his son, but he LET him go. He didn’t follow from a distance. He didn’t call his friends to keep their eye out. He let him go.
Sitting in the office of our therapist and giving her all the ways I want things to go, she looked at me and said, “you can’t control her feelings, thoughts, or behaviors while she isn’t with you. You can only control yourself.” Hard pill to swallow. “She can’t control your feelings, reactions, or thoughts, only you can” Harder pill to swallow. “What are you so afraid of, her failing or you?” Impossible pill to swallow. Is it really that hard to understand why I want her to do well? Is it wrong for me to take the danger out of her path, to keep the possibilities of mistakes happening out of the picture?
Oh, okay I see it now.
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