I met Deb and the kids at the park after work. We both had had long exhausting days, I had driven up from DC that morning, and by the time we got back to the house it was late. Everyone, including me, was tired, hungry, and a little cranky. We ate some pizza and tried to get in bed a little early, but the kids were being defiant and Deb sent David to time-out.
"I don't want to go in there," he said.
"Don't be such a scaredy-cat, David," Deb told him, exacerbated.
Now, this was an innocent enough reply, and she obviously didn't mean it to make him feel bad. But feel bad he did, and he began to act out. He ripped up a picture of me he had just drawn and stomped around. Bedtime was difficult, and we couldn't figure out what was going on. Eventually things that had been bottling up for the last hour spilled over into a cacophony of unprocessed feelings. I tried to hug him but he pushed me away and told me he hated me and to leave him alone. Crying inconsolably. I had been away for work and the night before he was crying on Facetime because he said he missed me so much. Now he wanted nothing to do with me. It was emotionally exhausting, the push-and-pull.
Eventually it started to come out in little phrases between his cries and gasps for breaths. "Nobody loves me. I'm bad. I'm a scaredy-cat. I don't love anyone. I made daddy sad. This is the baddest day. My heart is broken."
As I began to see what was going on, what was at the root of it, I started to get really upset. Before Deb and I got married and started a family, I confided in her my fears of bringing life into the world burdened with the cross of mental illness, which has a strong genetic predisposition. If you knew what it was like to suffer from it, you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.
Now, I know what you might be thinking--that this was just a toddler having a tantrum, and isn't it a little premature to be diagnosing him like that? We've had plenty of those instances. But something about tonight was different. As my son cried and wrestled with his feelings, I could literally feel his toddler pain in the way only a father can. He is so sensitive, such a little boy with such big feelings, almost too big for him. He swings from extremes. And I knew exactly what he was feeling, because I was feeling it with him, because he is my own flesh and blood...just as my my father felt the pain I went through in my darkest hours when he could do nothing to help me but be there with me in it. When you hate yourself, when you feel that all you do is cause people you love pain, when you push people away when you really want them close, when you really do feel like you are no good. It came back tonight in a flood, feelings that I hadn't felt in a long time. And the weirdest thing was it wasn't me going through it, but my son. But the feelings were the same, as if there was an invisible bridge connecting our hearts.
I continued to struggle with him, holding him in a bear hug but it was all I could do to keep his thrashing body from wrenching free. Exhausted after several minutes of it, I let him go, and he threw himself on the ground. "I need to be alone," he said. And so we all left the room.
I sat by the stairs outside his room with my head in my hands. And I began to hear him praying and crying. "Oh God, please. This is the worst day ever. I made daddy feel bad and ripped up his picture. And I love you God. And I don't want to be bad or scaredycat. My heart is broken, God. And I know you love me. And the Spirit, and Suzy and and God you love me. And your Son. Please God please." It was a junior psalmist's prayer--a heart rendering, offered up, honest and raw prayer of a little boy with big feelings and big hurt.
When he was finished he came out of his room and was sitting on the floor in the hallway. I came in with tears and sat down next to him. He fought it back for a little while, lips quivering, but then something broke free and he just sobbed in my arms. "David, I love you and forgive you and need you to forgive me and mommy too. Sometimes we hurt each other but there's nothing you can do to make me stop loving you. Just like God loves us, and will never stop loving us. And I know how you feel because when I was a little boy I had big feelings too that I didn't know what to do with. And it does hurt because sometimes your heart isn't big enough to hold it all. But everything you're feeling now I've felt, and granddad has felt too. But you know what? Everything we feel, God felt too, because his son felt it, because he was human like us. So it's good you talk to God like that, and that he talks to you, because that's what prayer is and only God can heal a broken heart." We talked for a bit after that. The storm had passed and left us drenched and sitting.
Like many people who struggle with mental illness, I thought early on maybe it would be better, more responsible and better, not to marry and bring life into the world and risk the chance of passing my genes and everything in them through another generation. But if I did listen to that fear and did not let love overshadow me, the world would not have David. There would be one less soul praying tonight in his room sharing his suffering with the Father who suffered as his Son suffered, who listens to little boys sharing their pain as if it were His own.
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