We’re hitting the point with our kids where some stuff I would normally want to talk about publicly, I’m not going to, because it would infringe on their privacy. It’s unfortunate, because it means there’s a cultural gap around talking about many things affecting teens — they’re not ready to talk about it themselves, and we can’t talk about it for them.
I’m not sure what the fix is, actually — we can talk in private forums, but that doesn’t change the public conversation, and so various taboos and prejudices persist, critical information isn’t as widely shared as it could be, etc. I don’t know if there’s a fix for this, honestly, which makes me sad, because it means so many people end up navigating it all without much guidance or support.
In related news, parenting teens and pre-teens is hard. I’m honestly a little exhausted and frayed by some of the stuff we’ve been dealing with the last two months, and starting to feel like I’m at the end of my patience. So I’ll mention that our pediatrician recommended an app called Bloom, which is a CBT therapy kind of thing. It’s free to try it for a week, than $60 / year going forward.
I just downloaded it for myself; if I like it and find it helpful, I’ll have the kids download it too, I think, see if it’s helpful for them. I may also give my own psychiatrist a call — I don’t see her very often now that the ADD meds are very stable, but once in a while, it’s nice to go in for a mental tune-up.
In other news, our house and garage are being eaten by ivy. My shed too, though not visible in the picture. I kind of love it, and I know we’ll have to take it down whenever it’s time to paint the house, but the paint’s held up surprisingly well for the last twelve years, so who knows, maybe it’ll hold up until we’re ready to move out.
Many of the windows are now covered with ivy, and so there’s a little less light coming in, but the light that does make it in is dappled and very beautiful, so it seems like a reasonable tradeoff for now. That’s not meant to be a metaphor for anything, but I suppose you could apply it to therapy and public conversations about these things if you tried.
Everyone’s okay here, just trying to deal better with various things. No need to fret.
My dad posted this recently: “KOMOREBI,”, a term in Japanese, which has no equivocal in any other foreign language, which means “the sunlight is glimpsed through tree leaves”, or “the sunlight which leaking through tree leaves”.
