Stages of Development--part 3b

Stages of Development--part 3b

Age seventeen to twenty-one

The year I spent on foreign exchange was an opportunity for me to get myself on a positive track. The family I stayed with was loving, well educated and thrilled to have me there. I basked in the nurturing which infused their home, the likes of which I had never experienced.

We went on a trip before school started. It was all a thousand times more amazing than even the trip to England had been. I was with a real family! I could be a child in the family. The adults were adults and behaved like parents, while also being warm and generous. I was in heaven.

The stability and warmth I was experiencing gave me the space to think of how estranged I had become from my mom. For much of my high school years we were not able to relate to each other. The "team" we had had when it was just the two of us broke up when her future husband moved in. From age fourteen on we ate meals together but I never shared my feelings with her. She was unaware of what was happening in my life beyond a few platitudes at the dinner table to make conversation.

Now, with the host family, I was actually developing relationship with them! I felt like I was the luckiest guy on earth. I wrote an old family friend a letter where I said I had become estranged from my mom and didn't know what to do. He wrote back a very encouraging letter and after a while I wrote my mom a letter stating that I saw we had grown very far apart and that I wanted to work on repairing our relationship. She wrote back encouragingly.

When I left after a year with the family I sobbed uncontrollably as I left on the train. The host mom ran towards the departing train with deep love and compassion in her eyes. I cried for about an hour before I was able to stop. The depth of my crying was because I knew that my life had been transformed by the experience with the family.

As I reflect back today I believe that my life would have unfolded very differently, and with many more negative outcomes, had I not experienced the wonderful model of family during my year as a foreign exchange student. It is not an exaggeration to say that they saved me from a much harder and bumpier life. I now had a model of a healthy family that I could inwardly refer to. Frequently I would ask myself, "What would my host family think of this? What would they do?" when confronted with moral choices.

After nine months overseas I had stopped drinking and doing drugs. I was very careful about who I slept with. And I was eager to get into college and study History and Languages, two subjects I had become interested in during that year.

Before my year abroad I was lost and confused, feeling like I had huge void inside of me. Coming back to the States I had interests, passions and was eager to start college. I had received a platform in those nine months which I could build on. Obviously, it was different than had I been with a solid family my whole life, but I felt I had something to work with.

As I was heading overseas, Mom lost her job and moved back to her childhood home, a five minute drive from her mom. Grandma offered her a job managing the family business and paid for her housing. Mom was in a very difficult situation and her family provided a soft landing for her. Mom was struggling and her marriage was filled with strife, but she was provided a cushion that would help her land on her feet.

An irony about this chapter is that my mom, to this day, sees what I've just described very differently. In her version, she went back home in order to help the family. Grandma was too old to manage the business and my mom was the one who was coming in to save the day. No one has ever challenged her version of it. Grandma felt enormous guilt about my mom's mental illness. Grandma was coming out of a period when even the medical establishment said mental illness in a child was the mother's fault.

It would have been much easier for grandma to hire someone to manage the family business. Having my mom do it was likely a much more challenging choice, but it also allowed the two of them to make significant progress, over the course of the next twenty years, in healing their relationship.

After moving all of our things to the new town, mom asked me where I'd be going to college. It was too much to apply from overseas and here I was a few months away the beginning of the semester. I decided to enroll in the local community college and move into the student dorms. The college was very near my grandparents' house and I started going there regularly to have lunch and spend time with them. I loved being with them.

My grandma was not very good with kids, but she loved spending time with adults. She loved to crack jokes and be the life of the party. Now that I was an adult (or at least I looked like one) we began to develop a close relationship. She had remarried at age seventy and her husband was a wonderful man. They had a great life together and cherished each other. Both of their spouses had died of cancer at the same time. They had been miserable and lonely for some years and then found each other. They experienced each day, and their time together, as a profound gift.

This, like my time overseas, was a wonderful model for me, and I soaked up the time with them like a sponge.

My mom was struggling in her marriage a great deal. She and her husband regularly yelled at each other and seemed to have little regard for each other. It was hard for me to be there when they both were present. Mom was learning a new job in business for which she had almost no background. She was taking lithium which seemed to affect her personality in addition to stabilizing her mood. She blamed grandma for her problems and railed against her regularly.

Mom liked to spend time with me and met my friends. It worked well for us to spend time together when her husband wasn't there and he traveled a lot for work. She was interested in my life, asking who my friends were and which classes I was signed up for. But she didn't really have much to offer in terms of advice or help.

With one major exception: my family, both grandma and mom, were going to pay for my college education. I would graduate and have no debt whatsoever.

My new friends didn't drink. I had one girlfriend. I was getting to know my grandparents in a new and wonderful way. I studied hard and got mostly "A"s. My life was pretty stable.

When I was twenty I transferred to the same University where my parents had met almost thirty years before. I wanted to experience something of the excitement and promise of their lives at the time they met. My dad had killed himself five years previous. My mom had major challenges from her strife-filled home-life and the affects both of her brain disorder and the medication she took to treat it. I felt an existential need to connect with the parts of them that seemed more healthy and hopeful.

I continued to do fairly well in school. I made friends. I enjoyed the big campus opportunities and took advantage of all kinds of lectures and activities in addition to my classes. I stopped by a video arcade from time to time and played a few games. After a while I became more compulsive about it and could drop $15-$20 worth of quarters before I walked out the door. I felt something of what it means to be addicted. I wasn't in control. I felt myself be sucked into the arcade and pile quarter after quarter into the machine. There was a manic edge to it. After I wrenched myself out of the arcade I walked home a little shaken and feeling unsure.

I feel very, very lucky today that my addiction was not to something more serious. My compulsive attraction to video games went on for a few years and then waned on its own accord. I never bought myself a home video game consul because I knew it would be unhealthy for me. A few years ago my wife and I bought a new computer which came bundled with games. I started playing them compulsively to the point that my wife commented on it. I went downstairs and deleted all the games. Addiction is something I know I need to be vigilant about.

I went to a therapist at the college but didn't make much headway. I joined a men's support group and shared a bit of my having been molested. I went to a Speak Out event where people got up and shared their stories of being sexually assaulted. I was way too shy to stand up myself. I realized it was a good thing to tell one's story but was a long way from having the guts to do it myself in such a large forum. I suppose I'm still building towards being able to do it now.

I dated a woman I met in a choir I had joined. We enjoyed each other's company, laughed together and similar cultural interests. Even so, I found myself ping-ponging back and forth between feeling sympathy and antipathy towards her. When I saw her on campus sometimes I could be very cold to her. Then we'd meet up later for a movie and I would be friendly and engaging. Clearly I had some issues.

As I look back I can see that my issues were complex and I had very little perspective on them. I knew that I had some pretty big stuff to work on but I didn't know where to start. I was trying to do well and be a good friend but my issues were frequently sabotaging my efforts. It's only been in the past few years and through taking the NAMI "Family to Family" class that I've been able to bring a lot more clarity to what my issues even are.

At the end of my sophomore year I was doing well in some ways and struggling in others. I missed my grandparents. I missed my host family from my year abroad. By myself I was more than a little lost. The time I had spent with the host family and grandparents had given me a hope of a life that could be stable, warm and wonderful. But I was still very far from having the inner resources to create that life I could imagine.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben