growing pains
We see the pill bottles first, lined up where Riley has left them, like various plastic soldiers standing at the edge of a pill box battlefield, awaiting their marching orders.
“Why does she leave them out like that?” Kevin asks, affronted by the implication of a demand, even while Riley sleeps. “Why doesn’t she just do it?”
It’s early yet. The windows look out on inky black, as though the night has transported us all the way back to before anything had substance or lines, before there was light at all. We feel boundless and unmoored, like travelers trying to find our way through a fog.
I imagine Riley’s precision in the wee hours, how carefully she lined up these bottles like pawns, how she narrated her need to put everything out so I would see, so I would come behind her and fill what’s empty, the pills falling staccato from my fingers into their labeled compartments. She stands here now somehow even though she doesn’t, watching, lingering in the room with her hand flat on top of the pill bottles, asking me to help her.
Sometimes I also set a stage, everything just so, like a fleece awaiting the dew, and then stand back to watch.
To be fair, when I leave Riley to her own devices, it takes her over an hour to complete a task that takes me only a few minutes. In her mind, it must seem to happen for me with a word and a snap of my fingers, as though nothing is impossible for me, whereas for her it involves narration and a long, repetitive dance, with careful interruptions and gulps of water for fortitude. I have witnessed many times the way she toe-walks in tiny steps up to the counter and back away again and again and again and again, the way she starts out loud, “O-kay, it’s time to–,” and stops and starts again and again and again, damming up her speech as soon as it slides beyond her control. Anxiety holds Riley prisoner, and obsessive compulsions make her cage. She can’t step out, even though the cage door stands wide open.
Fear still captures me sometimes too, even though God set me free a long time ago.
Kevin and I discuss the situation briefly, holding fresh cups of coffee in our hands. I tell him that it’s partly tenderness that moves me to fill the pill box for her and partly that I know where we’ll end up if I force the issue. “For a while, she’ll do okay,” I say with a sigh, “but then it will turn into a ritual.”
“Let’s try again,” Kevin says. “When she gets up, I’ll help her with it.”
God has given Kevin great discernment when it comes to helping our kids take next steps, so I agree easily, walking away with him to other things, cradling my coffee in my hands.
In the afternoon, when we have long forgotten the morning and the late day sun highlights the edges of everything and opportunity finds us again, Kevin turns to Riley and says, “Hey, why don’t you fill your pill box yourself today. I’ll help you.”
She turns to me and exhales a gust of insecurity, looks at me with those help-please eyes, and I smile, pretending I don’t know she wants me to rescue her. Nona Jones wrote that insecurity is the sign that we have secured our identities to something unstable.
Riley looks at Kevin, says, “Ummm,” her lower lip quivering as her eyes flick around the room. “I don’t know,” she starts and then stops, turning again to look at me.
“You can do this,” Kevin says, responding to her reluctance, drawing her attention back. “Now, what would be the fastest way to fill your nighttime pills?”
“Well, I can open all of these,” Riley says, pressing her finger against the plastic button that opens the compartment for Sunday night.
“Yes, that’s good,” Kevin says, as she presses each one in turn. “Now what?”
“Well, I need to put these pills in,” she says, her words clipped and mumbled as she picks up the tallest bottle, turning it in her hands so it rattles.
They go on like this, Father and Daughter, with her showing him that she already knows what to do, though she hardly believes that to be true. She has seen me do this countless times, so often she knows my process by heart. Watching them, I suddenly understand a bit more about what Paul meant when he prayed for the Philippians, asking God that love may abound more and more in experiential knowledge and depth of insight, that they might discern what is best and right. I have appropriated this prayer, asking for myself, for my family, for my friends. Paul wasn’t asking God to give the Philippians more information, but to give them a relationship with God so practically and consistently present in their lives that they would know God’s ways by heart and could imitate Him easily.
Kevin asks Riley how many of each pill she takes at night and she bends down to double check the instructions on the bottle. “Well, let’s see,” she says, even though she has a memory like a steel trap and has taken the same dosage every night for months.
“You need to trust what you already know,” I interject, meaning what she knows by heart and not merely in her mind. She doesn’t need to check the instructions, not really, and for Riley the checking and re-checking and re-checking quickly becomes the disconnected focus of her attention and the anxious clang of a prison door, dulling her fear like a drug while reinforcing the idea that she’ll never actually be equipped.
She gushes a disbelieving sigh and looks at me again so I can see her eyes wet with tears, and then she turns back to Kevin, sad because he has forced her to take agency, and even more upset because he’s standing beside her, pressing her to grow. She’s yet to discover the power in the relationship she has, in her Father watching over and protecting and leading.
I think of a Steven Pressfield quote, something I scrawled in my journal once on a rant with God about taking paths of least resistance, that the more important a call to action is to our soul’s evolution, the more resistance we will feel about answering it.
“Hey, this is a good thing,” Kevin says to Riley, observing her tears and reaching for her. “I know you want to be able to handle these things, and I’m trying to help you get there.” I know you want to be mature and complete, lacking nothing.
She nods, but without conviction, and they continue, him patiently drawing out of her the steps she already knows, her following through because he insists on leading her.
It’s like this with God and me too. He shows me how to live, gives me such an intimate experience of Him that I know it by heart, and then He urges me to do the thing, to choose what is right and best. So often, growing this way is painful to me as it happens, even with Him standing always beside me, teaching me to actively take hold of what He’s given me. I panic, feeling so insecure, until I finally hear what He’s been saying, I’ll help you, this is good, and decide to firmly secure myself to Him.
