A MOTHER'S PERSPECTIVE… Managing Bar Mitzvah Anxiety, Mine & His

A Mother’s Perspective…

Managing Bar Mitzvah Anxiety, Mine & His

*Our blog is pleased to welcome new voices to add to the mix, beginning with Melissa, a
Mom of two, dealing with her own anxiety as well as her children’s challenges. She is sharing her story to help others understand what it’s like to live and parent with mental illness.

My son’s Bar Mitzvah is in less than a year, and we’ve made no plans.  I’m not kidding.  We really have no idea what we are doing.  While everyone else has been busy booking venues, djs, and photographers, I’ve been wrestling with the anxiety that comes with this milestone.  Quite frankly, it’s been paralyzing, which is why there’s no plan.  For many months, I thought we were on hold because of my son’s anxiety, but I’m starting to realize this has more to do with my worries and fears than it does with his.  You see, I’m a mother with anxiety who is parenting a child with anxiety and depression, and it’s a tough combination.

Every Bar/Bat Mitzvah we have attended as a family has been miserable for my son, and in turn, for me.  He hates getting dressed up in nice clothes, has no patience for the service, finds the party overwhelming, and usually spends the majority of the time sitting alone in a quiet area away from the crowd.  If my son didn’t suffer from anxiety and depression, we’d think he was just acting like a jerk, but we know that’s not the case.  Instead, we know he’s anxious about socializing, and seeking control to manage his emotions makes him rigid and angry.  So we try to engage him in small doses, but that takes a lot of energy and patience.  Once we get him to mingle a bit, then he’s ready to leave… and not in 10 minutes.  He wants to go NOW and has tried to drag me out the door on more than one occasion.  It’s hard to enjoy someone else’s simcha when your child is distressed.

So now it’s his turn.

If it were up to my son, we would do nothing for his Bar Mitzvah.  No service, no party, nothing.  Cue MY anxiety.  How can we not have a Bar Mitzvah for him?  What will my parents think?  My friends?  How can I face the Rabbi whom I admire and respect?  And what was the point of four years of Hebrew School? 

At one point last summer, we brought up the topic of the Bar Mitzvah plan, and in minutes he was hysterical crying.  Ok, so clearly, we aren’t having a blowout.  I’m actually more than happy to skip the big, fancy bash.  Talk about anxiety provoking!  The guest list!  The food!  The clothes!  I’m relieved to be able to set that all aside and focus on the service, have lox and bagels with our nearest and dearest, and call it a mitzvah.  So let’s assume that’s the party plan.  We will keep it small and simple.  Fine.  No problem.

But what about the service?  When forced to discuss it, my son says he’s willing to do something short and private with just our closest family.  At first, that seemed reasonable.  Maybe standing on the bimah leading a service is just too much for this kid to handle?  We could talk to the Rabbi and tell him this anxious child needs some special accommodations.  That seems fair, right?  But perhaps a modified service is actually a disservice?  How will he learn to cope with the things he doesn’t want to do if I let him cut corners and take the easy way out? 

But is his anxiety still really the issue here?  Once we set aside the elaborate social event, why all the opposition?  Stage fright?  I don’t think so.  This is a kid who has performed in plays since second grade.  The truth is he doesn’t see the point in all of this and doesn’t want to do the work, and it is going to take a lot of work.  He has not exactly been the most diligent Hebrew School student.   But isn’t that a reason to force him to do it?  Don’t we find growth in facing our challenges head on?  Shouldn’t I ensure he experiences hard work and the joy of success that comes as a result?

So I guess that brings the decision down to me, the anxious mother.  What can I handle?  Can I keep my anxiety in check to tolerate the anger of a 12-year-old who is preparing for his Bar Mitzvah under protest?  Can I tune out all the chatter from everyone else who is having an elaborate party for their super excited kid without feeling inadequate and apologetic?  Can I just focus on my child and my family and plan what makes sense for us?  So much easier said than done, but I know from past experience, making a commitment to something, and taking that first step makes the rest of it much easier.  So as I head down this road, I’ll keep reminding myself that requiring him to manage his responsibilities is no different than me doing the same and making the responsible parenting decision.  I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

Melissa is a married mother of two, dealing with her own anxiety as well as her children’s challenges. She is sharing her story to help others understand what it’s like to live and parent with mental illness.

THE RULE OF INTEREST

The Rule of Interest

My best friend and I have a rule of interest.

It started when I realized that, although we shared many common interests, the biggest of which being the Pokemon video games, there were some things that we didn’t have in common. My best friend, who speaks Japanese, is a big fan of anime and Japanese video games in the original language, which I can’t play. And they’re not a particularly big fan of Tolkien and other fantasy writers.

Both of us love talking about our interests, but after a childhood of learning from my therapist how to gauge if I was going overboard and if my conversation partner was interested in the topic at hand, I didn’t want to risk letting my guard down and messing up the best friendship I’d ever had.

Then, we came to an agreement. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but we agreed that we’re free to share with each other whatever might be on our minds, whatever’s piquing our interest at the time, even if the other person has no idea what to say back. We can say whatever we want, however much we want, and at the end, we’ll still be friends.

It felt like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I could share things with my best friend that I wanted to share for such a long time, that might not mean anything to them, but would mean the world to me that they would still care to be my friend afterwards.

They tell me about the games they play, the shows they watch, and the jokes I’d never understand because of the language barrier. And in return, I tell them about the story ideas I’m tossing around for the latest Tolkien writing challenge, the fanfiction I read with a new theory about a favorite character, and my cosplay progress.

Even if their response is just a smiley face or a thumbs up, it makes me feel like I’m not being a burden as a friend, like I’m not my childhood self who would ramble about whatever held my interest until the other person could escape.

I’d always feel terribly guilty after this was pointed out to me. What was wrong with me, I wondered, that even my happiness was too much to handle? Was that why I had so much trouble making friends, or was it that I wasn’t hiding my childhood compulsions well enough? As an adult, I think it’s a combination of both, but either way, it made me feel like I had to hide who I was and what I enjoyed in order to fit in.

Nowadays, most people know that, at the very least, I’m a Tolkien fan. Some people see my phone case with my favorite elf on the back or notice the special New Zealand envelopes and stamps I hung up in my office with characters from The Hobbit. Others have seen my collection of badges from conventions across four states that I’ve attended since my best friend introduced me to anime conventions - their favorite kind - in 2015.

But there’s always a line. It’s normal to express some interest, but it’s far harder to express a deeper interest. At minimum, I’d be weird. Some people might even consider it creepy.

This week, I was really excited about the sign-ups for the art prompts for the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang. This will be my second year participating in the challenge, where I’ll work with an artist to write a story 5,000 words or longer about a piece of art they’ve made. For me, that was something I was thrilled to wake up to on Sunday morning, something that got me out of bed unusually early on a weekend and had me running over to my computer before I could even think of anything else. I started a Word document where I began to document my favorite prompts. I was so thrilled to go through all the slides of options and form my opinions.

But then, I realized I had very few people to share my happiness with.

My joy is as intense as the negative obsessions that plagued my childhood. Sometimes, it’s something that I feel the need to share just bursting out of me and I can barely wait to find the closest person who I think might care. Sometimes, I feel the need to share it more than once. Sometimes, it comes out in a rush of words and happiness and it takes all my training to notice if the other person might not care.

Sometimes, I’m faced with a blunt “I don’t care.” My interactions with that person are never quite the same afterwards, even if I can outwardly pretend like nothing’s happened.

Sometimes, it’s the opposite - at a convention last year, I had the immense pleasure of spending a day with other people who loved Tolkien and other high fantasy writers as much as me, and everything seemed to make me smile bigger, whether it was someone understanding a joke in my cosplay or even just knowing the name of my favorite character.

I’d love to have this “rule of interest” with more people. It’s such a great feeling to share the things I care about and learn more about what my friends care about, and I find that it makes for a deeper and more fulfilling friendship if neither of us have to censor ourselves. Everyone has things they love, and for some people, it’s a way to get through harder times. I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be functioning like I am today - I might not even be alive - if not for the strength and enjoyment I drew from my positive obsessions.

Talking about my interests helps me beyond measure, and I never know when the same can be said of anyone I interact with in my daily life. Even if it’s someone I don’t know well, I try to follow the rule of interest - even if I know it isn’t mutual. It’s a small and easy way to be an ally to people living with mental illness, and it’s appreciated more than you’ll know.

Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.

A MOTHER'S DAY THANK YOU

A Mother’s Day Thank You

My mom loved tracking my “firsts” when I was little - first smile, first words, first steps. I can’t even imagine how she felt when I was three and had another, far less pleasant “first” - my first phobia, which led to a diagnosis of OCD.

Every parent wants their child to be healthy, and I’m sure my mom was terrified at the prospect of a life with an only child with such a severe mental illness that it manifested before I even went to preschool. Not to mention, as a stay-at-home mom, she was the primary person responsible for taking care of me as I learned how to navigate my way through the world - and my head.

From what I remember, the explanations began simply: she told me that I thought differently from other people, that my thoughts would go around and around in my head instead of leaving. I came to associate those thoughts as “bad,” and she would take me to a child therapist who would let me draw with her scented markers and pick a little plastic prize out of a bin for talking about my thoughts and learning ways to make them go away.

When I recently asked Mom about this time in my life, she said her main concern during my childhood was what to say. Anything could cause me to start obsessing about something new, and she was afraid to set me off, afraid of causing a problem for me. All she wanted was for things to be easy for me in my head, and I can’t imagine how it must have felt on the occasions when I did start obsessing about something new after an offhand remark. It must have felt like her own home was a minefield, and yet she never gave up.

What she said was great, but what she did truly shaped me as a person.

She got me help. Even when none of her friends had children with mental illness, even when it was shameful to discuss such things, she made sure that I had a therapist and later a psychiatrist who could help me in the best way possible. It is thanks to her courage in looking past the stigma that I am who I am today, and for that, I will be forever grateful.

In honor of her great courage, here are fifteen things I’m thankful for on Mother’s Day and every day:

Dear Mom,

Thank you for getting me help at a time when the stigma against mental illness was even more powerful than it is now.

Thank you for taking me to therapy whenever I needed it, and for helping my psychiatrist gauge medicines’ effects on me when I was too young to know the difference between doses.

Thank you for listening to endless rants about whatever topics occupied my mind, even before my therapist told me that conversation is like tennis, and I sometimes have to hit the ball back.

Thank you for cooking me separate meals throughout my childhood, even when it would have been a lot easier if I’d just eaten what you made for yourself and Dad.

Thank you for being willing to only eat at restaurants where I could get pasta or French fries for the majority of my life, even if it had to be every single time.

Thank you for putting your own anxiety aside and helping me through all the unfounded worries about whether I’d throw up - and being there for me the few times I actually did.

Thank you for being my (often only) friend when I was young, listening to all of my everyday concerns about homework and teachers that probably meant little to you, but everything to me.

Thank you for sticking up for me even when I did unconventional things, especially when it involved confronting my scary middle school principal who regularly called me a freak.

Thank you for waiting fourteen years to get a dog, even when you’d wanted one your whole life, because it was a phobia too strong for me to overcome for a long time.

Thank you for always dropping everything when I needed you. The only thing that kept me going that first night alone in the hospital was that you were on a plane to meet me.

Thank you for staying on the phone with me for hours on end during my crisis two years later, even when my thoughts scared you. Your support is the reason I didn’t lose a semester and graduated college on time.

Thank you for always celebrating my creativity, including when I began writing Tolkien fanfiction. I love that you always read my stories even if you don’t know the characters or context, and discussing writing with you is one of my favorite things to do.

Thank you for cheering for me at the parade last summer when I wore my Tolkien elf robes in public, no matter what you may have been thinking.

Thank you for using your experience with me to serve as an ally to other people with OCD, whether you educate about why saying “so OCD” is hurtful or share your kindness with a student dealing with similar problems.

Most of all, thank you for believing that there was something in my life worth fighting for, even when it meant incredible sacrifices on your part every single day. Because you didn’t give up on me at three, I am now an adult who lives alone, works full time, has friends, and has come out the other end of some pretty serious struggles with a smile on my face. That strength you say you admire? It started with you.

Love,

Ellie

Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.

SAVED BY STORIES

Saved By Stories

On Tuesday night, I watched Stephen Colbert interview the director and lead actors of the new movie “Tolkien” after a preview screening. I watched live as they all shared their stories of discovering a love for Tolkien’s works. Each discussed a different circumstance in their lives that led them to finding themselves in the books and movies, and Colbert summarized it quite nicely: he was “saved by stories.”

I won the ticket to this screening in a Tolkien trivia competition. I arrived alone, sat at a table with total strangers, and formed a small team. As the rounds went on, our little group floundered against the early frontrunner and best contender, a team more than twice our size. But we were determined. We closed the gap, formed a tie, and made it through the rest of the game plus three tiebreaker rounds before our victory.

It’s very rare that I feel as thrilled as I did that night. It’s not just that I was able to talk about my longest-lasting positive obsession, or even that I could prove my knowledge as someone who, thanks to my sex, has been questioned many times over whether I can be a “true nerd.”

What mattered the most to me that night was how people looked to me not as a source of random and useless facts from a world that doesn’t exist, or as someone whose obsessive thoughts make me strange, but as someone whose knowledge and passions mattered and could take me far. As the game got more heated and the questions got harder, I got shy about writing down answers. I thought I was looking too intense to my teammates, that they might think I was some sort of weirdo and not want to associate with me even if I could get the questions right.

I hesitated until one of my teammates encouraged me to just write down what was in my gut for the answers. He said that no matter what happened, he trusted my mind - and the others quickly joined in. Pencil flying over the paper, I was thought of as cool for remembering how to say “hobbits” in Sindarin (periannath, if you’re curious) and the process from the Silmarillion of how balrogs became balrogs.

After the victory, when we milled about the bar hoisting our prizes and eagerly chatting about the upcoming movie, I couldn’t have been happier. I showed every bit of knowledge I usually hide because I think it makes me seem strange, and people actually appreciated it and liked me for it. It was incredible, and the feeling resurfaced at the end of the screening, when the interview began to air.

Stephen Colbert recited poems from the books - Bilbo’s walking poem included - to general astonishment and applause from his audience at the Montclair Film Festival. It wasn’t strange that he had so much memorized or that he spoke in such depth about how the books helped him through his darkest times. It was brave, admirable, and all too familiar.

Losing myself in fantasy worlds and finding myself in them was the greatest pleasure of my childhood. Books took me away from obsessing over germs in the air or on my hands or already inside of me. They took me away from the times I was hungry because it was so much easier to not eat than to face my OCD head-on. They took me away from a life where adults who took pity on me were my only friends and brought me to a place where all sorts of people came together, no matter their past, and won.

No matter what happened, they won. It didn’t matter if they were facing a small skirmish or the war to end the Third Age, or clinging to the slopes of Mount Doom with nothing but hope and friendship. Sauron’s tower of Barad-Dur falls. The heroes win.

In all the times I’ve felt hopeless when faced with a life with OCD - even now, as I’m succeeding in keeping obsessive thoughts at bay, I know there will be times in the future when I relapse as I have before - Tolkien’s stories inspire me. And I was even more inspired to watch my museum experience come alive in the movie and see Tolkien’s life through his eyes, the incredible love and horrifying war that I can’t help but find in his works.

It’s my dream, one day, to do something similar - to turn pain into prose, to use stories to help others not feel quite so alone in their heads. And in the meantime, I’ll keep rereading and rewatching my favorite stories, starting with a rare edition of “The Two Towers” I was able to find in Hebrew.

Like Stephen Colbert and his interviewees, I was saved by stories. If the price of this is a passion that makes me jump for joy, I’m thrilled to find I am less ashamed of sharing it as time goes on. Just as I’ve found the stigma of nerdiness decreasing, I hope that one day, I can share more about my life with OCD openly and without shame or fear of losing respect or friendship.

In the words of Samwise Gamgee, the books and movies couldn’t carry my burden for me, but they carried me - and I’m proud to carry the passion and happiness they gave me forward into my life as a writer and beyond.

Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.

AWARENESS ISN'T ENOUGH

Awareness Isn’t Enough

Thirteen years after my diagnosis, I told a friend about my OCD for the first time.

I was sitting on a bus with some new friends on a teen tour, listening to a fellow trip participant as he described what growing up with Asperger’s was like for him. I uttered the words “I have OCD” for the first time then, half expecting a sudden thunderclap or bolt of lightning to remind me that such things were not meant to be discussed.

Instead, I was listened to and respected. It was strange how this made me feel more included than anything else on the trip, especially when I’d believed throughout my childhood that admitting to my diagnosis meant never having a real friend.

It was my first step to trying to be more open about my life, which I’d always avoided out of fear and shame - the powerful stigma surrounding mental illness. I didn’t know anyone else who lived with mental illness, and even though some members of my family told me they were anxious about things too, it was never quite the same.

I was reminded of this moment at a seminar earlier in the week focused on destigmatizing mental health. The presenter began by sharing her story before asking if anyone had questions. I was surprised at how many people opened up and were able to ask about themselves and the people in their lives who they wanted to help. It was so encouraging to see how people could talk openly without any shame, whether they expressed their concern over a friend’s well-being or shared their experience of going to therapy or taking medication.

A personal connection seems to be the key that opens so many doors. It works better than anything else I’ve seen, and it’s why I share my story here and with my friends and family. It’s even how I got close with my best friend - after we met at a Pokemon game tournament, I knew we had common interests, but it wasn’t until they took out a bottle of anxiety medication at dinner and offered an explanation without batting an eyelash that we truly began to bond.

These moments are what I think of when Mental Health Awareness Month rolls around each May. The word “awareness” trips me up - as someone who was diagnosed before I can even remember, I’ve never known a life without OCD. By default, it’s something I’ve always been aware of. But there’s a big difference, for me, between being aware of something and actually doing something about it.

As a child, my only awareness of any kind of mental illness besides OCD came from lists in textbooks, with words like bipolar and depression and autism thrown around with no deeper meaning beyond what I needed to study for a test. It wasn’t until I met people with these and other conditions that I began to really understand what sorts of things people lived with, and even though I couldn’t understand the intricacies of what was going on in their minds, I began to have sympathy for situations where they behaved in atypical ways that others considered weird or annoying. And even with my own experience, I was still surprised to hear the different ways mental illness manifested in different people. Even with awareness of my own life, there was - and is - still so much I didn’t know.

I could list facts about mental illness for school, but I couldn’t say why it was so hard for a friend with social anxiety to go to an event she wanted to go to. I knew from school that autism and Asperger’s were often talked about in the same context, but I didn’t understand why some of my friends felt strongly that they wanted to identify as one or the other, and were offended when people got it wrong. In other words, I knew mental illness existed, but aside from living my own life, I wasn’t doing anything to get rid of the stigma that has felt so oppressive for so many years.

Learning the facts about brain chemistry and acknowledging that mental illness exists are definitely important steps, but expressing this knowledge through compassion really changes things. Listening to a friend in need, supporting someone in even the simplest way, and sharing stories of mental illness can make an enormous difference towards breaking down the stigma.

I think my session this week would have gone completely differently if the presenter hadn’t shared her story about depression. My own life would be a lot more isolated if not for the people who shared their stories with me and helped me feel safe to open up. Hopefully, this blog can be another step in the long but very worthy journey towards destigmatizing mental illness.

This year, during Mental Health Awareness Month, catch up on the basics. Get an idea of what mental illness is, and maybe even learn some facts or statistics. And I also hope you’ll find a way to learn more stories, whether here at No Shame On U or with your friends, family, co-workers, or acquaintances. Consider sharing your experience as either a person living with mental illness or an ally - you never know who you’ll inspire to make a change, and who they’ll inspire in turn.

It is in this way, rather than simply being aware, that we can truly begin to smash the stigma and create a world where no one’s lived experiences are out of bounds for discussion.

Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.