It’ll Never Change

I took a possible-suicide call from a kid tonight.  We had just finished supper.  Geoff was sitting at the kitchen table visiting with me while I loaded the dishwasher. The kids had been sent off to various rooms of the house to pick up before heading upstairs to get into PJ’s. The phone rang.  Geoff answered it and handed it to me.

“Hi Ruth,” said the pleasant voice on the other end.

I said hello, and asked how everything was going.

There was a choking sound, and then the sobbing started.  I looked over at Geoff as I reached for the towel to dry my hands.  I raised my eyebrows at him, and waved as I headed into another room to talk in private. He stood up and assumed dish duty.

“What’s going on?” I asked into the phone.

“I’m in trouble.  Can you talk to me for a few minutes?”

“Are you safe right now?” I wanted to know.

“Yeah,” came the tentative answer.  And then she proceeded to tell me about a fight she’d just had with her family.

“It’s never going to change,” she cried.  “It’s never going to get any better.  Nothing is ever going to change.”

I listened for a while longer as she described the argument she’d had with her parents.  She described her frustration.  Her despair.

“I don’t know what to do.”

She had told me several weeks previously that she had been thinking about suicide.  She had planned how she could do it.  So I asked tonight if she was thinking about hurting herself.  She erupted in another round of sobbing.

“I don’t know,” she said.  “I just don’t know what to do anymore.  It’s never going to get any better.  So why keep trying when everything I do is wrong?  It’ll never change.”

We talked about how she could get through the rest of the night.  I asked all the questions for assessing suicide risk, and we made a plan for follow-up.  By the time we were done talking she’d calmed down quite a bit. She told me her plan for handling the rest of the evening.  She assured me that she wouldn’t hurt herself.  She would be okay.  She’d see me tomorrow.

I hung up the phone.  I could hear the commotion upstairs as the kids were getting ready for bed.  I took a moment to breathe.  Then I turned off the lights and headed upstairs.

“Who called?”  Kathryn, age ten, wanted to know.

“Just somebody who needed to talk,” I gave my typical work-related answer.

“Oh,” she said.

A short time later I said goodnight to the kids.  And tonight I held on to each one of them for just a few extra seconds.

“Mom,” Benson, age five, groaned when I requested another goodnight hug. “I already gived you one.”

I explained that tonight I was kind of feeling like I needed two.

He smiled.  Just playing hard to get.  And hugged me hard around the neck.

“Is that enough?” he asked exasperatedly.

The little girls, age three, took my request for extra hugs tonight as being some sort of game.  They didn’t really get it.  But were happy to oblige me with long, repeated goodnight hugs, and sticky kisses.

I climbed into bed for a few minutes with the older two girls, ages seven and ten. I crawled in under the covers between the two of them.  Anna’s head immediately came to rest on my shoulder.  Kathryn threw a leg across me.

“Mom,” Kathryn asked, “is that person who called tonight gonna be okay?”

I said that I thought the person would be just fine.

She didn’t say any more.  The three of us laid together quietly for a few minutes, snuggling.  I was thinking about the kid who’d called tonight. Praying that she would find her way through the night, and the weeks and months ahead.  And thinking about our own kids.

We’re not far away from the time when they’re going to feel a lot of the things that young girl is feeling tonight.  They’ll hit their teen years and likely struggle with feeling stupid, hopeless, ugly, frustrated, hurt, lonely, depressed.  They’ll wrestle with whether they can trust their parents enough to let us know how they’re feeling.  And at the same time, they’ll probably resent us for being so intrusive.  They’ll need to pull away from us.  And find their own way.

And as they move through that whole phase of their lives, I’ll still just be me. Mom.  Wanting extra rounds of goodnight hugs on nights when work gets a little too hard for me.  And wanting to snuggle with them for just a few minutes more, just one more time. I’ll miss the heads leaning on my shoulders, and the legs thrown across me.  The hugs that actually hurt sometimes.  And the little bodies that meld into mine when they hug.

But for tonight I got all those things.

It’s funny, though.  The kid I spoke with on the phone tonight ached inside, thinking that nothing in life would ever change.  And here I am, aching, knowing that it will.

C – Thanks for letting me tell your story – R