The Three-Digit Phone Call

        "Hello, is this the Piper residence? Will you take a call from your son?"

      It's the psychiatric hospital calling on my adult child's behalf. The caller ID displays only the hospital's prefix in a distant zip code. Three digits tell me two things: he's safe...and he's sick.

       How is it possible that my heart can both leap and sink at the same time?
       When I see "510," I think: "Thank God!" and "Oh no!"      
       Since it's the third hospital in a year, I have learned a few things about talking to my inpatient. I don't ask how or why he got there, because his account will be unreliable. Anything he says in the first few days is likely to be incoherent, belligerent, or maudlin. His mood will be unstable for up to fourteen days. When his conversation turns to ranting and blaming, I disengage. "Why don't we talk when we're both less out of sorts?" Click.
        I don't promise anything, If he needs something, his social worker will tell me. I don't negotiate with the disease. It's not my job to find benefits, a bed or a flight.
       It's my job to keep myself from drowning.
       I read somewhere that congruence exists when one's talk, actions and feelings match up. I am a long way from congruence. As far as what my son HEARS, my walk and my talk are consistent:  when you're ready to consider a long-term treatment situation, we will help. Until then, it's yours to figure out.
       As for what I FEEL, I FEEL like getting on a plane and flying to his bedside. I FEEL like putting him in a taxicab from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi River just to set eyes on him. I FEEL like sending money.
       But those actions constitute a rescue. Rescue occurs when you do something for a competent adult that they can do for themselves. And if he's competent enough to find the dope man, he's competent to find the Drop-In Center. Ditto for the medication: if he can find money for booze and weed, he can find $10 for the prescription that would keep him stable all month.
        "Act your way into right thinking" was just one of those yellowed 12-step phrases that hung on the wall at my home group...until I had to do it.  And I do mean acting: I deserve an Emmy for some of the performances I have given in the last year while my son plays Relapse Roulette.
       But maybe the congruence is starting to happen. Consider: when a hospital begins discharge planning, their first attempt is usually to reunite the patient with family, especially for youth. My son's doctor asked me to consider bringing him home. I did.
      I got very still and pretended he was arriving at the airport at 8:45 that night  - with no agreement about rehab, no ownership of his illness, no movement forward -  and I did a gut-check. (It's an old therapy trick: you make your mind shut up a minute, and listen to your gut, because it will tell you the truth.)
       And it felt...sickening. The prospect of living the last four years over again filled me with a palpable dread that made me all but swoon.
       I was polite but resolute when I emailed the social worker to decline being part of any homecoming plan.
       Poet Charles Bukowski once said he'd rather drive from New York to LA in reverse than live certain parts of his life over again.  That goes for me, too, brother. As of a few months now, the thought of hitting rewind is WORSE than the anxiety about what the next years will bring.
       Am I "acting my way into right thinking?" Or just acting? Some days it's both.

Yes, This Will Be on the Final

Jill Piper's Totally Unscientific Quiz for Addicts' Moms.

          An addict's mom has to be on her toes to get through the day. How would you handle the typical situations below?

          1.Your adult child's phone bill comes.  Do you:

                   a. Stuff in drawer with others

                   b. Divert that amount to new custom-fitted bras

                   c. Pay it because as long as she has a phone you know where she is

          2. What's the best binge food for crying jag:

               a. Birthday cake

               b. Rotel dip

               c.  Ashes

           3.     Your friend's child just finished medical school. Do you:

                a. counter that your kid is taking a “gap year”

                b. manage icy smile 

                c. say Serenity Prayer through clenched teeth

           4.     Micro amounts of cash disappear from your wallet when your adult child                        drops by. Do you:

                  a. Leave a few $1's and $5's lying around so addict won't get to your real                      money

                  b. Hide wallet in zip compartment of vacuum cleaner

                  c.  Tell yourself you must have bought something you forgot about

5.     Your son lives in a house with no utilities. Lately he's been asking you to pick him up so he can shower & use your computer to “look for work.” You:

                   a. See his number on the Caller ID and let it go to voicemail

                   b. Figure if he's resourceful enough to buy drugs, he can figure this out too

                   c. Drop everything and work on his problem

                    

                6.  My favorite film or TV show about addiction or alcoholism is:

                    a. I 'll Cry Tomorrow with Susan Hayward

                    b. My Name Is Bill W. with James Woods

                    c. Nurse Jackie with Edie Falco

                    d. The Lost Weekend with Ray Milland

                    e. Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon

                7. Who's more gratifying to blame:

                    a. Child's second grade teacher

                    b. Husband's side of the family

                    c. Self           

                 8.  Your son wants $5 for cigarettes. You:

                      a. give him $5  if he promises to go to a meeting

                      b. withhold $5 until after he's been to a meeting

                      c. buy pack of cigarettes and smoke them yourself

Self-Scoring:  The correct answer is there are no “correct” answers. ( You knew that was coming, right?) I have done “all of the above,” and a lot of them more than once. We respond to our children's addictions in a thousand different ways and employ a thousand different coping strategies. Some make us feel better for a few minutes, some make us feel worse. I have found that if I give myself permission to feel everything on this conflicting, heartbreaking continuum, I can tolerate the ambiguity of my situation. As long as there's cake.  - Jill Piper

If Only Longing Would Fix It

        While visiting New Orleans recently, I took in the World War II Museum. The experience begins with a simulation: you board a train, you feel it move across the rails, and through the use of film, you see a black and white America pass by the windows. Most of the young soldiers have never been more than fifty miles from home, and their future is uncertain.

       And their mothers' job was to let them go....into separation, danger and not knowing.

Those mothers had little expectation of getting word from their sons, perhaps a letter or card from time to time. Others would get that dreadful telegram from the state department.

       Theirs was some serious waiting.

       When I lost touch with my faraway son a few weeks ago – no phone, no texts, no Facebook – it took me to a new level of panic. As moderns, we expect to reach anyone, any time. Nightmarish scenarios multiplied themselves in my mind: he's friendless, he's jailed, he's overdosed.

How frequently the metaphor of war is invoked to talk about addiction: the “war on drugs,” “battling an addiction,” “in the trenches” and so on. And it's a comparison not without merit. Sometimes drugs feel that way to me, that my son is off fighting a dangerous enemy that is beyond my comprehension.

     Then I remembered the example of those World War II moms. I can wait fretfully, until I am paralyzed with worry, or I can contribute to the war effort . My most important job – and maybe the only job within my power - is to pray.

Loss of Focus

When my young adult son moved to the West Coast three months ago, among the wreckage he left behind was a 2002 Ford Focus. It's easy enough to shred his unpaid bills, but I have a view of his junker out my kitchen window every day. There are worse things to look at than a GM rustbucket, I guess, but this car thing has gotten personal.

For months I ignored it. But increasingly it's become a dirty, daily reminder of the circumstances that brought it to my doorstep: I moved it here during his hospitalization last July. The come-apart was cinematic in scope, featuring glass breakage, a three-day disappearance, and mystery abrasions to his extremities.

I'm not certain what triggered this episode, but I suspect pills, weed and a steady contempt for his legitimate meds had something to do with it. While he was at large, I began to worry that he'd kill somebody in his car. So I used my spare key and just took it. What would I rather deal with: someone's accident-shattered life or another of his irrational tirades? 

Last summer I had high hopes for his dual diagnosis treatment. Ditto for the three sober living situations since. But sobriety's just not in the cards for him right now. As long as he's out there, I know I can count on the disease to cheerfully refund his misery. So I plan to outwait it. 

Meanwhile, there's this eyesore in my driveway. 

How, in less than a year, does someone turn a gently driven sedan into a crackmobile? Not only was the transmission locked up, the console was ripped out, the grill fell off the front, the body has been beaten with a baseball bat, and cigarette burns have made Swiss cheese out of the cloth seats. On humid days, does the feral smell come from the rat droppings or "product" still clinging to the interior? 

Still, I continued to store his car thinking, "Pretty soon he's going to get his act together and he'll need a car to go to work," or "Once he has a job, he'll save up enough to fix it himself."

Please. As Spanky used to say on The Little Rascals, “Wish cotton was a monkey.”

It dawned on me that I myself have been as stuck as that car while he yo-yo's between treatment and relapse. I've felt unable to move forward, useless to anybody, badly beaten up and sorely in need of an interior detail. 

Last week I couldn't look at it one more day. I called and donated the car to charity. I was never so glad to see the back of anything in my life.

Removing the car opened up space in my driveway, but not nearly as much space as it made in my head. I have heard it put this way: like his Ford, I can let go, or be dragged.

Enneagrammatic

For 20 years I’ve been running a numbers game. In my attempts at enlightenment I have consulted the twelvesteps (Bill Wilson), the fouragreements (Don Miguel Ruiz), the seven critical choices (Dr. Phil), and the five people you meet in heaven (Mitch Albom). For a historical perspective, I also reviewed the four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile)—the Classical Era’s answer as to why people are the way they are.

Despite these and other sincere efforts, my 19th nervous breakdown arrived right on schedule at mid-life. Always a pushover for a self-understanding scheme with a numerical rubric, I signed up for an Enneagram workshop (from the Greek prefix ennea meaning nine).
Turns out, the nine-point personality system was my One True Thing.
According to Helen Palmer,  author of The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life,  the Enneagram is an ancient map to the nine basic personality filters. While it has its roots in the monastic traditions of the Middle East and Asia, the Enneagram corresponds to the nine psychological types recognized in today’s counseling professions: the Perfectionist, the Giver, the Performer, the Individualist, the Observer, the Investigator, the Enthusiast, the Protector and the Peacemaker.
“The Enneagram gives us a very clear map of the nine different ways we fall asleep to our lives and respond to life on automatic,” explains Sandra C. Smith, M. Div. and Certified Enneagram Consultant in Asheville, North Carolina.  “When we respond to life from an automatic posture (to paraphrase Jesus) we do not have eyes to see and ears to hear.”
Smith says spirituality is as individual as personality. “Our journey to wholeness will involve a deeper understanding of both of these. Self-observation is key for personal growth and spiritual development. The foundational theological question is ‘Who am I?’”
Each of the nine personality types has a certain filter that guides one’s attention down a particular path.  Do you know someone who has to have everything “just so”?   How about the person who’s always at the center of some drama?  What about someone who requires a lot of time to themselves?   According to the wisdom of the Enneagram, each of these basic temperaments has its virtues and its vices, and no one type is “better” than any other.
Rather than offer another behavioral inventory, the study of the Enneagram goes deep toward discovering  a person’s motivation and habits of attention. If we can understand what motivates us and how our attention is hijacked by our habitual responses, we can discover the direction in which our spiritual work needs to go.
Sandra C. Smith“We really do have two selves, an automatic self and a present self,” Smith continues.  “The automatic self, when we are in it, is in lockstep with our patterns and knee-jerk reactions, and we’ve fallen asleep to life.  The automatic self sees reality through a specific filter that is shaped by our core fears and avoidances. This automatic self is really a contracted posture, both of the body and the heart, and it resists the present moment.”
Presence is the state in which spiritual growth is possible.   “If I am awake and fully alive, I am resting in the lap of the holy, and when I move into a place of essence, I can offer love and compassion,”  Smith explains. “When we are all there in our present self, type structure fades.  When I am present, it is in that place of presence that I become receptive.”
At the two Enneagram workshops I attended, I discovered I am a Four, also known in various “Ennea-books”as the Individualist, the Tragic-Romantic, or Artistic temperament.  (Because there are many teachers who have different names for each type, it’s more uniform and neutral to refer to someone as a Two or a Seven than with the descriptive nomenclature “Giver” or “Enthusiast,” which can be mistaken for a label.)
Fours value themselves for their individuality, their specialness, their originality.  At the obnoxious end, the expression of our “terminal uniqueness” can be so aggressive that its turns people off.   We are attracted to the extremes in life, and we are comfortable with despair and beauty, both our own and others’.  A phrase like “the unbearable lightness of being” makes actual sense to a Four.  What we’re not so great at, it seems, is doing ordinary stuff, like going to a job five days a week or tolerating an uneventful stretch in a relationship or task. In fact, the thought that another one out of every nine personalities is ALSO a Four is a massive affront to my Individualism with a Capital I.
At the end of the last workshop, Sandra Smith asked me, “Jill, what would your life be without drama?”  My first thought was, “Dunh,  I would cease to exist,” but I’m finding that’s not true.
When I take a step back from being a prisoner of shifting emotional states, what I find is that stillness feels pretty nice.  When the people around me report that they are finding me too intense, I try to believe them.  Drama, I’m finding at 50,  is better indulged as a  spectator sport than as a participant,  so I’m getting my intensity from Battlestar Galactica on DVD andWicked on tour.  When I’m tempted to create some chaos, I try one of the breathing techniques  I learned in the workshop and become present to whatever I’m feeling, and let that sadness or nostalgia or anger just have its voice.  The description of  a Four’s inner state “nailed” me closer than anything I’ve ever read, and I have hopes that I can move away from my investment in being seen as an “original” to a genuine connection with holy origin.  Being present is not the same thing as being seen.

My Achilles' Heel

At first the ache in my left heel was little more than a tenderness when I put my feet on the floor in the morning. I had no way of knowing this condition would impair me for nearly a year, culminate in surgery and educate me in the ways of chronic pain.
Plantar fasciitis, my diagnosis, is an inflammation of the fascia, the bands of tissue that connect the heel to the balls of the foot. On X-rays, a comma-shaped fragment of bone is the visual clue that the condition has been present for some time. The spur is not the cause of the pain, but is evidence of the body’s attempt to repair the torn fascia.
Not to put too fine a point in it, but the diagnosis came as I had just concluded a period of deep darkness and disorganization. My mother and father had both died of dementia after years of suffering; lifelong friends had moved away; a hit and run accident had cost me thousands of dollars and months of discomfort; my childhood home had been demolished.
To a chapter at the end of which I desperately wanted to place a period, plantar fasciitis came as an ellipsis…a three-point punctuation mark meaning no end in sight.
For months, pain dictated my routine. Instead of taking orders from my mind, my foot was in charge of where I went, what I said yes to, and how many productive hours I had on a given day. My physical and emotional selves were stalled at the same intersection; I couldn’t move forward and I couldn’t go back.
Our attempts to understand the origins of illness are as old as the Bible. In John 9:3, followers of Jesus ask him, “Who sinned: this man or his parents that he was born blind?” In Biblical times, suffering was commonly attributed to sin. The mind/body connection is a frequent topic on talk shows. Oprah has said that when her clothes fit too tight, viewers can accurately conclude “she’s going through some times.”
A newscaster friend of mine, who does three newscasts a day, community events and all the duties of husband and father, broke his arm recently while riding his bike. He interpreted the fracture as an opportunity to examine his tendency to overbook himself. “I took my fractured wrist as a gigantic stop sign from my higher power,” he said. “As I pondered the cast and all the multi-tasking I am prone to attempt, I took a deep breath and asked for God’s help in slowing down…It might be the best break I ever had—an opportunity to slow down and get in tune with God’s will.”
While many Christians have learned the habit of mining it for meaning when illness comes our way, I wondered if I had done anything to court the pain in my foot by being stuck in so many places.
Did the emotional vulnerability of grief and care-giving predispose me to injury, or did I feel fragile as the result of months of inescapable heel pain?
Dr. David Forbes, a founder and director of Nashville Integrated Medicine and trustee of the American Holistic Medicine Association, said the subject doesn’t lend itself to oversimplification. “To me there are two polar opposites that are frequently voiced, neither of which I find accurate or helpful:
“The standard Western notion is that it would be absurd to liken what’s going on with a patient’s health to the events in their life in any kind of causative way,” he says.
“The other pole is that there’s some kind of linear, easily definable cause and effect link that would sound like, ‘I’ve got this illness so let me figure out what I did wrong.’ That’s very popular in this kind of fundamentalist new age approach.”
Dr. Forbes favors the notion that everything is deeply connected. “At the same time there is a mystery there that we cannot fully comprehend. So we have to step very lightly in drawing too many direct linear connections, particularly to the degree that it causes tension and anxiety.”
There are common conditions that have a significant component of “here’s where I swallow my stress,” according to Dr. Forbes,. These include upper back and neck pain, stomach discomfort, lower back pain and bowel issues. “Stress always plays out in body tension and where we hold tightness. Everybody packs that differently.”
The thrust of integrated medicine (also variously called holistic and alternative medicine) is to acknowledge the relationship between not only lifestyle and health, but life circumstance.
Forbes said it can be helpful for people to connect the dots. “If they’ve come from the standard Western background they need to see if, for instance, the fact that they’ve been swallowing their feelings all their lives might be connected to their gastritis.”
But don’t blame yourself. “There’s also an enormous number of people who connect those dots too tightly and get completely wrapped up in anxiety and tension of ‘how did I do this to myself?’ That’s why I think it’s important to hold a center line that leaves open the very real mystery that we don’t know exactly why something has happened.” While holistic medicine looks at the whole person, it’s still grounded in medicine, not an emotional scavenger hunt.
“I believe there are many reasons why (medical) things happen, only one of which is that something has happened in our lives that needs to be corrected,” he said. “That’s definitely a possibility but not the only possibility. We have to honor the mystery in that. Holding that mystery always at the center of it is what’s essential to giving ourselves a break while we look for remedies. We look for links but with a very soft, gentle heart.
“My ultimate measuring stick for anything I’m going to engage in with a patient has to answer to the law of love or it’s a miss.”
Stephen Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, used an illustration from medicine to make a point in his non-fiction book about living an authentic life, The War of Art. Pressfield cites the work of a Jungian psychologist whose specialty is working with people who have been diagnosed with cancer. Once they embrace the deeper, more grounded perspective they acquire from a brush with mortality, it’s remarkable how often their cancers go into remission. Pressfield writes,
Is it possible… that the disease itself evolved as a consequence of actions taken (or not taken) in our lives? Could our unlived lives have exacted their vengeance upon us in the form of cancer? And if they did, can we cure ourself, now, by living these lives out?
It’s something to think about. But back to my foot.
I wish I could tell you I thought happy thoughts and the pain went away. But that’s not what happened. I had surgery. I guess the truest thing you can say is a medical solution led me out of spiritual situation.
The textbook of Alcoholics Anonymous contains the before and after stories of recovering alcoholics from all walks of life. One of the stories, written by a doctor, contains this passage: “When I stopped living in the problem and began living in the answer, the problem went away.”
He was talking about his problem with alcohol, of course, but he could have been talking about my left foot.
(This article originally appeared on explorefaith.org.)

Sunday Morning Rebel

Just when you think a teenager could use God in his or her life, that’s precisely when they’re likeliest to experiment with disbelief.
After years of attending Sunday school and temple, bible school and church camps, teens often need to go on a spiritual quest independent of the family. Parents can feel dismayed when they find themselves alone in the pew after their churchgoing children hit 13 and older.
According to Niles Goldstein, founding rabbi of the New Shul congregration in Manhattan and author of eight books, including Gonzo Judaism, resistance to the family’s religious observance goes with the territory of the teen years. “Parents would do well to start by recognizing these are human beings in transition,” says Goldstein. “They are smack dab in the middle of this space where questioning and rebelling against everything, including of course religion, is to be expected.”
Teens are, in fact, programmed to explore the concept of “who am I and where do I fit in,” counsels Mimi Doe, author of Spiritual Parenting and Nurturing Your Teenager’s Soul. “That’s the basic spiritual journey of every teen.” Doe encourages parents to welcome this exciting and necessary phase of self-discovery, even if it clashes with the family belief system. Instead, parents panic, saying: “This is the religion we have gifted you with, this is who our family has been, this is who you are,” Doe explains. “And the teen is saying, ‘I need to find that our for myself.’ ”
Rebellion wears many faces, ranging from “oversleeping” and indifference to open controversy.  When teens say, “Jennifer’s mother doesn’t make her go” or “I don’t get anything out of it, it’s boring,” those are statements that are accurate for them, says Rev. Eyleen Farmer, a youth minister in the Episcopal Church.  
“Underneath those excuses, they’re saying, this same tired old stuff doesn’t touch my life. When they say, ‘I don’t believe in God,’ I’ll say,  ‘Okay, tell me about the god you don’t believe in.” Often teens will describe a deity who is judgmental and punitive. “Maybe this kind of a god needs to be abandoned,” Farmer adds.
Churches fail to connect with teens at many points of entry. Girls may feel detached from liturgies steeped in masculine language. Plus, kids accustomed to the pace and pizzazz of the internet can find it difficult to engage with sacred texts such as the Bible, the Torah or the Book of Common Prayer.
And on Sunday mornings particularly, Farmer says, don’t underestimate old-fashioned sloth.

HOLY FIRES & SACRED COWS
Your child has a spiritual journey that is not yours.
Understanding that teens are on a spiritual quest is critical to navigating this passage, according to Mimi Doe: "This is not an intrinsic threat.  It’s an opportunity to create, not a divide, but a bridge between us.  By interpreting it as a betrayal, as opposed to an exploration, that’s our issue about our job—our fear that our child will turn against what we hold so dear.
"Then we set up a tug of war, and do we really want a tug of war over spirit?"
There are already many competitors lined up to hijack your child’s spiritual yearnings. Teenagers come equipped with restlessness, passion, and wildly creative energy, all components of, what Rev. Farmer calls, a “holy fire” just waiting to be ignited:
"Most of the time this passion attaches to the secular world, with the irresistible seductions of power, sex and fame. That energy and God-given beauty gets claimed and tamed by the powers that people of faith try to oppose.  We struggle to help our kids resist false gods because we struggle with them ourselves.
"Part of our children’s most intense yearning is to know that within them is some spark that is no less than love itself."
The point of a spiritual life, continues Farmer, isn’t to turn children into more regular churchgoers.  “It’s to touch some place most authentic in ourselves. That can lead to a desire to be in community, although it may not look like coming in through the front door.”
Another door into the life of authentic (rather than handed-down) faith my be service to others,  in part because it capitalizes on a component of the teenage heart already in existence—a crusading generosity and quest for justice.
Rabbi Goldstein also recommends service work as a place for teens to engage their faith. “We are commanded to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Maybe through a soup kitchen or a non-profit, kids can put in a couple of hours of age-appropriate work. The idea is to get it out of their heads and into their guts.”
When it’s time for children in his congregation to prepare for the bar and bat mitzvahs, he asks them to engage with six of the traditional practices of Judaism—not just memorization of texts.  The practices may include dietary law, prayer discipline, and ritual. “I try to make sure there’s an experiential component to this passage [into adulthood].  You can’t know what it means to be a Jew by reading a book.”
Goldstein adds, “I don’t care how their religious journey unfolds, but I would not be doing my job as their rabbi if I didn’t explore at least a sampling of some of the ancient and powerful practices of the faith.”

TO BE THERE, OR NOT TO BE THERE
You cannot dictate the contents of your child’s heart, but you can still uphold family ritual.
All the clergy represented above thought it fair to insist on teenagers attending some kind of worship. Mimi Doe calls it a “habit of reverence.”
“I think it’s critical to set aside a time that teens observe a quiet worship time, and I believe kids embrace that structure,” she explains, adding that parents may need to be open to a teen’s preference for a walk in the woods or a shift in the soup kitchen. Moreover, Doe contends that parents need to be consistent about their own commitment, and come from a position of clarity:  “It’s as true at 2 as it is at 18: ‘we believe that Sunday (or Saturday) is sacred, and in our family we go to church.’ Whatever these habits of reverence are that we have created throughout our family’s life, these habits stick with them for the rest of their lives.”
Other clergy recommend letting children attend services with their friends in other congregations.  If you want accountability, ask teens to bring you the bulletin from the service they attended.
“Perhaps the greatest argument for pushing ‘insistence’ more than ‘backing off’ is that nowhere other than faith-based places is ‘goodness’ the goal,” writes Rabbi Micah Greenstein of Temple Israel congregation in Memphis.
“In school, the goal is doing well.  Among peers, it’s popularity and material success. In society, it’s ‘happiness.’ While virtually all parents say they want their children to value goodness over popularity, material success and narcissism, there is no place other than church or synagogue whose message is ‘doing good’ versus ‘doing well.’ ”

(This article originally appeared on explorefaith.org.)