It’s so hard watching T-man struggle through this pain, knowing there’s not much I can do other than just be here for him…
I’m not always great at just BE-ing. Not when I’m watching anguish shoot across my child’s face while he fights overwhelming feelings.
Here’s the real irony of the situation. I spent years (YEARS!) telling BrightSide “I just need you to listen.” When I came to him fresh off a bad day or frustrated with the kids or simply needing to talk, for a long time we’d end up banging heads in the process. He’d offer suggestions, ways to make it better, and I’d throw up my hands with “Don’t try to fix it. Just be there. I just need you to hear what I have to say.”
And now here I am, stuck in a situation I desperately want to “fix” (as if I could even begin to take T-man’s pain away), and all I can do is BE THERE…it’s my turn to sit and listen, take it all in, and not insist on making it right.
It seems like everyone goes through some kind of Who am I? phase. For most of us it’s a developmental, what-do-I-want-to-do-with-my-life sort of thing. But this is no simple exercise for T-man.
For an 11-year-old, he’s dealing with some pretty heavy stuff.
He’s struggling to find more than just his place in this world – as a black student in a school where he’s in the minority, or an adopted son in our transracial family. He’s also wrestling with the question of who he IS, and there are times when it’s tearing him up.
For me, the question “who is T-man” may have a lot of answers but it’s not overwhelming. He’s a young, biracial (although his peers see him as black) boy who’s growing toward his teenage years far too quickly for my liking. He’s smart, funny, and athletic. T-man can fearlessly do front and back flips on the trampoline but balks at heights. He cares deeply about what his peers think of him, and he has a razor sharp belief in what’s fair. He came into our family through adoption and has been our son for most of his life.
T-man grapples with some of these areas, but this month he finally let us see how much he’s bothered by a missing piece of his biological history.
I hear the question “Who am I?” and think about all the things that make T-man, well…T-man. But for him, there’s a whole section that’s been lost. He doesn’t know his birthfather, never had the chance to meet him, so T-man’s not just wondering “Who am I?” He’s wondering “What part of him makes me who I am?”
Except ‘wondering’ doesn’t quite capture T-man’s state of mind. BrightSide and I had a heart-to-heart with him recently, and the void caused by that missing knowledge caused him actual pain. I watched it flit across his face as he tried to express his feelings about a birthfather he couldn’t even picture…my boy was broken that night, mourning the loss of a man he never knew, and there wasn’t a single thing I could do. Except be there.
So I guess I have to work at being okay with just being there. Listening when he wants to talk, and giving him a hug when he doesn’t. It won’t be easy, but then again neither is this whole parenting gig.
Riddle from the Middle 