“Daddy, You Need to Take Me Back to the Hospital”

Maddie was crushing me at Anomia.

She always did. She played that game with a focus she didn't hand out to much else, and she almost never lost. That afternoon was no exception. She was fast, she was smug about it, and she was having a good time.

She was home on a day pass. She had been in the hospital for a month and a half then. The passes were the thing she looked forward to more than anything else about the place, more than the Starbucks lattes she would get downstairs, more than when we came to visit. It was just the two of us at my house. The conversation was light. Nothing heavy in it at all. She was winning and she wanted me to know it.

Then something came over her.

I don't know how else to describe it. It arrived. One minute she was laughing at me across the table and the next she had gone somewhere I couldn't understand. I watched it happen and I had no idea what I was watching.

She said, "Daddy, you need to take me back to the hospital."

So I took her back.

What I got wrong about that afternoon

I have thought about that day more times than I can count.

For years I looked at it as the afternoon the darkness came for her. That was the wrong thing to be looking at.

She told me.

A fourteen year old girl felt something turn inside her, understood what it meant, and said it out loud to her father in plain words. She didn't hint. She didn't leave it for me to guess at. She didn't wait to see if I would notice. She named it and she asked to be taken somewhere safe, and she did all of that in about four seconds while a board game sat between us.

Here is the part that took me a decade to understand.

She could do that because someone had taught her how.

She had spent weeks in a place where adults asked her direct questions every day and expected real answers. Nurses. Doctors. Social workers. Other kids on the unit who were working through the same thing. She had language for what was happening inside her because people had put that language into her hands. She knew what to call it. She knew who to tell. She knew what would happen after she told them, because it had already happened before.

Most kids have none of that.

Fine and yeah

We ask them how school was. They say fine.

We ask if everything is okay. They say yeah.

That is close to the entire vocabulary most teenagers have been given for their inner life, and then we are surprised when it’s all we get back.

If you’re wondering why your teenager won't talk to you, this is worth sitting with. A kid who cannot name what’s happening to her isn’t hiding from you. She is working with the words she has. If nobody has ever sat down with her and handed her better ones, she will use what she’s got, and what she’s got is fine and yeah and I'm just tired.

I’ve talked to a lot of parents over the years who found out much later that their kid had been carrying something for months. Almost none of them describe a child who lied. They describe a child who said very little, in ordinary words, in a tone that didn't seem alarming at the time.

That’s not deceit. That’s a shortage of language.

You can start before anything is wrong

I got a moment of clarity that afternoon because my daughter had been handed the words in a hospital. That’s a terrible way to learn them.

I’d give anything for her to have had them earlier, from me, at our kitchen table, on a quiet week night, back when nothing much was happening.

You don't have to wait for a crisis to teach your kid what to call things.

Most of it isn’t a conversation you schedule. It’s you saying out loud, in front of them, that you had a rough week and here is what rough actually felt like. It’s asking questions that can't be closed with one word. It’s what you do the first time they tell you something small and difficult, because they’re watching to see whether it was safe, and they will decide the size of the next thing based on how you handled that one.

None of that requires you to be a therapist. It requires you to go first.

Maddie asked me to take her back to the hospital because someone had shown her how to ask. I think about that most days. It’s the closest thing I have to instructions.