Seventeen Hours
When One Child Is in Crisis, the Other Kids Notice
Maddie was in a psychiatric unit from late January to late March of 2015. Her friends thought she had a stomach problem, because that’s what she wanted people to think, and she was fourteen and it was her story to tell.
Zac turned thirteen in February, in the middle of it.
I have thought about that birthday more in the past few years than I did at the time. That sentence is most of what you need to know about that spring.
What the house was actually doing
While she was an inpatient, I felt something close to safe.
There was a building with staff in it and a door that locked, and for two months the responsibility was not resting entirely on me. I still don’t know whether what I felt was safety or whether it was relief from responsibility. I have never fully separated the two, and I’m no longer sure there’s a difference worth arguing about.
Then in late March she came home. Outpatient, alternating weeks between her mother's place and mine.
That’s when the fear arrived again.
Between four in the afternoon and nine the next morning, she was ours. Seventeen hours. Every weekday of every week she was with me, until we dropped her off at the hospital the next morning.
That’s the number I would give anyone who asks what that period was like. That number.
What my sons were doing during those same hours
They were in the house.
Here’s what I didn’t understand at the time. The story available to them, the one the adults were telling, was that things were improving. She was out of hospital. She was home. The worst was behind us.
The temperature of the house said something completely different.
Children don’t calibrate on what they are told. They calibrate on the room they are standing in. And in those three weeks the room was more frightened than it had been across the entire two months she was an inpatient, while the words were about things getting better.
They would’ve known the reassurance was wrong. They just had nowhere to put it, or process it.
I suspect a fair amount of what came afterward for both of them runs back through those weeks. They learned, at nine and at thirteen, that an adult saying it’s okay now is not reliable information.
That’s a hard thing to un-learn. Some people spend a long time on it.
They weren’t having the same experience
This is the part I’d want any parent in a similar house to hear, because I think it gets missed everywhere.
At thirteen, Zac knew what a psychiatric unit was. He knew the word nobody in the house was using. He was old enough to be told some things and old enough to work out most of the rest, and he held a cover story at school for two months without slipping once.
He was carrying information.
At nine, Sawyer was carrying the absence of it. A house that had changed shape. Adults who went quiet when he came into a room. No explanation he could use with anybody, including himself. Children that age fill that gap on their own, and what they come up with is usually worse than the truth and frequently involves working out how it might be their fault.
Same house. The same seventeen hours. Two entirely different weights.
And because both of them were, in the language every family uses, good about it, neither weight got looked at by anyone.
October
Sawyer turned ten inOctober, six months after we lost her, to the day.
I’m not going to write about that birthday.
What I will say is that the first one after is its own event, that nobody in our house got to have it properly, and that he was ten years old.
What I would say to a parent standing in this now
It doesn’t need to be a big conversation. A big conversation tells your other child that they have become a problem as well, which is the exact outcome they have been organizing their behaviour to avoid.
Ask them something that isn’t about their sibling. By week six, almost every question a brother or sister gets is either logistical or about the other kid, and they stop being able to tell the difference between how are you and how is she.
Don’t make the reassurance bigger than the house feels. If it is a frightening week, don’t tell them it’s a fine week. Tell them it is a hard week and that you’re still here. They already know the first part. What they need to find out is that you will say true things when it would be easier not to.
Give them one thing that doesn’t bend. A standing half hour. A drive. Something that survives a bad week. The pattern they are learning is that everything in the house moves around the emergency, and one thing that doesn’t move is worth more than any conversation about it.
And be careful about thanking them for being so good about it. I said a version of that. I meant it warmly. What it teaches is that role is working.
The thing I want to leave you with
If there is a struggling child in your house right now, there is almost certainly a quiet one as well.
The quiet one isn’t the relief. They are the second thing happening. The reason it looks like nothing is that they have already decided you have enough.
FAQ Section
How does a mental health crisis in one child affect their siblings? Most often through attention rather than information. Siblings work out quickly that the household has a finite supply of attention and that their brother or sister has a legitimate claim on it. They stop bringing forward the medium-sized things, and within weeks they can look like the easy child while carrying more than anyone has checked.
Should I tell my other children what is happening? Age changes the answer, and the more useful rule is about consistency. Children calibrate on the temperature of the house rather than on the words. If the room is frightened and the words say everything is fine, they learn that reassurance from adults is unreliable. Saying that this is a hard week and that you are still here tends to land better than saying it is fine.
My other child seems completely fine. Is that a good sign? Sometimes. It is also the most common presentation of a sibling who has taken on the role of the one who does not need anything. Being the easy one is work rather than temperament, and it is worth checking what the fine is made of before you rely on it.
What should I ask my other child? Something that is not about their sibling. By week six, almost every question a sibling gets is either logistical or about the other kid, and they stop being able to tell the difference between how are you and how is your sister. One ordinary question about their own life does more than any planned conversation.
Why is coming home from hospital harder than the admission? An inpatient stay transfers the weight to somebody else for a period. Discharge transfers it back, and it does so at the moment everyone around the family has concluded the crisis is over. That combination, a household more frightened than it was a month earlier and a world that has moved on, is a stage almost nobody prepares parents for.
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