"I gotta Get Outta This Place!"

Preface: This is not my normal humorous style of writing. I was helping a friend in financial trouble and I just had to share this insight with you. 

When my son was two he broke his femur in half. Yes, in half.  The femur, also called the thigh bone, is the longest and largest bone in your body. Apparently, it is also the hardest to break. It was a harrowing experience to say the least and in many ways it changed my perspective about life, children, and parenting. One of the lessons that I learned was from something that Maxx’s doctor said to me a few years later.

You see, when Maxx started school at age five, he did not know how to go down the slide. No big deal, I thought. I figured that he was probably scared of falling off and breaking his leg again. When he was seven, Maxx still could not ride a bike. Try as he might, fall as he would, Maxx still could not get it. Not being blessed with coordination, I assumed he got it from me and again I was not worried. Then, when Maxx was in fourth grade, his teacher was concerned because he continued to babble and play around on the floor like a second grader. Did he have autism? Asperger Syndrome? We did not know. The odd thing about all of this was that Maxx was not that way at home - and he was very intelligent. Not that autistic children aren’t, but he just didn’t fit the spectrum in all cases like most autistic children do. Therefore, we just chalked it up to Maxx being Maxx. Finally, I talked to his doctor with the caveat that I was NOT concerned, just curious. Goodness knows I didn’t want my son going through a plethora of testing only to find out that he was “a real boy.” What my doctor said, changed my perspective on just about everything. He simply asked if Maxx had ever crawled.

Crawled?

Crawled.

Looking back on it, I could not remember, but with the broken leg and other issues when he was a child, it seemed possible that maybe he hadn’t really ever crawled. It turns out that children who miss a developmental stepping stone, like crawling or walking, often times are unable to do many other large motor skills, such as sliding down the slide or bike riding. The result being that they simply stop where they were and in some aspects of their life they simply stay at that age. In Maxx’s case, he simply needed to go back and relearn that step he missed so that the other steps could fall into place. So, what did we do at age 9? We crawled. We slide down the slide, we swung on a swing, and as a result he stepped the rest of the way up the ladder in a short period of time and has since caught up with his peers.

To this day, I use that lesson in other areas of my life. One being, how we are trained to relax. Some people take vacations, some shop till they drop, other’s have a drink after work with a friend, other people watch television at night, many go camping, play in the garden, some take a smoke break, other’s will even have a “bitch” session with a friend.  

Whatever it is you do, it is usually a learned pattern, from collegues, family, friends, or even just from yourself. Escaping from reality in order to relax is as much needed in everyday life as the need to crawl is as a child. If we are “on” all the time, we get exhausted. As a result, if we do not learn a healthy way to relax and recover our body and mind will find a way to do that for us; be that through anger, depression, hatred, resentment, you name it, your body will shut down to survive.

I write this because I have noticed with this economy and this fast-paced lifestyle we all live, it seems that more and more people are cutting out their “escape” time in order to make more time for work.

I was talking to a gal the other day who was strapped with money problems and devastated because she is too busy working to make money and yet too broke to do anything fun with her kids. Every night when she came home exhausted after work, she and her daughters would argue for an hour - while she tried to clean the house – about how they never got to do anything fun because their mom was always working. My friend said that she had gotten to the point where she was beginning to hate coming home and yet she was too tired and burned out to continue to work another hour.

I suggested an escape. Maybe a picnic, or a hike, on her next day off, but she simply shook her head. All that her children ever wanted to do was to go to the mall and shop. That was it; that was all. The problem was that she could not afford it. She had taken them last week, spent money, and it was fun while they were there, but after ward, the same stresses returned. The girls knew that they were heading back to boredom for another week, and my girlfriend knew that she was heading right to her check register to try and figure out if she had just overdrawn herself for the sake of a little fun.  She did not know what to do. It seemed that her plan had only caused more angst after it was over instead of making them all feel better.

I advised her that her plan was not going to work.  It was never going to work.

The reason: their escape was not fulfilling the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal was to make their time dealing with the stresses of reality more palatable. What I advised her to do was to think of a better escape. Frankly, it seemed obvious to me that the girls seemed more focused on venting than shopping. After all, that is the first thing they did when they hopped back in the car. No one was happier, nor were they refilled or rejuvenated. They were simply more stressed and equally as cranky.

I advised her that taking them shopping when she clearly couldn’t afford it was counterintuitive. It was like taking an alcoholic to the bar and then telling them they could only drink Diet Pepsi. Therefore, what she needed to recognize was that what her girls really needed was some time to vent their frustrations, just like she was doing to me. My suggestion: Allow the girls fifteen minutes a day while she was doing the dishes or straightening house after work for an unfettered, unjudged venting session. The rules. One, at the end of fifteen minutes, they were not allowed to complain any more until the next day. Two, they had to help clean while they vent. By setting this new pattern into place the girls would learn a new way to relieve their stresses and she could get the house cleaned.

She didn’t think they would ever go for it, but what parents forget is that when children are speaking, be that in anger, through tears, or in defiance, they are trying say something too. After all, wasn’t she being defiant when she was talking to me> Of course she was. She was frustrated, angry, and she needed to vent! To this day I’m not sure why that privilege is only recognized after you turn 18, but it is. She needed to listen to them, like I was listening to her, and I promised that things would change.

For my son, his escape was baking cookies and eating them while he vented his frustrations about his day to me. However, given an inch he would take a mile and he would complain himself right into tirade and a chocolate cake. His escape was not working either. Not only was he gaining weight, which he did not want to do when he was in football, but he had also gone past relieving himself of his frustrations to reliving them every day. When I realized this, I suggested that we sit out on the deck together and have a glass of iced tea and some crackers so that he could vent for fifteen minutes. This satisfied his need to munch as well as his need to get his frustrations off of his chest without allowing them to monopolize the conversation. When the fifteen minutes was over, we could continue to hang out and talk about other things, or we could pick up our tea and be done. 

Just like crawling, we take the steps we have learned and apply them to the next phases in our lives. As toddlers we escape by throwing a tantrum, so our parents tell us to go outside and play. This soon becomes our escape until we grow out of that and move on to the next. As a teenager, it could be sports, or music, or painting, but it could also be smoking, drinking, in some cases sex,  or something even worse. My suggestion: figure out what you do to escape. Figure out what your children do to escape. If it is unhealthy, teach them a better way, and you may find that you might learn a better way of escaping yourself.