“Dad! Dad!” On being helpless to protect your child.

I’m sitting in the baseball stands watching my son’s game when a young boy’s anxious voice calls, “Mom! Mom!”

Though a parent is acutely attuned to her own child’s distinct cry, our biology snaps us to attention when we here these words, even if the voice only marginally resembles one of our own, which is why all the women and most of the men swung their gaze toward the boy. It was the anxiousness in the boy’s voice that got to us, a tinge of worry and need that reaches right into your gut and shakes your brain stem.

I don’t remember what the trouble was, but a few of us began to stand, unconsciously moving toward the boy because we would have willingly helped him until his parent surfaced because it was not the kind of sound a child makes when whining for a soda or irritated by a little brother. In his cry there was vulnerability, a sense of loss and, “I’m scared.” There seems nothing more powerful than sounds of a genuinely frightened or pained child. Nothing.

Countless parenting books offer advice on everything from breastfeeding to curbing tantrums, but the one thing we don’t need to learn is how to know one’s child is hurting emotionally. We feel it ourselves, deep into the marrow of our beings, even if we don’t know how to help. Parents have an inexorable need not just to nurture and protect but also to make everything ok. To fix it. Ask any parent of a child who has suffered and they will tell you, “I wish it were me instead of him.”

When one’s child calls out for help, we become single-minded, our adrenaline surges readying for the battle to protect our young. We may even knock over a few parents in our path to get to our own. For me, when that frightened call comes, there is a wee sense of relief, or gratitude that my child had the wherewithal and trust to call upon me. Me! It’s selfish, and maybe misdirected pride to be chosen to protect my most precious thing in life.

Imagine how heartbreaking it is, then, and counter to our biology when a child won’t ask or take a parent’s help and instead puts himself in danger. Parenting an adult child with persistent mental illness is frequently excruciating for this very reason. The illness teases and manipulates every fiber of the parenting coda to protect and just fix it.

I’m thinking in particular of Kelly Thomas, a twenty-seven year-old schizophrenic man who was experiencing psychosis. His parents loved him, kept their home open to him, tried their best to keep him in treatment. But Kelly was sick and preferred to wander the streets, a common theme with people suffering with psychosis and schizophrenia.

Thomas was brutally beaten to death by Fullerton, California police officers for not cooperating. And “brutally beaten” doesn’t really describe what happened to Thomas, who was unrecognizable when the officers were done with him. The officers apparently lacked any compassion or understanding of serious mental illness, and had become impatient with Thomas’s inability—due to his easily detectable psychosis— to follow instructions to, “Put your hands behind your back.” The beating has been captured on video and it is clear Thomas is confused by the instructions given to him when he says, “Like this? Is this what you want?”

Also in this video, one too painful for me to watch to completion, are the clear cries for help when he calls out, “Dad! Dad!”

The calls to his father are crushingly heartbreaking. He is afraid, and anyone able to watch the video wants to rush to him, and save him. His feeble cries remind us that he is someone’s child. He calls out to a father he trusts to help him, who has earned this trust that Thomas can even recognize and remember while in a psychotic state. He calls to a father who is sadly out of range to come to his aid. There is nothing more devastating than knowing your child called out to you and you weren’t there.

And sadly, for those who have children living with serious mental illness, stories like Kelly Thomas’s are not uncommon.

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StoriesBehindTheWall

Follow Behind The Wall on Twitter @widdi123

Comments are always welcome

Name(required)

Email(required)

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

---