Continuing: Collections of a Middle Aged, Middle Income, Middle School Teacher

Story #3: Why it’s ok to have nothing in your envelope.

Today is a very special day for me and my husband. Our youngest daughter, Madeleine, will graduate from high school. She will graduate Cum Laude and will attend a private university here in Texas where she will major in nursing. Our oldest daughter, Mary, graduated two years ago. She also graduated with honors and is attending a university out of state; majoring in broadcast journalism.

So why am I telling you all of this? To brag about my kids? Show you what great parents we are? Make you wonder about your own parenting and how you can make your kids do better in school, so they too can be as awesome as mine? Not quite.

I got a text from Madeleine about two weeks ago that read, “Mom! I’m graduating with honors. Cum Laude.” The smile that spread across my face was huge and the tears this message brought to my eyes were many.

Why? Let me tell you a little about what she’s been through in the past 18 months.

In September of 2016 she broke up with her boyfriend of a little over a year. She was humming right along; looking forward to the new adventures in friendship and dating. That worked out for a little while and then the doubts and fears and “missing you” of a first love came rushing back. With that came severe anxiety and a bit of depression. I’ve suffered from depression my entire life, but this anxiety thing was a new ballgame to me.

When she told me about her anxiety, I tried to play it off. Told her it was just a phase and that she just needed time to get over the boyfriend. By Christmas we were in full blown panic attacks and it was clear she needed to see a doctor.

We went to see a high school friend of mine who has become one of the best doctors I know. He listened to Madeleine and was understanding of what she was experiencing and told her that in today’s social media, fast paced, everyone knows everything about everyone’s life, anxiety is something he is seeing more and more in his office. He told her she is normal and that he could help her with diet, exercise and medication. This was music to my ears. She immediately felt better and I could see the twinkle in her eyes again. We left his office with hope.

Madeleine started her medicine and with most anti-anxiety meds, it took a few weeks to kick in. Slowly I could see the girl I knew and loved coming back to me.

We were moving right along. Junior year ended. Summer came. A new job. More friends. Trips to the beach. A trip to Boston to see her dad. Senior year was just around the corner and it was going to be glorious. THEN…the meds stopped working. It was worse than before and depression came along with the anxiety and panic attacks. There was nothing I could do to console her. The text messages I was getting from her were heartbreaking and the tears that filled my eyes because I couldn’t help my baby were enough to make me scream. It was like that scene from Steel Magnolias at Shelby’s funeral when Malyn freaks out because she can jog all the way to Texas and back, but her daughter can’t. There was nothing I could do to help my daughter and it was killing me. She was breaking down at school and I even received phone calls from teachers expressing their concern for Madeleine. One teacher told me, “I think Madeleine is severely depressed. This is beyond anxiety at this point.”

I made a phone call to the doctor and begged his nurse to ask him to switch her meds. When I say begged, it’s more like I sobbed on the phone with her. I was going to do anything I could to get her better. The nurse agreed with me and convinced him for me to get her on something different.

The next few weeks were hell. Coming down off of the old meds and letting the new ones kick in was a nightmare. At one point, I had to disable the internet on her phone so she couldn’t google her “symptoms” and tell me she was dying of some sort of disease, that she was schizophrenic, or had multiple personality disorders. She needed to decompress from this information, social media age and I was going to make that happen, come hell or high water.

It took a few weeks, but the new meds did kick in and the sweet, funny, witty, make anyone laugh Madeleine returned. It was like the storm clouds lifted and the sun began to shine again.

Heartbreaking story isn’t it? Not really. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a ripple in the waters of life. But here is the real reason I started writing this story.

We are inundated with life these days. Everywhere we turn, we are facebooked, twittered, snapchatted, instagrammed, and vined. We have information readily at our hands every second of the day. If an earthquake happens on the other side of the world, we know about it within minutes. Trump blows his nose or wears the wrong color tie to an event and we are calling for his head by lunch. The information/social media age has permeated our lives and has become the new normal. We feel that our lives have to be meticulously chronicled or we are insignificant.

But still…what’s the point?

Madeleine is graduating with honors tonight. It’s not the highest honors, but it’s honors. She applied for private scholarships and didn’t get them. She slept in most mornings and didn’t make it to 1st period government. She barely passed Latin, but she passed. She made friends and had a good time and will have to borrow money to get through college. She is going to have to work hard, study harder and cry some to become the nurse she wants to be.

At awards night the other night, Madeleine got a manila envelope with her name on it and when she opened it, it was empty. She texted me from the audience and said, “Mom, my envelope is empty.” My first response was, “I’ll make you a certificate, baby.” And then my next thought was, “Nope. She’s gonna have to settle for being average. Mom’s not coming to the feel good rescue this time.”

In my mind, Madeleine is anything but average. Her sister as well. But in today’s society they aren’t the kids who make the news for doing amazing things. They are the kids next door who have had jobs since they were 16. They pay me for half of their cars each month and I reward them with a cell phone, car insurance and a roof over their heads. They will be amazing adults and will accomplish most, not all, that they set out to do in life. There will be successes and failures, but that’s part of life. I will celebrate with them and cry with them. And hopefully I’ve taught them that it’s ok to open an envelope and have nothing in it, because life doesn’t always come with a tangible reward. Sometimes it comes with a pat on the back or a smile of recognition. It comes from sitting in the audience on graduation night with 800 of your closest friends; family watching from afar, knowing that you gave it your all and accepting that life is going to be more than you hoped for. That it’s ok to be average now because you’re going be great in the future. Your envelope doesn’t always have to have something in it for me to be proud of you.