Read This Before You Judge My Goth Kid

Teen and pre-teen coping strategies can take some unusual forms.

New development in our lives. My kid went full-out Goth. Well, first he was Emo. Then Goth. Please don’t ask me the difference — I’m still working that out.

It happened slowly at first. The black clothes. Black Sharpie marker on the nails that quickly gave way to black nail polish. A studded leather bracelet. Marilyn Manson and Slipknot on the iPod. He’s too young for tattoos so he draws and writes all over his arms and hands. Then the rest seemed to happen nearly all at once. The black eyeliner. Wayyyy too much black eyeliner. More studded bracelets. The belt with studs and metal rings. Both ears are now pierced. And now … the one thing I tried hard to keep at bay: the black lipstick.

He’s in the grocery store or the pharmacy with me and you stare. I see you. I look right at you but you avoid my eyes. Sometimes you whisper something to someone. The truly ill-mannered among you actually point and laugh. I see you.

I also see you look at me aghast as I stand next him, chatting. How shocking that I converse with this black-clad creature as normally as any other mother converses with her child. What kind of mother am I that I would allow this? You’re judging me too, and not even bothering to try and politely hide your shock or scorn. I see you.

Look, I get it. He’s different. Maybe he’s even a tad scary in our otherwise kinda whitebread homogenous Pennsylvania ‘burb.

But you know what? That Goth “uniform” is helping to keep my only child, my baby boy, alive right now. So your judgement is irrelevant.

You don’t know the first thing about my kid. You don’t know who he is or what he’s been dealing with. His Goth garb is his armor, forged because kids, more often than not, are petty and downright mean. Some adults aren’t much better.

Scroll backward. He is 5 and the bullying begins. Kids call him fat. It doesn’t even make sense. He is taller and more solidly built than his peers. But he isn’t fat. I guess it’s instinctive for smaller boys to try and take down the bigger one by throwing emotional punches instead of physical ones.

Those punches find their mark. Even at 5, he grasps for a shield. He becomes the class clown.

He is 6 and 1st grade is no better. You’d think they’d clamp down on bullying a little harder at a parochial school. But no. If anything, it gets worse.

And, oh yeah, he also has ADD. Teachers label him a problem early on. Then they start singling him out for his behavior even when he does nothing wrong.

The ADD makes things difficult at home as well. His father has no patience, their relationship is strained. He and I are very close but I still yell too much. I am ashamed of my impatience.

Forward scroll through the next few years. A change in schools helps but not enough. ADD meds help but not enough. He eats for comfort. He gains more weight. The bullying intensifies, in school, in summer camp, in random places coming from absolute strangers (not all of them kids).

The ADD gets worse. Teachers are frustrated with him. Things at home get harder. He looks so much older than he is that we keep forgetting he’s still a little boy. Dad is emotionally unavailable and verbally abusive. Sometimes physically too. I am constantly exasperated and feel like I yell nonstop. Even so, our bond is tight. But I feel like a failure as a mother.

Now he is 10. The bottom drops out of our world when my mother, his beloved Nanny, unexpectedly leaves us. She was his #1 confidante and his only source of unconditional comfort and affirmation. His best friend, and mine. My son and I take it very hard. We do not merely grieve. The weight of the void she leaves crushes our very bones.

Now he is 12. It’s the week before middle school begins. He is suddenly and violently gripped by acute anxiety the likes of which we’d never seen in him. His panic attacks send him into gastrointestinal distress so alarming that he’s afraid to go to school, afraid to go camping with his Boy Scout troop. He is afraid to be away from me for even one night, even though that’s never been an issue before. He cries for his Nanny. We are blindsided. We spend the first month of school visiting pediatricians, gastroenterologists, and finally psychologists.

Within weeks, he is struggling academically for the first time. One teacher bafflingly seems to presume that his intelligence should somehow magically cancel out the ADD and makes demands he can’t possibly meet. He loathes her. He’s pretty sure the feeling is mutual. Soon he is failing her class and slipping in some others. He has never loved school but now he hates it with a soul-burning passion. His stomach hurts all the time.

The bullying is at a fever pitch. He’s fresh meat to the 8th graders. He’s a very big kid now. Linebacker big. Bigger than a lot of 8th graders. He wouldn’t hurt a fly but he stares them down on the bus to get them to back off. “Fat!” they retort, because they can’t come up with anything more original. “F#ck off,” he replies with menace. Also unoriginal, but I choose not to fault him for it. “Fat!” goes the hiss from complete strangers in the school hallways. It burns through his skin like flaming arrows.

He is in pain now all the time, emotionally, physically. He is also in adolescent hormone hell and struggling to figure out who he is. Fearfully, he tells me he thinks he may be bisexual. I tell him I love him no matter what and he’s relieved but still — this is one more thing he will struggle with.

What he doesn’t tell me is that his brain chemistry has begun to misfire in terrifying ways. He hears voices. The voices tell him he should kill himself. Sometimes the voices even tell him to hurt other people.

I am desperately spinning plates through all of this. I’m lobbying to get him an IEP because I think he will fail the grade without some kind of intervention. I’m struggling to find him a psychiatrist because I’m afraid he’ll kill himself if I don’t. Little did I know he’d already tried — on Christmas day, no less. I interrupted it, apparently. But I won’t know about that for two more months.

Enter Prozac, finally. I’m relieved. I pray the tide will turn now.

It does. Just not in the direction I hoped for.

My child is withdrawn. Sullen. Angry. He has begun scratching his hands and arms at school with random sharp objects. The wounds aren’t deep but they’re wide and angry. He picks the scabs and they can’t heal. His pocketknife collection, which has always made me uncomfortable, now makes me panicky.

Every day we sit in the car for 45 minutes in front of school, me alternately sobbing and screaming at him because he refuses to leave my car and enter the school building. I’m late to work every day now. I’m preoccupied and struggling to focus. I’m worried about losing my job. I’m more worried about losing my son. I’m coming apart at the seams.

On a horrible night in January, after a silent but drama-filled session with the psychologist, I drive my son to the ER for a suicide risk assessment. We spend an awful, endless night in the ER, and he is admitted to a psychiatric hospital the next day. I cry so hard I can barely stand. My husband holds me up and guides me out of the building because I am undone.

I have been here before, you know. From the other side of this cracked mirror. I have been the suicidal teen with parents forced to make the only choice they can to save the life of their child. I cry all the way home, for my son, for myself, and for my guilt at what I put my parents through all those years ago. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I whisper to the air and I wonder if she can hear me, wherever she is.

The hospital is wretched. Their staff are zookeepers, not mental health providers. He sobs incessantly day and night, pleading and pleading and pleading to come home. They take a “tough love” approach and tell him to stop being a crybaby. They are not helping him, they are traumatizing him. I yank him out in a week. He twitches like some kind of PTSD survivor.

He enters a partial hospitalization program. Treatment by day, home by night. It’s still touch and go but the program clicks for him. This is where the Emo/Goth persona is born. The changes are obvious by the time he starts transitioning back into school.

I watch it happen — the nail polish, the tattoo-like art on his skin, the studded cuffs. I don’t love all of it, but I don’t protest, to his surprise. Because what I notice is that each addition, each new scale determinedly patched onto that armor, makes him lighter, not darker. It lifts him up. It makes him feel more confident, more able to withstand the world.

The changes are noticed by school peers after his long absence. He’s now “that Emo kid,” and later “that Goth kid.” You know what he’s not anymore? “That fat kid.”

I realize this was a stroke of adolescent genius.

By forging his armor, my son took control of his peers’ perceptions and rewrote them. If any of them think he’s a little bit creepy or scary now — hey, all the better, from his perspective. Bully the creepy, scary, Goth kid and he just might hex you or worse. That’s what happens in the movies, right?

He’s made up of unusually tender flesh, my son. And hasn’t been on this Earth long enough to develop a thick skin. His Goth trappings will remain his porcupine quills to keep people from hurting him for as long as he needs to wear them. And I will walk beside him, always.

So when you see my Goth kid in the store or wherever, check yourself before you gasp or gape. Try smiling and saying hi instead … even if he makes good on his plan to dye his hair electric green this summer. Underneath, he’s the same kid he always was and he loves macaroni and cheese and kittens and fro-yo and snuggling with his mom. (Just don’t tell him I mentioned that last thing.)