Great Expectations

parenting and radical acceptance

A picture I made in art therapy right as Molly was going to her first residential program. It’s about me trying to keep her safe and pointed in the right direction.

When Molly¹ was a very small person, she made it clear that she was a force to be reckoned with.

One evening on the way home from daycare, when she was still learning to speak, she was in the back seat talking to herself, in a singsong. “Hungee,” she said. “Hungee, hungee,” (and for those of you who have not had to decipher babyspeak, this meant that she was ready for dinner, which of course we’d have to scramble to throw on the table as soon as we walked in the door, since we would pick the kids up after we’d both worked full days, and then drive through Houston traffic to get home, at which point it would be about 6:30). She repeated this little tune several times, and then there was what I now think of as an ominous pause. And then a booming deep voice echoed through the car, and Molly spoke her first full sentence: “MOLLY FUCKIN HUNGEE.”

John and I looked at each other to make sure we’d both heard the same thing, holding back laughter to the point of tears. “Oh, you are hungry, Molly?” I finally managed. I put on an attentive expression, working on addressing her concern and not the fact that she’d just used a word that we were not expecting to hear from her. She made eye contact with me for a moment. Then she went back to looking around the car, holding her Bear to her face, and started up again with the sweet little “Hungee, hungee” song now that she knew I was paying attention to her. Her brother Joey, two years older and already used to the endless drama that was Molly, looked silently and blankly out the window on his side, sucking his thumb and pretending he was not with us. Joey has always been an old soul. He and Molly are about as different as two kids can be who were raised by the same people in the same household.

This combination of pride and horror would be a defining aspect of our relationship with Molly. She spoke so early, but had to throw cussing in there. She read and wrote at four, and primarily used that skill to write declarations of outrage on the whiteboard we installed on the wall outside her room. In all things, she has kept us on our toes, off balance constantly even as we admired her for being more vibrant and energetic than any of the rest of us in the family. From the beginning we’ve assumed that she’s destined for something big. And as I tell her frequently, she’s got such power and talent, we just need to make sure she’s pointed in the right direction. Our job as parents (and even Joey as a sibling, when they were younger, although we told him finally that this was not his responsibility) has been to put some guardrails up where we can, guide her without letting her feel too constricted, and hope for the best.

We went to Disney World when she was four, and when we got home she set up a facsimile of the line for a popular ride in our house. Not the ride itself, and nothing having to do with princesses or castles or characters or mouse ears. But the line. It started in the dining room, and went up the stairs to the playroom, where she stood as the gatekeeper at the door to her room. Along the path of the line were signs telling us to keep our hands inside the ride, to stay seated, and to have our tickets ready. We all had to stand in the line and walk at a very slow pace till the end, with Molly harassing us if we went too fast or talked about anything other than how much we enjoyed Disney. And then when we reached where she was standing, she sternly asked us what the expected behaviors were for people on the ride (which we knew because of the signs we’d read), nodded, and then let us in. Whatever happened in the ride (which was in her room) was not her business. She wanted to make sure people were doing what they were supposed to do on the way there. And she wanted to be in charge.

She was always acting, role-playing, in a series of long-running scenarios that the whole family took part in. We played school of course, and she was always the teacher, with us in the roles of students with varying levels of obedience and skill. My husband John was a student named ‘Eric’ who would act up and refuse to do what the teacher told him to do, and she’d end up having to call his mother (‘Mary Beth’) on the old rotary phone we had attached to the wall at preschooler height, to tell her that Eric was out of control and that he needed to be picked up immediately. She was amazing at doing just her part of the conversation for those phone calls, and having us almost believing that poor Mary Beth was on the other end, having to make arrangements to leave work to deal with her rambunctious son. Sometimes Eric would just have to get on the phone with his mom, and she’d talk him into behaving. But in any case, Molly-the-teacher would make sure that everything was running properly.

But the best character of all was Cousin Wilhelmina. She was a grownup, and she had quite a run over the several years that she was part of our lives. Sometimes I’d be sitting out front doing a crossword, and she’d come around the corner, walking briskly up the sidewalk, clearly on her way to do something important. She’d do a double-take when she saw me there, and say, “Oh HELLO, Rebecca!” as if she hadn’t just told me (as Molly) to wait there. I was expected to ask questions about her life and what she was doing, and she’d answer them deep in character, one hand on her cocked hip, sometimes pausing me with one finger held up so that she could take a call on her toy phone. She had five children, a full time job as some kind of power broker in the city, constant trouble with child care, and a very complicated love life. Sometimes I’d be her employee, abruptly summoned into the study from the dining room table where I was working surrounded by various dolls and stuffed animals (Wilhelmina had the office of course, because she was the boss). I’d usually be getting my performance review, it would usually be terrible, and one time she fired me by saying, “you can still do your work, but you’ll have to do it somewhere else.” I’m still impressed years later with how fully she’d inhabit the character of Wilhelmina, and how extensive and detailed she’d made the backstory. I could tell just from Molly’s walk, the angle of her head, her first word, that it was Wilhelmina and not my daughter who was initiating a conversation.

Our neighborhood elementary school had a ‘drama club’, where kids could create and act in a play. Molly participated starting in first grade, and threw herself fully into it, as she did everything. She played an evil witch, a part with not much nuance but a lot of opportunities for hamming things up. And at the end of the school year when she stalked on stage for her first scene, there was a noticeable reaction from the audience to her presence. She paused for just a moment, and we could almost literally see a light bulb go off in her head as she realized that all eyes were on her, that she had the power to make these people react to her. She seemed at that moment to grow taller, to take on a glow.

Things changed, though. When we had our first set of parent-teacher conferences when Molly was in sixth grade, we entered the drama classroom eagerly. What would she be up to? We were prepared to hear about her commanding performances, her presence, her leadership. What we were not prepared for was this:

“Molly is very quiet and shy, and it’s hindered her ability to participate in our class,” the teacher began. John and I laughed, thinking this was a joke. But it was not. “I could not convince her to go on stage even in non-speaking roles, but finally she agreed to help out with the costumes and that seems to really give her a way to join in." Then after a pause, she added reassuringly: “I really do believe there’s a place for everyone in the theater.”

We looked at her blankly. “You are talking about Molly P.,” I finally got out, “Not some other Molly? This does not sound like her at all.” But it was our Molly, this wallflower who was afraid of the spotlight, and the other teachers all echoed the same themes: She was quiet, she did not raise her hand, she did her work but not without a lot of encouragement. What had happened? What should we do?

That was in sixth grade, and now Molly is eighteen. I know now that there are about a million studies and articles and books about how girls’ confidence can plummet in middle school, and how anxiety and ADHD can emerge especially for those who are ‘early bloomers’. Or how serious mental health issues like bipolar disorder frequently emerge in adolescence. I did not know that then, and I also didn’t know how much pain Molly was in or what a long road was ahead of us. Three years after the conversation with the drama teacher, one of her doctors would tell her that even though people were ready to help, it would be up to Molly to find a way to manage her impulsivity, her rages, her self-destructive urges. He said that kids with the issues she had were usually very intelligent and talented people, and that in his experience they always ended up either in charge or in prison (or dead), nothing in between. This man was in his seventies and had a wall of books he’d written about adolescent mental health on the wall behind him. On the other hand, he said that when he was a young doctor in Russia, the recommendation for a girl in her situation would have been to send her to Siberia. So we took his counsel with a grain of salt.

We take everything with a grain of salt, after all these years of trying to figure out a way to get our Molly back on the path that will lead if not to greatness, at least to stability and happiness. Because she’s had a very rough time, and she’s very unhappy, and our hopes for her right now are to stay alive, to live on her own, to have stable relationships, to accept that she needs medication and to be substance-free. And to know that we love her always. I still believe that she will do great things, and I am always proud of her for continuing to fight. Great expectations have to start from where you are.

1. I am changing all names but mine, for the purposes of this Substack. One day I think my daughter will share her own story, but I’m not going to ‘out’ her till she’s ready.