The Young and The Restless | Navigating the damage from things out of your control

I wasn’t the kindest, I wasn’t the meanest.

I wasn’t the best behaved, I wasn’t the worst.

I was an average Josephine.

I got bullied on occasion. Not relentlessly, but kids can be cruel and if they can make fun of your name or your clothes or tear apart your appearance, they will.

I had freckles before freckles were cool. And no, that’s not some flex.

It meant I got teased for them.

But I had friends.

And when you have friends, life is easier, especially when you’re a kid, in a tough environment.

So when my child mentions in passing that he just sits under a tree alone every recess or lunch break eating his lunchbox contents, it hurts.

It hurts me more than if it was happening to me.

My head transported back to that schoolyard, at that age, as I tried to imagine what that would feel like.

And despite my child telling me it doesn’t bother him, I can’t find an angle in my mind where it doesn’t bother me or wouldn’t bother me if it were me.

Kids won’t often tell you how much they’re struggling.

Sometimes they’ll keep things from you and try to deal with them alone before they’re forced to tell you for whatever reason; perhaps before someone else beats them to it, perhaps they finally surrender to needing your help when they can’t work it out on their own.

You can talk with them until you’re blue in the face about mental health.

You can let them know you’re there for them, withhold judgment, present them with options they may not have considered, and so on.

And when life is so chaotic, you can keep going about it, not picking up the minor dips and rises in the currents of their moods.

I’m guilty of putting some things down to off-days and teenage hormones, laziness or rebellion.

But I’m learning there’s usually always an underlying reason.

Another of my three kids is extremely communicative.

He talks in depth to me regularly about all sorts of things I’d never have been game to canvass with my own parents at his age.

So I felt safe he would tell me if something big was going on with him personally.

On the surface he was showing no sign something was amiss and then one day he refused to go to school and finally shared with me some abhorrent messages containing threats.

It came to light that people had actually performed criminal acts against him while he was at school and I had been oblivious.

School staff were also aware of some incidents, but had not informed me.

When this happens, several somethings ignite inside you.

For starters, you can almost physically feel new cracks spread across your heart, but beside that ache, you get this fierce maternal spark that coats you in metaphorical armour and prepares you to ride at dawn across some dewy hills into battle to set what’s wrong, right.

You want to, and you will, protect your child in any way possi… uh… legal.

Sadly, there are just some things you can’t protect your kids from, and one of them is their own thoughts.

I remember the challenge of three kids aged three and under.

There was so much organisation needed just to get out the door.

Loading nappy bags, remembering to pack snacks, stuffing prams into boots, timing things around naps and feeds.

It was exhausting.

There was never much relaxing in social situations.

You couldn’t focus properly on any adult conversations for any length of time because your attention had to always be directed mainly to your kids, making sure they were playing nicely, not running into traffic, staying within reach in the water, feeding them, changing them, putting sunscreen on them, making sure they kept their hats on, rocking them to sleep in your arms or a pram.

I thought all that was challenging.

And it was, but every stage of parenting kids at different ages is challenging for different reasons.

Some of the things I worry about now push my imagination to very dark places.

So while my attention doesn’t so much have to be finely tuned to road sense — well, at least not while they’re crossing it; now they’re driving on it the angle is different — it has to be honed right in on the tiny, almost unrecognisable change of currents in their moods and behaviours.

For more than 30 hours a week they’re out of sight at school, in a place they should be safe.

But that’s not always the case.

Those years can be damaging.

I’m still self-conscious about my freckles because of the schoolyard teasing decades ago.

Yet that was all I had to deal with.

Strength to the young ’uns to build the resilience they need to survive in this unpredictable maze of life.

And to the parents navigating the fallout from the things their kids are put through that are out of their control.

The six-week block of school holidays over Christmas may seem too long to some, but sending my kids back there wasn’t on my list of most favourable things to do.