Written Feb 2022, this post describes the dawning of my awareness about the calling to become a professional coach so that I could be a better mother for our son, and a better wife, and friend.
Crouching in grief, I felt helpless, small, impotent to nudge our 18-year-old son to make what we believed was a smarter choice about staying in school. For a few days I felt guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, and blamed. Our family has been deeply involved in education for years — volunteering in the classroom, serving on advisory boards, and even starting a 501c3 to help mothers teach their children math.
We knew this year would be interesting—our oldest son had headed to college happy to be independent but he was already burned out on school. As we dropped him off in August, we held out hope that a new setting and the chance to make friends would invigorate him a bit, re-ignite an appreciation for school or at least a degree that would be useful down the road.
That was not to be, and despite seeing the writing on the wall for months, intentionally steeling ourselves for that day, when hope came crashing down around me in a matter of hours it felt more like the shock of an earthquake than the release of a brewing storm.
Move-in went well. We’ve done the massive-box-explosion-in-a-new-home routine more than a dozen times moving around the country and the world with the military. We go into a near frenzy and generally get it 98% sorted within two weeks. (Don’t look at the garage, though.) So a college dorm room? Easy peasy - an hour of fan-installation, bunk-racking, desk sorting and we were done, but not fast enough for our son.
“Look,” he finally barked, “just leave. I wanna go to war.”
We had given him my husband’s seabag from his first submarine to carry much of his gear, and he wanted the agency to set himself up.
We agreed not to call for two weeks, but in a moment of weakness I hit video call on Insta and grabbed 37 seconds with him that first weekend. He kept his video off. We saw food money being deducted from the account and took comfort that our strongman was feeding. (He trains in these functional lifts with stones, logs, etc.)
Then in October the month-long plague hit the freshmen dorms. Was the clinic up to taking care of him? How many Advil had he pounded? Was he tracking his temperature at all between doses or just slamming more meds? He wasn’t interested in sharing these details, and I grew worried enough that I welcomed a request to deliver his tube amp the next weekend. I drove the 6 hours out to school and listened to hours and hours of pods to understand what might be going on with my intelligent, creative son.
When I arrived at his dorm, he was moving through the illness ok but was tired and eager for me to leave again. I put my brave face on and complied but cried much of the first hour of my six-hour drive home. Our sons may be massive in stature, somewhat hostile in nature, but they are still our sons. And this is my firstborn, away at school a year earlier than his peers because he had skipped a grade in middle school.
For Thanksgiving break, I drove out again and we had dinner, he was more conversational, more at ease with himself, less intent on shoving me away. “We could go for a drive, I guess,” he offered after dinner. I jumped, despite having already driven 6 hours that day. We took off through town and headed west. I had no idea where I was going, didn’t set a destination…just took off, old-school. Generally I head up—I like a view—but it was pitch black, and heading up into the mountains in the pitch black was an interesting choice on a 22-degree night.
At the first gas station I filled up, jumping like a frozen lunatic with one hand on the pump as the biting wind cut through my fleece. With our gas tank and our stomachs full, it seemed reasonable to head out. My son is a fantastic music connoisseur, taking us through Yes, Roger Waters, Boston, Journey, Zeppelin, Styx, REO Speedwagon, The Police, and Van Halen as we twisted through the country roads into the inky blackness…
I’ll never forget Silent Lucidity playing as I rolled down the windows to see the chandelier of stars dangling, dripping down in three dimensions to us. The night was so so dark, the air so cold, but the drive was unforgettable as we began carving out an adult relationship, different than parent-child.
Christmas came and with it a reckoning with reality. We were shattered by the most exceptionally low GPA I’d ever seen in my life. “I see you’ve joined the squares club,” my husband said. I’m still not honestly sure what that means? Suffice to say he was on academic probation. I’d say this was a shock, but high school was a shot across the brow. Having earned 46 college credits by senior year and despite a 3.89 GPA, he had barely graduated from his STEM academy. Homework was not necessary for him to learn, the work was not stimulating, pandemic hangover rules stifled classroom discourse and budding friendships, exit tickets and homework added no value and just didn’t get done. He was failing a required freshman chem course so he asked to drop it and take the end-of-year test instead. The high school capitulated. He earned Advanced without studying. He was out…
…But not in the headspace to really look forward to more bureaucracy, linear learning, and prescribed pathways.
At university, he was a freshman, academically he was coded as a sophomore, but his scores and prior dual enrollment work placed him into junior math and physics courses. He was accustomed to being three to four years out of sync with his peers but maybe we were all a bit surprised that the work was still under-stimulating, the routine as numbing as high school had been.
Socially he had a great time away at school playing guitar with a few lads, and physically he flourished between the gym and the dining hall. Given that he’d had to move during the pandemic from Japan to virtual environment in a new high school, we were so happy to see him thriving on most fronts away at university. The academic stuff was a royal pain in the ass…but we’d somewhat braced for that. We didn’t expect a 4.0. Not even close.
The holiday weeks went by, and the weekend to return arrived. We had told him it was his choice to go back or not, knowing well that if he didn’t have agency then we might as well write off the next semester, too. The appointed hour came, and went. He was still asleep. The truck didn’t get loaded. I was away at an ice hockey tournament with our younger son as this played out. As I waited for text updates from the homefront, I was grateful that one day over the holiday I had specifically said something that I thought was known.
As the sun streamed through the kitchen window one afternoon, I turned from the sink to face him while he used the microwave. I was responding to a visceral desire that our son know that we loved him no matter what, that the decision was his, that we were not disappointed in him, but that we also wished he could find a way to make his path less difficult later in life. I asked him to please look me in the eye as I told him this, I wanted to be sure he knew we loved him. I didn’t want him feeling that he was disappointing us, even if he put on his armor, shunned our advice, and decided not to go back—we loved him. He had to know that. The fact is, a college degree does open doors, whether or not we appreciate being rogue actors. A fact is a fact. Going solo is harder. While I was away in Pittsburgh, my husband said the same thing to him but left the final decision in his hands.
He decided to go the next day and was ready to leave 10 minutes early. Things seemed to be clicking...
Ten days later things were not trending well out at school. Our son’s advisor said he wasn’t going to class, he didn’t seem like he wanted to be there, he hadn’t added a class he needed, the deadline had passed, a form wasn’t filled out… No one was reaching out and trying to engage with him. I had tried to pull any string in the fall but there was no such resource. Mental health services are everywhere, but the student has to activate that path. He wasn’t looking for that kind of help. There is no academic outreach or student engagement person who looks at real-time indicators to see a train going off the tracks. No one does that.
He decided the best choice was to call the ball and leave, resign.
A day into the extraction project, calculating the financial impact and the murky way forward, I found myself in Tractor Supply Company looking for a small present for an angel in the Bursar’s office. I spotted a sign hanging from the ceiling boasting: “Answers for Life Out There.” Ha! Tempting. Plus, there were four hapless employees standing around at a desk under the sign. Most of the time I have enough self-awareness to know that what I’m tempted to do is super weird, cringe. Often, I hold back. (My family would counter this claim.) This time I couldn’t. I was too raw, vulnerable. I had to try.
“My 18-year-old is away at school but doesn’t appear to be going to classes. Thoughts?” Not sure what I really thought The Divine was capable of, but He didn’t deliver. They didn’t have anything for me.
“I thought I could do it, I thought I could make myself do it,” he explained. “But I just can’t justify the why.”
Home now for—I just checked the date three times—it’s only been 4 days but it feels like a month. Why is that? Things are going well. He has a sense of purpose and agency, his life is his own. Now 18, he can set up contracts with clients for his small business, think about a logo design, take payments via PayPal, upgrade his checking account to an adult account, drive to the gym, buy steaks, cook dinner for us, and be an adult on his own terms. Yes, he’s home, and no that was not our grand-master-plan for our idiosyncratic eldest. Not at all. This is a major disruption to the aspirations of two parents who had poured every resource and opportunity in front of this young man who we know is capable of so much, has such a fine mind in need of nurturing.
All of this agony transpired over the weekend of our son’s 18th birthday. We never imagined this is how adulthood would announce itself. Now, two weeks later, I realize that our culture lacks rites of passage for young men. Perhaps this collision of milestones—reaching adulthood while rejecting a seemingly perfect path all laid out—is what caused my emotional crash in the bathroom last week. I was finally coming to terms with what we had known for years. Our son has taken responsibility for feeding his own mind all along, from his earliest days of consciousness.
Maybe you remember your children doing this? As toddler he studied the hinges on the bedroom door in our friend’s home where we crash-landed for a week after moving to Hawaii. I will always remember him crouching as only babies can, chubby legs out, feet flat, large head hunched over the hinge as his arms moved the door back, and forth, back, and forth. His mind has been ravenous since, and we joyfully fed it.
This is just another twist on an inky mountain drive illuminated by headlights grasping to peer around granite banks and guess at the way forward.
His life is his own. I knew that I needed to shift gears from parent to coach. But how?
I ride horses and really enjoy working with the younger "green" horses. They are quite a challenge, and often sensitive to your movements. They get confused easily, but when the lightbulb goes off, it's very rewarding. I’m switching from hunter/jumper and dressage to Western (I grew up on a small farm where I raised and trained Welsh Cobs) and occasionally my old dressage habits cause consternation. Typically, a dressage rider bundles the horse up into an athletic frame, collected, strong through the haunches, driving the horse up into a firm rein. This athleticism creates beautiful, symmetric movements during strict tests in a rectangle ring. It’s good horsemanship, but there are other ways to go about developing this “frame” as I’m learning from the Western way.
How to avoid getting bucked off
To a young mare, bundling her up means you’re in her face while simultaneously asking her to go. This is a mixed message she doesn’t like and depending on the temperament…she may buck. (Especially if she is a redheaded mare as well.) All that frustrated energy needs to go somewhere. If you have her all boxed in with the reins, the only place for that energy to escape is up in a buck. To avoid this, you have to move direct that energy forward. Mover her feet out. If you sit there clutching, she is going to buck more and with a bit more intent. A novice rider really doesn’t want to move an angry horse forward for fear of losing control. It’s very counter-intuitive, but it’s the only way. Giver her the reins, let her take the bit, but nudge her forward with confidence. Get her moving, in any direction. Just get her feet moving.
Our son needed to be given his head, and a nudge forward, the confidence to move out in a direction of his own choosing. If I wanted to preserve our relationship and not get bucked off, I needed to loosen my grip on the metaphorical reins entirely.
When I shared this metaphor with my friend at the Bursar's office, she said: "You HAVE to do something with this insight. Parents need you." In that moment, I finally realized my calling for this phase of my life. I had been searching for it for several years, and at last my new friend told me what it was: become a life coach.
To be the best support to our family when our son came home, I put myself back in school. With an adult in the house finding his purpose in life, the family dynamic would necessarily change. I didn't have a manual for this and wanted to take our current model down to the studs and rebuild. I chose the best school I could find to ensure that I learned the process and received the proper supervision and mentoring to be highly effective. It was a huge bet on myself and a massive investment of time. I had to keep my business running in high gear to pay for coaching school, and somehow dedicate the time to 300+ hours of training and coaching, plus be a hockey mom for our younger son.
These are early days, but I am grateful to have him home and able to see this growth firsthand. Yes, it’s unexpected but it’s also a gift. We have a chance to keep building an adult relationship day by day through iterations of mistakes and repair. I am learning to let go, not dive in and project-manage or troubleshoot, but rather to gather up coaching skills and practice them.
Just over a year out, our son is truly thriving. He set goals for himself that he exceeded before the year was out. He loves what he is doing and is making a very solid living working in an area where he is free to be both creative and highly technical, and an expert getting recognition from industry leaders. I admire his courage so much for knowing himself and honoring what he knew to the core of his being, even if it was difficult to do.
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