Back when Molly was younger and we were always one crisis away from the hospital, I learned that I needed to keep a bag ready to go.

The first couple of times we’d gone to the emergency room, I was so overwhelmed that I grabbed only my purse. My purse has my phone in it, which is a great distraction. But it won’t last 12 hours or more. For one thing, there’s a limit to how much scrolling and game-playing I can do (and I’m speaking here as someone who’s very addicted to my phone). More importantly, without a charging cable I’m likely to run out of power.

I wasn’t aware then that a trip to the ER, especially for a teen mental health crisis, involved so much waiting around. Sometimes the wait was for a social worker or a doctor. Sometimes it was for blood and urine test results. And sometimes we waited for more than 24 hours, if Molly was headed to an inpatient setting and a bed was not available yet.

Eventually I learned that I needed to bring more with me to keep me entertained, charged, and fed. So I would grab my backpack and throw things into it as I ran out the door. And with even more visits to the ER and other settings where I had to sit and wait, I realized that it would make more sense to keep a bag packed all the time in case I needed it.

Here’s what I packed in my go bag:

• a phone charger, so I would not have to worry about running out of juice;

• a book that wasn’t too serious or dense;

• a cross stitch or crochet project that didn’t require too much counting;

• some granola bars, fruit snacks, nuts, or other portable food, so I wouldn’t have to rely on the vending machines;

• a refillable water bottle;

• my journal, so I could write what I was thinking and feeling;

• a piece of paper with all Molly’s key information on it, so I wouldn’t have to remember it or look it up when the staff asked.1

Having everything I needed already packed up was a game-changer. Instead of pacing or doomscrolling while I waited to hear what would happen next, I could do pretty much what I’d be doing at home. Being prepared helped me stay calm, stopped me from ruminating or worrying too much, and allowed me to be present when Molly needed me.

If you are parenting a teenager with bipolar, BPD, or another serious mental illness, I’m sure you have seen your share of hospital waiting rooms. What do you keep in your go bag?

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People often tell me that they are impressed with all the things I’m doing and accomplishing (although it might just be that it all comes out of me in a rush once I start talking and get excited). Meanwhile, I’m internally feeling like a failure because I can’t seem to finish anything, and spend hours playing a stupid arrow game on my phone1 and scrolling.

In a post from last summer, I wrote that I had decided to move from describing Molly and all her many facets, to writing about the effects her illness have/had on me, and some of the techniques I’ve learned to protect my own peace.

I was looking at that post today, and I realized that when I wrote it I was undergoing an internal shift in how I thought about myself, my time left in the world, and what I really want to accomplish. Right now, I’m in the middle of another.

At about this time last summer, Molly had been out of our house for a little over a year, and she’d been living out of state for about eight months. Things were not calm yet, because her relationship with her boyfriend was volatile (to say the least). Between the nonstop calls and texts, and her frequently showing up at our house without warning in the middle of the night, I was still always waiting for the next shoe to drop.

Day to day though, my life was much calmer than it had been for the last five or six years. I found myself with more control over how I spent my days than I’d had since I was a kid. I had time to think, to write, to sit out in my screen porch reading, to sit in an Adirondack chair looking at the sky. All this time, all to myself! I was still on edge and not getting much done, so it was not peaceful yet.

Now, a year after that, things are even calmer. Without all the constant interruptions from my kid’s needs and the nonstop crisis that was my previous job, I suddenly don’t have my priorities shaped by what fires I need to put out. I have almost nothing on my calendar, and all that open time makes me uncomfortable and edgy. I’ve realized that I am responsible for how I spend my days.

I’ve learned that when there are no emergencies, I am less productive. I wrote about this phenomenon a couple of years ago as it related to inbox zero. When I’m not playing whack-a-mole, I’m supposed to be working on the most important priorities, and they are hard! It turns out that I’ve been using the chaos as a crutch, a barrier between me and having to deal with my actual work. Having too much free time can be just as bad as having none.

At the start of 2026, I set goals for myself that were more challenging than in 2025. And oddly enough, I’ve been making real progress on them. My book proposal is written and I’ve started to query agents. I’ve got an estate plan and a better handle on my finances. I’m working on my consulting business. Adding more to my plate has made me get more done, oddly enough. I feel more at peace than I have in years. I need to make sure I don’t overwhelm myself, but right now I feel like I can take on the world.

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Discovery

My first realization that boundaries could benefit both Molly and me was when she was in middle school. By seventh grade she had developed serious school avoidance, and used to start calling me to pick her up within 30 minutes of her arrival. She would call over and over again, not waiting for voicemail. My phone would ring five times and then pause, then ring again. Once I answered, she’d move immediately to asking me to come get her, which I could not do because I was trying to work a stressful job that involved 9-meeting days and projects in between. Not to mention that she was a kid and was supposed to be in school. She would cry and beg and I would feel terrible but also pressured and resentful, and just about every day started with me feeling frustrated and powerless and like I was failing at both parenting and working.

Molly was also spending a good part of every morning in the office of the school social worker, who did a heroic job of trying to get her to attend classes and make it through the day. In a conversation with the social worker I mentioned how upsetting it was to have to comfort and argue with Molly on these calls, and she said, “Just don’t pick up the phone.”

I was taken aback. How could I just leave her calls unanswered, when she was clearly upset? And the social worker told me that my feelings mattered too, I knew Molly was being cared for in her office, and that she needed to understand that calling me forty times in a row just for me to say no to her was not going to help. So I stopped. And shortly after that, Molly stopped too.

This didn’t mean that she wanted to stay at school. But it meant she had to use the channels that were available and appropriate, and both of us were spared the emotional spikes that these pointless conversations brought about.

Boundaries Explained

Boundaries in relationships are a tricky thing. Setting and managing boundaries can stop you from feeling used and upset by the relationship, but only if you take them seriously. In the case above, a pattern had developed where my daughter’s very real feeling of being trapped in school was expressed in a way that impacted my wellbeing. Not only was I flinching every time the phone rang, but it was hindering my ability to do my job. I couldn’t help her with her need, and we were both upset.

Saying “no” can be painful for both parties in the short term. The goal though, is longer-term peace and the ability to get more out of the relationship. Setting boundaries like this turned out to be a valuable part of our efforts to help Molly be less impulsive, learn consequences, and think about the effects her actions have on others.

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Boundary Examples

Besides the “don’t pick up the phone at work” boundary, I’ve had some success with these:

• When a conversation or interaction devolves into attacks, I will always hang up, mute a text thread, or walk out of the house. I say something like, “This is not getting us anywhere. We can continue when you’re able to do it calmly.”

• During one particular period where she and a now-ex were both barraging me with phone calls and texts, I created a Do Not Disturb rule on my phone called “Roller Coaster.” This cut off notifications from either one of them. I turned it on when I needed an afternoon of peace, and I would catch up and respond (if needed) later when I was able to handle it.

• During the year leading up to her 18th birthday, we made it clear that if she could not follow the rules and keep herself regulated, she would not be able to live with us. We helped her find an apartment and move into it, and paid for the first year. This was a hard one.

Each one of these boundaries was designed to protect my own mental health as well as that of the other members of our family. By setting them and sticking to them, we sent a message to both Molly and her long-suffering brother that we all had a right to peace and safety. And they did not mean that we loved her any less - in fact, we loved her so much that we wanted her to be able to hang out with us, as long as she was able to treat us the way we deserved to be treated.

How to Set and Maintain Boundaries

• Express your boundary clearly, calmly, and confidently. What is the line you are drawing and why are you doing it?

• State that your own needs matter, and that the other person is still loved and valuable. This is a tough one to navigate when the person is sensitive to rejection or even has rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD). It may take some practice.

• Be flexible where you can. If the other person suggests an alternative choice, listen to it and then decide for yourself whether it meets your needs.

• Write the boundaries down somewhere and refer to them when you notice things slipping back to how they were before. It’s a good reminder of exactly what you said, and you can refer to it for yourself or for the other person.

• Focus on the long term - the goal is to have the relationship succeed, even if it’s a hassle in the moment.

Conclusion - Where we are Today

My kid is 20 years old and lives across the country. We both figured out that she needed to be out of our house and our city in order to meet her goals of independence, education, and health. And she’s doing so well! Some of this is age of course, but a lot of it is being pushed to make her own choices. As far as boundaries: She asked me to co-sign her lease last October, and I told her I could not. She accepted this boundary and moved on. A couple of months ago she needed help making rent, and I helped her. Boundaries need to be flexible, and we need to start where we are.

While I was driving home from a funeral last weekend (and already feeling contemplative), I happened to pass through a section of the suburbs that includes a very high concentration of mental health care facilities. I passed the Eating Recovery Center, where Molly did her first residential program (the event that had me sliding down to the kitchen floor frozen with despair), and the Adolescent Behavioral Health building where she did her first PHP,1 her first IOP, and her second PHP (the one she got kicked out of for vaping in the bathroom and sharing with another kid). I passed the offices of the old Russian psychiatrist who told Molly that back in Russia she’d have been sent to Siberia instead of getting therapy and medication.

And best of all, I passed what I call the Sad Starbucks. This establishment sits across a four-lane road from the behavioral health place, and is where I used to spend a few hours every day while Molly was doing her outpatient programs. Seeing this building gave me more of a jolt than the other places did, maybe because the experience was mine and not hers. I have strong memories of myself sitting there wondering whether the world was falling apart and whether I needed to continue living in it. Molly was having her own intense moments, to be sure. But back in the fall of 2019, I was in pretty rough shape myself.

The family was gradually realizing that Molly was not just ‘spirited’, not just ‘intense’, but dealing with serious mental health and substance issues. At the same time, I was realizing that my job was damaging me and unsustainable. Somehow I became the person who managed all the paperwork and scheduling and medication and Molly-wrangling, even though I was the person working long frustrating hours.2 It was all becoming overwhelming. I dropped out of my Masters program. I dropped out of my volunteer work. I was depressed, having panic attacks, and for the first time in my life taking medication for both.

I also hated driving, especially on highways. So instead of going home after dropping Molly off at her day programs and having to make a second trip to pick her up in the afternoon, I decided to work in the Starbucks across the street.

I was handling every day moment by moment, which is a useful strategy in general and even more so when life is taking unexpected turns. I was trying not to catastrophize though. Where would this lead? Why were things getting worse instead of better? I sat in that Starbucks for hours every other day writing in my journal, using their free wifi to get some work done to justify my salary, and stressing out. And I started calling it the Sad Starbucks.

Little did I know then that things would get worse and worse for the next few years. Back in the fall of 2019, I thought my situation was terrible. And every day when I sat in my table in the corner, a dark cloud surrounded me. Eventually that fall I took a leave from work and found myself in my own PHP. Molly started a cycle of mental health crises that put her in the ER, inpatient, and residential programs over and over. Covid hit and work got even more intense and frustrating than before. Molly refused to isolate even if it meant killing all of us (“I don’t care if you die! I can’t stay in this house!”), and ran away frequently. We had to hide valuables and alcohol and car keys. There were frequent times when we were afraid. It was not till late 2025, when Molly was 19 and living far away, that things settled down for all of us.

During the most intense times, I was running on straight adrenaline. I was barely holding it together. But as awful as that was, at least I knew what was going on. I’d learned an enormous amount of information about mental health and its treatment,3 been to support groups, and developed strategies to help me keep everything in perspective.

Back in the fall of 2019, though, it was all new and terrifying. So I sat in the Sad Starbucks, alone with my very sad thoughts. And driving by this place on my way from a funeral brought that time back into my memory as if I were there again. I thought today about pulling out my journals from that time and seeing what I wrote about how it felt. I don’t want to revisit it right now though. And I don’t want to visit the Sad Starbucks ever again.

I seem to be having a bit of trouble these days with my overlapping writing projects. I’m hoping that if I write my issues down, my thoughts will become organized enough to push me forward.

I’m working on three distinct projects that cover a lot of the same subject matter (my relationship with and support for my daughter, who is bipolar and likely BPD as well). The formats and style are not at all similar. First, a book to help families navigate the adolescent mental health care system. Second, this Substack. Finally, a personal essay. Right now I’m stuck on all three:

• The subject matter across/within the projects is so similar and so deeply ingrained for me that I sometimes think I’m just saying the same thing over and over. I’m boring myself.

• Because my life for the past ten years has revolved around trying to help my daughter, I sometimes forget that other people have not gone through the experiences I have. I often leave my descriptions too vague to convey to readers how serious the situation really was.

• I am starting to imagine, because my daughter is now living across the country and seems (knock on wood) to be out of crisis mode, that I made this all up. There’s no way it could have been as intense as I thought, right?

• All three projects are important and urgent to me so my ADHD brain sometimes can’t choose which one is the top priority. I therefore ignore all three of them to work on something completely unrelated but much more fun (check out aworryaday2026 on Instagram or Threads if you are interested).

• I’m suffering from impostor syndrome regarding both the subject matter and my writing skills.

• Apparently I have some kind of aversion to completing anything. My book proposal is so close to being ready to submit! But I can’t seem to take the last few steps. And self-imposed deadlines hold no power over me.

So there it is. Hopefully now I’ve written all this out I can address each issue separately, and get some work done! If anyone has any suggestions, please share in the comments!

I find it very difficult to cry. The last time I did was over a decade ago when the replacement of our ductwork necessitated ripping out the wall and ceiling in part of our bedroom and back hall, which we had painted a just couple of years earlier. We had so many house projects going on in various stages of completion, and now the one thing we’d finished was being undone. We had lapped ourselves. We were going backwards. And I cried. The kids (now young adults) still talk about this in hushed tones, because it was so rare, and it’s never happened again.

Yes, I tend to walk around with a permanent lump in my throat and pain in my chest when I’m upset. And over these recent years trying to figure out how to help Molly, I’ve often been upset. It’s easier to just let that lump sit there blocking the door to deeper thoughts. It’s too painful to let it sink in. Much easier to let physical discomfort float on top of my emotions, so that I know it’s there but I can still do the things I need to do.

Sometimes I share the stories about Molly’s illness and the intense effects on all of us, and people are horrified. I’m so sorry, they say. It must be so hard.

It is hard, but I tell it as if it’s something I saw in a movie, happening to a stranger - not danger and pain and sadness pounding away day after day. This is real, happening to my kid and my family and me. Sometimes I even laugh and then apologize for laughing. Is it funny? Not unless you’ve been through it.

My therapist once asked me, have you cried about this yet? When are you going to cry? Hopefully never, I said.

I can’t cry or let these emotions really sink in, because what if I can’t stop? What if I collapse into a puddle on the floor and can’t get up to carry on? I can’t just abandon all my responsibilities! Of course, what am I doing to myself by not dealing with this pain? Is it all just festering in my body and poisoning me?

I have written in previous posts about Molly’s path through her teens: not just the diagnoses, but the moods and the behaviors and the impulsivity and the frightening meltdowns. No need to rehash all that here. There have been times that I was sure she would not survive. There have been times that I was afraid she’d take us all down with her.

These days, the graph of her life status is generally trending upward. I’ve mentioned that she lives in a different state and is getting good help. Recently she passed part of her GED and got not one but two jobs. The lump in my throat is barely noticeable most of the time, although it pops right back when she calls in distress (she’s been left in a hotel in Vegas without a phone, for example). I still can’t stop myself from being pulled into her pain. I have physical flashbacks to times when she cornered me during an emotionally violent episode and I thought she was about to attack. The lump in my throat makes itself known again. It’s doing its important job of smothering any attempt by real emotions to break through. Because I’m able to stay steady, I can listen and co-regulate with her, and help her keep moving forward too.

My daughter Molly has frequently been called “smart as a whip” by those who know her. I’ve mentioned before that she started reading at 4, made detailed logistical plans for our Christmas shopping trips not long after that (presenting them to the family using a whiteboard and telescoping metal pointer), and organized sit-down strikes to protest naps at her preschool.

In the years since her mental illness has emerged and endured, though, sometimes Molly seems like she's incapable of doing day to day tasks. Her executive functioning can be so bad that she’s not able to organize a trip to the doctor, and she’ll forget the content of a phone call about medications or test results before she’s even ended the call. Her mood swings are intense (what the professionals call “lability”, and caused by her bipolar disorder and/or BPD) and make it almost impossible for her to stay in a job or a relationship more than a couple of months. And her impulsivity means that she spends money as soon as it hits her account, she ends up in dangerous or unpleasant situations, she makes choices that move her in the opposite direction from her goals.

Sometimes I fall into thinking that she’s not bright, or not capable of understanding emotions or impacts or what her own illness makes her do. I think this is because over the last few years I mostly talk to her when she’s in crisis or in trouble or needs money (which I mostly don’t provide, because I’m working on boundaries). But she’s come so far; now there are times when she is wiser than I am.

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Crashes

I do this thing where when I get overwhelmed emotionally or mentally, I completely shut down. Once I came home after school and passed out in the living room and my mother had no idea where I was for hours because I wasn’t responding to her calling my name for dinner. I continued this through college, grad school, early jobs - I remember in my twenties lying immobile on my bed one day when I wasn’t able to get up and go to work, watching my work pager on the nightstand go off repeatedly as people tried to reach me.

Before either of my kids had issues with anxiety or depression, I was the only one in the family with any kind of mental health problem. I could “take to my bed,” as my son put it, and stay there for days until I felt better, and my family would just go on as usual. As the kids got older and needed me more, I started working on taking better care of myself. I wanted to be more present in the family, and I also didn’t want to be embarrassing to them with my crashes. My therapist at the time told me that just getting out of bed and into a chair was a step in the right direction, even if I stayed there all day. With therapy and medication, I got much better at pushing through depression and shutdowns, and also at seeing the signs that a crash was coming so I could ward them off.

By the time Molly entered her teens, I had gotten to the point where I rarely “took to my bed,” and I could navigate daily stressors pretty well. But then, boom! Molly’s mental illness and addiction popped up, right as we were in a scary political environment, and then Covid arrived, and my job became more stressful. Every single day was a nonstop barrage of terrible things that I needed to handle. At home, Molly screamed and yelled for hours, she ran away, she stopped participating in school, she ignored the shutdown even when we put locks on the windows and outside the doors. I felt unable to keep going in the face of all that, and yet I somehow did.

Hypervigilance waiting for what she’d do next. PTSD from the screaming and threats. Anxiety and sadness. Overwhelmed by home, work, and the world. I started to have crashes again, more intense and shorter than before. I would lose the ability to move or talk, with a permanent lump in my throat. When Molly first had to go to a residential program, my husband and I were talking about logistics and I slowly slid to the kitchen floor, leaning against a cabinet door and completely zoned out of the conversation. When she sprinted away from the house shoeless in 20-degree weather, I curled up in the fetal position in my chair, face pressed against the leather, frozen for an hour. I would have stayed there longer, but something else happened that had to be dealt with so I had to pull myself back. I don’t even know what that something was - in an earlier post I talk about shutting out some of the painful moments and I guess this was one of those.

Sparks

Molly and I have very different temperaments, which makes for some odd clashes.

For me, my frustration takes a long time to build up. Sometimes it grows in the background for weeks before any sign is visible to others. And then I roar it all out in an enormous way. Even after the moment of conflict is done, it takes me hours or days to cool down.

For Molly though, she can go from zero to 100 in the space of seconds. A pleasant moment can instantly turn into a flying rage that’s stronger than my mood gets even at my most intense. This is just the way her brain works, whether it’s due to bipolar, BPD, ADHD, or whatever - I don’t think much about the why, but boy am I impacted by the what. When the episode is over, she’s instantly over it as well, and is ready to resume conversations as if nothing had happened.

When we both hit that level of intensity, the stars are aligned for a very bad scene. We feed off each other, both explode, and then she leaves the room and I collapse. I’m a wreck, exhausted and spent. I can’t easily move, much less talk.

Evolution

Now that Molly is 20 (not to mention living elsewhere), these clashes almost never happen. There are still moments where she quits a job after a couple of weeks, or loses a relationship because she’s “too much” and calls to unleash on me for making her the way she is. When these moments come, I can see that Molly has become much wiser and more empathetic than in the past.

In middle school, she once came into the living room five minutes after a double-meltdown and asked, “Why are you sad?” Either she didn’t remember the blowup or she didn’t understand that it was damaging to me.

In high school, after she melted down and I responded with my own explosion, it started to hit her that this was not my normal state. She would stay upstairs for a while and then I’d hear her crying. She’d apologize, wish she could stop doing this, and hate herself (which was not helpful but at least she understood that this rage was something she needed to work on and that it caused real pain to others).

And nowadays, if we are talking on the phone and she can tell I’m down, she reassures me that things will get better, asks her brother to spend time with me to cheer me up, tells me to touch grass. She waits for me to feel better and then analyzes the situation like a professional. Here’s what happened, here was her mistake (impulsivity, black and white thinking, etc.), and here’s what she’s working on. Apologizes for hurting me, says this problem is hers to solve, and just generally supports me. This is strange, since she’s the one with the serious issues and they are not disappearing. But I say it’s wisdom.

I was planning to title this post Rip Tide vs. Tidal Wave, till I did some research and realized that not only were these not opposites, but that what we think of as a “rip tide” is actually a “rip current,” which doesn’t sound nearly as good when paired with “tidal wave.” Then I followed the tide/current rabbit trail looking for good matches till I finally gave up. I wanted something cute about tides, waves, how to escape the quicksand of raising a mentally ill young adult who sometimes pulls me into her emotional or financial crises when I really should be staying out.

What happens is: I get pulled off my feet, submerged, sucked out to sea and then tossed to shore to sit among the wreckage of plans. Then I have to pick myself up and take inventory, knowing that it will certainly happen again just as I think we’re safe, and I can’t really walk away completely even if I say I will.1

Instead of a clever wave-related title, I ended up thinking of a bunch of common pieces of advice about supporting a young adult with serious mental illness. Even though these phrases are practically clichés, I find that they actually work for my current experience of parenting a bipolar young adult, so I’m going with them.

Don’t Get on The Roller Coaster With Her

As I’ve probably mentioned, I’ve got my own issues with anxiety and depression and guilt feelings and suicidal ideation.2 My self esteem is not what it could be. I feel more responsible for my kid’s actions than I should be, now that she’s an adult. When Molly is spiraling or melting down, she often aims her verbal weapons at me. And when I’ve just been the target of screamed insults and sometimes physical intimidation, it affects me deeply.

Even though I know she loves me and doesn’t really mean the things she says (she’s told me in the past to go kill myself, that all her problems are due to my parenting, etc.), it’s hard to stay cool and steady. She may not be able to stop herself but that doesn’t make it any easier. Sometimes it takes days for me to recover from the sadness that takes over after an episode like this.

It’s not just the direct impact on me from her moods and meltdowns that has the potential to throw me for a loop, but also the disappointment when she gets into trouble or disappears or relapses. I wanted her to succeed, but instead she’s doing worse! I wanted her to go back to school, but instead she’s in Vegas! These setbacks can knock me down too, kicking off some very dark thoughts.

Advice to stay off the roller coaster actually makes sense. She may be freaking out, but I don’t need to join her. She may be hating herself for something she did, but this is her issue and not mine. She is the one on the rollercoaster. My job is to be there when the car rolls back to the boarding area.

Don’t Do More for Her Than She’s Willing To Do for Herself

I have tried making appointments for Molly, signing her up for government benefits, researching programs where she could get help. Often she says these are things she’s interested in pursuing. But just as often, once I’ve done all the legwork to save her from having to focus on administrative details that are difficult for her, she backs off at the last moment. She doesn’t make the phone call, she leaves town instead of going to residential treatment, she doesn’t attend the appointment.

If a young adult is not going to follow through, there’s no point to the parent making these efforts. Often, doing this kind of work feels better to me than doing nothing. At least I’ve accomplished something, right? But it’s not my job to drag her to the help I think she needs. When she is really ready to make changes or get help, she will take the necessary steps. I just need to celebrate her when she’s stable, and support her when she’s not. This is Molly’s journey, not mine. She needs to do the work.

You Can Only Control the Present Moment

I sometimes wonder (as in this earlier newsletter) whether I’ve made the right decisions in the past regarding my daughter and her mental health. One thing I try to keep in mind is that I can’t change what happened in the past, whether it was something I did or not. When Molly is in a volatile state and tells me that I ruined her life by doing this or that, I tell her (and myself) that we always did our best with the information we had at the time, and that we are always working from a place of love. But it took a while for me to really grasp what this meant.

What I understand now is that we can’t do anything about the past, and we can only make decisions today based on the information we currently have. And by doing the best we can in the present, we hope to have impact on the future but we can’t control that either.

I can do what I think is best for her, but it’s up to her to take the action she thinks is best for herself. I can’t directly impact her progress towards or away from stability and health. But I can show her again and again that she is loved and has value. This way, no matter what decisions she makes regarding medication, substances, employment, etc., she’ll always have a strong foundation of support. Whether or not she realizes this when she’s at her lowest points, she knows it and relies on it and tells me she is grateful for it, when she’s more stable.

I can keep loving my daughter, make and keep boundaries, be strong for her, help her if she wants to pursue treatment for mental illness or substance abuse, and always listen to her without judgment. This way, she will keep talking to me and know that there is at least one person out there who will always be there.

Ignorance Is Bliss

Speaking of “the information we had at the time,” how much information do we really need about what’s going on in our young adult’s life, when they are not doing well? The cartoon below refers to world news and politics, but it also fits how I feel about Molly and her life situation. I used to ask for all the details and get angry when she wouldn’t share names and locations, or how she was living, or where she was hanging out. And when I did learn what she was up to, I’d rile myself up worrying about her getting hurt. Now I just make sure I’m checking in every day or two, asking how she’s doing, telling her I love her. Since I can’t control her actions, I’m better off knowing only what she wants to share with me. I don’t love her any less, but I’m mentally healthier and thus more able to help her if I don’t know everything.

Radical Acceptance

For years one of my biggest frustrations was that my daughter refused to follow rules, or follow through with promises to take her meds, or stay in school, and I had to deal with the emotional (and often financial) fallout. If she would just take her meds, she could be more stable. If she would just stay away from certain friends, she would not get in trouble with the police. If she could just suck it up and go back for her senior year of high school, she’d have so many more opportunities. I’d get angry when I couldn’t control outcomes, and depressed when terrible things would happen. I would wish that things were different, and grieve for what could have been.

I learned about the concept of Radical Acceptance as part of the Family Connections course for people supporting loved ones with Borderline Personality Disorder. Radical Acceptance is a practice that allows us to separate our emotional responses from outcomes or situations that upset us. It’s possible to accept the fact that something has happened and understand that this is a reality we can’t change, and at the same time decide we’re going to move forward and let go of our judgment. It’s not always simple to stop fighting with what’s happened, but once this concept sinks in, life becomes much easier. And if we concentrate on what we can change instead of what we can’t, we can accomplish a lot more.

I’ve been staying with my parents for about a month while my dad recovers from ankle surgery. It’s been over 30 years since I lived here, although I’ve been for plenty of visits. As I drive around town (to the CVS! To the groomers! To the grocery store! To the coffee house, 500 times!) I pass by places where I have a memory of something interesting happening. And every time, I get a playback of about 3 seconds of that memory, and then the car keeps moving and I forget about it till I pass it again.

I present you here with some of these spots, in no particular order:

• The house sitting on what used to be an empty lot full of tall grass and flowers, where as a kid I picked a huge bouquet of daisies for my mom which turned out to be soaked with dog pee.

• The house where as I was walking home from middle school I saw a naked man in the open garage, standing on a stepladder and looking out at the street. I speed walked till I got round the next bend, and never told anyone about it. All I really remember is his very pale skin and his very dark pubic hair.

• The 7-Eleven where I bought my first pack of cigarettes, on my 16th birthday,1 the day after a conversation with my mother wherein she told me that while it would be legal for me to buy them, she knew I was mature enough not to do it.2 Of course I took it as a challenge.

• The cemetery where a good friend of mine took me on a date and shocked me by putting the car in park and kissing me. It was a date but I somehow didn’t think it was a date-date. We’re still good friends over 40 years later, thank goodness.

• The park where a group of friends and I used to sit around looking at the stars and drinking Mickey’s Big Mouths, talking about the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd.

• The split-level house where a different group of friends and I used to sit around playing D&D and drinking whatever liquor we had on hand, and talking about Roxy Music and Laurie Anderson.

• The cul-de-sac where yet another group of friends and I used to sit around looking at the half-built houses and drinking two-liter bottles of wine coolers, talking about The Cure and Elvis Costello.

• The intersection where I spun out in extreme slow motion after an ice storm hit while I was in the eye doctor having my eyes dilated, hitting the car of my gym teacher Ms. Pillow, who was not pleased or particularly kind about it.

• The wooded parking lot where I got the gigantic Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon wedged in a space between trees that was really not meant to be a spot, because I was late to school after dropping my little brother off at kindergarten.

• The curve3 where the car I was riding home in the night before Thanksgiving leapt off the road and flipped, landing upside down in someone’s front yard. Somehow we were all mostly all right.

Somehow we are still mostly all right, as far as I can tell.

I wonder sometimes what it must be like to stay in the place where you were raised, instead of just visiting a couple of times a year. Do these flashes of memory stop happening? Do they get merged together with other more recent memories so the whole collection seems like a smooth moving picture instead of a series of individual images, like what happens in a zoetrope?

I guess I could ask my friends or brothers who have stayed here. But I kind of like things the way they are.

Happy International Molly Day! This year we are celebrating for the 20th year, which is a big one. On the phone last week, Molly told me that she was actually looking forward to International Molly Day this year, which is not usually the case (see last year’s post for more about that):

Yes, there have been some bumps in the road since she left her last relationship behind and moved to yet another state. But it’s no longer constant chaos. She’s gotten (and left) a job, she’s gotten (and lost) a new boyfriend, she’s working on all the adult-type administrative things, with help from an organization, she’s got a GED tutor and a therapist and is mostly substance free.

And most importantly, when I talk to her it’s really her. She cooks. She draws. We have great conversations. We text each other almost every day, and try to FaceTime every week or so. It’s almost like all the uproar of the last few years is completely in the rear view mirror.

Is it maturity? Is it getting out of town and away from her stormy past and all the associations that go with it? Whatever it is, I see my amazing girl in there more consistently than I could have imagined was possible. I can almost believe that she’s completely stable and sane and happy.

However.

I started writing this post last week in anticipation of a very positive International Molly Day report this week. And on Thursday, Molly told us that she’d passed the first section of the GED exam, which is great progress on one of her big goals! But then I got an email from her at 4 AM saying that her phone was broken and she needed to talk to me. Then nothing for a couple of days, till she called me inconsolable from a hotel in Vegas (on the landline, since her phone was unusable). She was back with the boyfriend, and they’d gone on this trip for her birthday, but then they’d had a fight and he had left. I couldn’t get more details, but I got her calmed down enough to talk. We did some box breathing, she splashed cold water on her face and blew her nose. I asked if she needed anything, she said no, and we hung up after saying we loved each other no matter what.

That was Saturday night, and now it’s Monday afternoon. Molly is completely AWOL. I have no idea whether the boyfriend came back and they had a great weekend, or whether he came back and they flew home in stony silence, or whether he never came back at all. This is more like the Molly of old, and if it hadn’t been for this past six months of relative peace, I wouldn’t pay it much mind. You get used to a certain level of worry when your kid is at a certain level of living dangerously, because there’s no choice. But this time, I’m worried.

And once again I feel like I’ve been smacked out of complacency. Reading over my old posts on this newsletter, I sound so positive! Surely this is a turning point! She’s so stable! Every time I think this, I’m surprised and hurt when it turns out to have been temporary. Twenty years of this pattern and I’m still falling for it every time. But I’m her mother, and apparently I don’t have any choice about that either.

I’ve always had a pretty terrible memory. My parents and siblings always have to remind me of events that happened when I was a child. My husband has to remind me of things that happened over the past thirty-odd years. This includes not only day-to-day occurrences (“remember in 1983 when the dog got into the bathroom trash just when the cute UPS guy was coming up the driveway, and you had to flip the area rug over the pile of shredded sanitary products right by the side door?”) but even major events like weddings and car wrecks. My memories of the past tend to be flashes of emotion, time and place without much context. And if someone swears that something happened, I believe them but it’s as if someone else experienced it. They could invent my past life from scratch and I would nod along.

I also have problems with names and faces. We’ve lived in the same neighborhood for nineteen years and more than once I’ve been greeted by name on the sidewalk and had no idea who it was or how I knew them. Here again, I’ve depended on my family to cover for me. I remember people because of their hair, or their glasses; this falls apart of course when these things change. But if my husband’s with me he’ll fill me in, either during or after a conversation.

With books and movies, I immediately blank out the plot and the characters, sometimes even before finishing. This is actually helpful because I can watch the same movie over and over without knowing what’s going to happen. On the other hand, I’ve had to start Broadchurch over several times because I waited too long between episodes and needed to remind myself what was going on. I can often tell you the general vibe of a book, but nothing else about it.

I forget about friends if I’m not actively in conversations with them. I quit my job a couple of years ago and it’s as if my former colleagues fell off the face of the earth. But if I do talk to people after a break, we are connected again with no loss of closeness. When people die, it’s the same for me as if they’d moved across the country: I don’t think of them much, maybe because I think there’s always a chance they’ll pop back into my life and we’ll pick up where we left off.1

I have to put notes and labels everywhere - “EAT GRAPES” is on the fridge door. “WE HAVE YOGURT” is on the pantry shelf where we keep the cookies. It’s an out of sight, out of mind thing. I’ve always been like this, but recently I’ve learned it may be related to my late-discovered ADHD. Somehow that makes me feel better about all this, but I’m still annoyed.

How does this connect to my relationship with Molly?2

Over the past few years, especially when Molly was still living with us, there were crazy things happening constantly. Emotional outbursts and attacks. Calls from the police or hospital at 3 in the morning. Deep sadness and loneliness that needed my love more than anything, even when she was violently pushing me away. It was a roller coaster every single day. But if you’d asked me about how things were going, I might say it had been a while, and that things were going better. I’d be thinking months, when really there’d been a screaming fight only days earlier.

One day last year, I’d convinced Molly to go to a residential treatment program, done all the paperwork, and was getting ready to take her. My husband told me to keep the car doors locked in case she decided to make a break for it while I was driving on the highway. I remembered that this had happened once when she was much younger, but he reminded me that only the previous year she’d opened the car door when we were taking her to the same program. I’d completely forgotten, as if it had never happened. But at the time it was terrifying. We were driving along at 70 miles per hour in Chicago traffic, and she was screaming and crying and swearing at us, and suddenly lunged at the door and lifted the handle. I really thought she’d make the leap, and I reached over the seat to grab her clothing while my husband had pulled the car over. But in the year since, I’d forgotten this ever happened.

Was this my usual faulty memory? Yes, but also something else. When these scary moments happen with Molly, I am overwhelmed, hopeless, angry, frightened. I feel like I’m under attack. As the terrible thing is happening the emotional response takes over my entire body and brain. I feel like I’m ready to explode, never to speak to her again. It frequently takes me a day or more to come down. I forget the feelings of distress and anger, and remember only my love for this beautiful girl. I think it’s something like going through childbirth. It’s the worst pain you’ve ever felt and you swear at the time you’ll never do it again. But when your baby first smiles up at you and lets you know you are the most important thing in its world, the memory of that pain disappears and is replaced with love and hope for the future.

And then Molly comes around with new plans and new promises, and I’m happy to see her and to believe her, and hopeful that this time my love will be enough to keep her safe and on the right track.

One thing I (and probably 90% of the people reading this) like to do at the end of each year is to review my accomplishments and learnings, and then make some goals for the upcoming year. In a very quick post today, I’d like to catch you all up on what happened on the home front in 2025, and what I’m hoping will happen in 2026.

What I got done

I’m not a person who celebrates wins as they happen - I just move on to the next thing without a break or a reward for myself. And I also tend to forget about my accomplishments as soon as I’m done with them. But I am a big fan of recording everything I do: in my long-form journal, my Monk Manual, and my Amazing Marvin productivity software. When I reviewed all my notes from 2025, I was pleasantly surprised by how far I’d gotten on some key goals. I won’t list everything here, but the ones relevant to this publication are below.

First, I finished the first draft of my book!

As a reminder, the book is called “Crazy-Ass Bitches: A guide for families to navigating the adolescent mental health care system” (I call it “CAB” for short), and the more I work on it the more excited I am about getting it out into the world. Now that the first draft is done, I’m working with my writing coach (the wonderful ) to get a book proposal ready for submission, and we’ll see how it goes from there.

Second, I managed to make it through a really rough year on the Molly front.

Molly started the year in a bad state physically and mentally, and it was nonstop chaos from then on. I haven’t shared all the details here for privacy reasons, but I managed to support Molly with love (including cleaning out her apartment when the lease was up and she was already living in another state), while also doing a much better job of setting and maintaining boundaries than I’ve done in the past.

Third, I published twelve issues of this Substack.

Have I been consistent? No! Did I meet my goal of one every two weeks? No! But did I gain some subscribers and also some insight into my parenting and mental health? Yes, absolutely. Plus, that’s twelve posts that did not exist a year ago, and twelve is better than zero.

What’s ahead?

In the new year, I want to work on all these projects (again, plus all the things I’m not telling you about here). I hope to get a publisher for CAB and keep working towards publishing it. Supporting Molly will always be on my list, and I will strive to help her where I can, hold firm when I can’t, and make sure she always knows I love her. And I hope to publish more here, focusing on consistency and frequency.

I hope that the transition from 2025 to 2026 goes well for all of you!

When we moved to Evanston, Illinois eighteen years ago, we had never lived anywhere that had a big trick or treating scene. Honestly we were still more into the parties than the kid stuff. That first year at about 3:00 on Halloween, people at work started leaving and someone asked me, aren’t you going home? I asked why, and she said for the trick or treaters. I thought she was nuts, but I did leave, and it was worth it.

Here in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago, things are almost apple pie sweet. Our first week here, out with our kids in the stroller, we were literally walking by white picket fences and wondering if we were dreaming. A neighbor introduced herself and said, welcome to Heavenston. It was like things we’d seen in movies. We’re in a commuter neighborhood with tree-lined streets, the choice of the El or the Metra to get to the city, and plenty of local buses. A block from our house we have several blocks of mostly locally-owned retail and coffee shops and eateries and bars and even a post office (we used to have a library branch too, but budget cuts took it away and now it’s a comics store).

The city of Evanston takes Halloween very seriously. The official hours are 4-7 PM, and if your porch light is on, you are open for the trick or treaters. I learned that first year that Halloween is a big event, not just for the kids but for everyone. Our houses are close together, so it’s great trick or treating territory. But more than that, it’s a day to connect with your neighbors one last time before winter hits and everyone disappears indoors for 6 months due to our famous Chicago winters. Evanston, and Chicago too, is about community and connection.

At four on the dot, the little kids start coming by, some carried by parents, some toddling along on their own with parents there to supervise. The parents stop at the sidewalk, and the kids come up the walk and chirp out Trick or Treat in their raspy little voices. A little later, the slightly bigger kids come by, usually in groups of 5-10, with several parents following a little behind. Eventually the middle schoolers come by, no adults with them, but in herds. They dress in coordinated costumes and have been preparing for weeks. One year my daughter and her friends dressed as M&Ms, in colored sweatshirts with pinned-on logos and black leggings. One year there were a bunch of Minions. By the time it’s dark (about 6:00, this time of year), it’s high schoolers. More than you might think, and there are even some elaborate costumes although most are not. And at 7 on the dot, we pack up the leftover candy and turn off the porch light, and it’s done.

It turns out that this is a great time to catch up with the neighbors. Here in Evanston we are very into our neighbors. There’s Halloween, but also block parties, the tree lighting at Fountain Square, the Fourth of July parade, and lots of front porches occupied all summer. It’s lovely to watch the neighborhood kids grow up through the years of trick or treating, starting out as babies dressed as pumpkins, ending as teens ready for college, maybe wearing a skeleton shirt or with some bloody face paint. There’s always conversation, the kids are polite, and we tell the older ones to say hi to their folks if they are out on their own.

Over the years the weather has varied, of course. Pouring rain one year, snow another year. One time it was too hot to be comfortable in a heavy costume. But always, people are out and enjoying the occasion. Some years there are hundreds, some years only a few. But it’s always an event, and always a celebration of community.

During Covid there was no trick or treating, of course, especially the year before the vaccine came out. That was sad and we (at least the adults) were all scared. It took a while to ramp back up. Adult costumes tend to reference current events, and the first year that people came out again, the coronavirus was a common one.

This year though is the scariest of all. ICE is in Chicago and neighboring suburbs (including ours), for what they are calling Midway Blitz. Masked men in camouflage or jeans, driving into neighborhoods and grabbing people. Helicopters flying overhead nonstop. Maybe you have heard of some of the incidents, or seen the videos. It’s not just the so-called ‘worst of the worst’ they are tackling to the ground and dragging away, it’s ordinary people, more than 70% of whom have no criminal convictions at all, and including many who are here legally or even citizens. They are using tear gas and rubber bullets on protestors and now even crowds of neighbors.

Yesterday, after ICE disrupted the start of a Halloween parade in Old Irving Park, and used tear gas on the peaceful neighborhood, our governor made a plea to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, asking them to please take a break on Halloween so the kids could enjoy the holiday and be safe. In an interview on Fox News, Noem responded by saying that not only would they not pause, they would actually ramp up the activity.

And so they did. All day long ICE has rampaged through Chicago, tackling both immigrants and protestors and carrying them away, using tear gas, and refusing to show badges or remove their masks, much less wear body cameras as ordered multiple times by Judge Sarah Ellis. And this includes the heaviest activity we’ve seen yet in Evanston. They were in all parts of town. They took landscapers from their job sites, there were helicopters flying over us all day, they were scoping out our schools. Our younger kids had indoor recess, and our high school was on ‘closed campus protocol’. I wonder what the younger kids were told about why they couldn’t go out?

These elementary schoolers have only known times of Covid, active shooter drills, increasing weather violence due to climate change, and now this? Seeing their neighbors and the parents of their friends (or their own parents) grabbed off the streets by masked men with weapons and using tear gas on their neighborhoods?

What will these kids grow up thinking about life, the United States, the people in power? Safety, security? How will they not have nightmares every night?

As I was writing this, it was nearly 5:00 and we’d had hardly any trick or treaters, although we did get some later. We don’t really need Halloween to get us scared this year. Things are scary enough as it is.

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When Molly was first admitted to a residential treatment program for her mental illness (this was in November of 2019, and things were already pretty intense at our house), I was a ball of nerves. She’d been so emotionally dysregulated, unable to get out of bed or go to school, crying loudly and screaming at us, for weeks. There would be breaks, but a lot of our time was spent wondering what version of Molly would show up when she entered a room. Having her admitted was difficult and I wondered if it was the right thing to do. Shouldn’t I be able to help her at home? Shouldn’t I be able to manage being under constant alert, when I knew she didn’t mean the things she said? Would she be ok on her own for a month or more? But when she was gone, it was a lightening. I was not sure what to think about that either.

By a couple of years later, there had been so many trips through the ER/inpatient/residential/home cycle that it was almost routine. Not normal, not enjoyable, but we knew how it worked. We’d be managing as best we could, and then there would be a crisis, and she needed more help than we could give. So we’d get her that help.

In the early days, I’d feel lighter once I knew she was away for a few days or weeks. And then I would immediately lecture myself. Shouldn’t I feel terrible? Shouldn’t I miss my child when she was miles away in a hospital unit? I’d push down the relief, tell myself I’d spend the next week getting work done, cleaning up her room (and finding any alcohol or weed she’d left behind), catching up on housework. But instead I would lie down on the sofa and sleep for 24 hours: the deepest most restful sleep I’d had in weeks or months.

As time went on, I accepted that the relief was real and justified. It wasn’t that I wanted her to be “locked up” as she put it. But being able to breathe is important. Being able to sleep through the night is important. Knowing Molly was safe and cared for was important. And I deserve to think of my own needs, plus the needs of everyone else in the house. Plus, I could feel the pressure building when she was home, and I started wanting to run away. I knew that I was getting dysregulated myself, and then I couldn’t engage with Molly the way I needed to: calmly, using all my DBT skills, validating without agreeing, listening for the emotion behind her words.

She moved out of our house (into an apartment that we paid for) when she turned eighteen. A year later, she moved to a different state with a boyfriend, and of course it was not a smooth relationship. So every once in a while, even though we know we can’t have her living here with us, she would come back for a day or two and then fly off again. Since that relationship ended, she’s been bouncing around from place to place, but always landing at our house (often at 3 in the morning, unannounced, but that’s a different story) while she figures out what’s next.

At the beginning of one of these visits, things can be good for a day or so. We cook together, get our nails done, plan walks and projects. Things seem so “normal,” and I find myself wishing things would work for her to just live with us and get better. But then we start with the mess, the missing socks and clothing and chargers, the tension between Molly and my son, between Molly and my husband, between my husband and me, between Molly and me when I start to ask questions about her plans. By the second day, she starts leaving the house at 2 in the morning and staggering home at 5. Drinking and smoking in the house. Yelling and crying on the phone. Yelling and crying to us. The hypervigilance is back. I hear her footsteps on the stairs and stiffen up, not knowing what will happen next. All of us are on edge waiting for something to blow, because it always does. The pressure ramps up immediately as if it had never been gone.

We started telling her earlier this year that she could stay only as long as she did not break the rules, which we put into a “contract” and all agreed to. Inevitably she’d break them within days, and we’d tell her she needed to get out. She would go, and not tell us where, but she’d be back in a couple of weeks. Finally in August we told her she was no longer welcome to stay at the house. This is what my therapist calls keeping my boundaries. This road will be hard but I’m told it’s what has to be done. Right now Molly is across the country again after a rough visit home where we did not let her spend the night. That’s a whole new kind of pressure. As a parent it’s very hard to push my child away like this. But my life is important too, and I can’t manage both hers and mine. As she tells me, she’s an adult and needs to figure things out on her own.

When I conceived of this Substack more than a year ago, I started out writing about Molly and why she’s simultaneously fabulous and frustrating. This publication was intended to be another outlet for me as I work on the first draft of my guidebook for families dealing with mental health issues. That book is more about logistics and how to stay one step ahead of the chaos that goes along with having a teenager with complex issues, but I wanted this Substack to be more about my personal experiences with our own daughter. Initially I set out to describe Molly, how she was as a little kid, when things got more difficult, and where we are today.

With the last couple of posts I shifted to describing some of the effects of having a teenager with a complex mental illness, for those of us who are often riding that roller coaster with her.

In these recent posts, I wrote about how as parents we will never know whether we made the right choices, and about what a change it is when a kid who is not ready to be in charge of her own life turns 18.

I want to write more about how our home feels when she’s here and not here, for everyone who lives here.

I want to write more about the numbness, even detachment, that is setting in as the chaos and danger continues, even though I still love my daughter and want more than anything for her to be safe and happy.

I want to write more about the importance of setting and keeping boundaries, both the “rule” kind and the emotional kind. Both are difficult because saying no when your child needs you means hurting both of you in the short term, but is healthier for both of you in the long term. Hopefully.

I want to write more about how living with Molly’s often frightening illness seems to get mixed up in my head with managing the state of the world right now. Climate change, the world order shifting, the possibility of another pandemic. All of these are overwhelming, and I can’t control any of them.

And I want to write more about some of the ways I’ve found over the years to cope with the chaos. Radical acceptance, having realistic expectations. Stepping back emotionally without ceasing to care. Remembering that I’ve got needs and that my comfort and happiness are important too.

So, that’s what’s coming up. I can’t promise (as you’ve probably noticed if you’ve been following along) that I will write every week or even every other week. I’m trying though, in between all the ups and downs. Thanks for reading.

Side note: In the couple of weeks it took me to draft and finish this post, Molly has split and reunited with her out-of-state boyfriend twice, come home several times, and been to the hospital once. That’s the rollercoaster.

When Molly was a couple of years younger, we mostly knew what was going on with her. We were aware of and took part in decisions about her physical and mental health: even when she was secretive or untruthful about her day-to-day goings on, we knew what doctors she was seeing and got updates from them. We knew what medications she was on and could ensure that she was taking them. An since she lived with us, we could observe her state/status in person, in real time. We were an integrated part of her care team.

As soon as she turned 18 of course, it all changed. Even before we moved her to her own apartment (which at the time seemed like the only option, but the jury is still out on what the results were) we lost our ability to take part in medical care. This makes sense of course; she’s legally an adult, and should be able to manage her own affairs. But in practice, it’s thrown a new wrench in the works.

Molly is still on our insurance (thanks ACA!), because otherwise she’d probably not have any coverage. We have still been paying her copays, hospital bills, ambulance charges, as long as the bills come to our house. At some point during the last year, she started giving providers her own address instead of ours, which means that we never see the paper copies, and sometimes not even the online ones. If we call to ask providers what the bills were for, we are not allowed to have that information, we are just supposed to pay it. I can’t call a treatment facility to facilitate an intake, or get discharge instructions.

She refuses to sign a medical power of attorney, or anything that lets us see her records. And we can’t force her to sign one - that’s the whole point! Since she’s of age, she’s in charge and considered responsible for her own care. But what if she’s not able to handle it?

One frustrating aspect of Molly’s illness is that she has terrible executive functioning, terrible short term memory, and tends to latch onto only part of what’s said in a conversation and not even hear the rest. More than once she’s had phone calls with her providers where they discussed test results, insurance coverage, diagnoses, medications, all kinds of things. When I ask her about the call, the answer may be either garbled/skewed, incomplete, or even flat-out wrong. As my mom says, she’s an unreliable narrator. But it’s my job to straighten it out somehow so she has accurate information and follows up appropriately. Otherwise things just get worse.

So I’m not privy to all the relevant information, I can’t make decisions about how her care should proceed, but I’m still ultimately responsible for her health.

Or am I? This is where boundaries come in. The apartment experiment was supposed to cut us off from the impacts of her behavior and let her learn from her mistakes and successes. Of course it didn’t, because she’s not great at this kind of learning. She’s impulsive, she makes the same mistakes over again because her memories of consequences are overwhelmed by the need for instant dopamine. Over the year we watched her get worse and worse - her mental and physical health, her finances, her living environment. She suffered from delusional thinking to the point that she thought she was dying and rotting from the inside. The people she was hanging out with were worse and worse for her, the situations more and more dangerous. She was arrested for public disturbances, sent to the hospital multiple times, etc. And we could do nothing but watch. She knew she was delusional, knew she was making terrible decisions, knew that she was in trouble. She’d sometimes tell me some of what was going on, but never agree to go to treatment or even talk to a doctor or therapist. She wanted to do it on her own, and really believed that she could, despite all evidence to the contrary.

We love her so much. It’s insanely hard to watch this and not be able to do anything. but that’s what adulthood is like for all parents, I guess. She’s just making mistakes that are bigger than what most young adults make. We have to wait for her to realize that she can’t do it alone, and ask for our help.

Coincidentally, Molly told me yesterday on the phone in tears, preparing (again) to come home from living in a different part of the country, that “adulting is hard.” I’d already written most of this post, including my title. Seems like we are still connected even when we can’t share everything.

When looking back over my daughter’s tumultuous life, I tell myself that I can’t feel guilt about any of my actions. We do the best we can with the information we have at the time, I say. I try to have no regrets; that’s one of my life principles. We can’t change the past, but we can act now and affect the future. We only have this moment. This is what I say to myself when I see where Molly has been and where she is now. But sometimes I slip up, and start going through all the things we could have done differently, and wondering.

What if?

If we had been more strict. If we’d gotten therapy when she was little and first started having “anger issues.” If we’d listened to friends who were a few years farther on the same path. If we’d really listened to her saying she had ADHD and anxiety when she was in elementary school, instead of believing it was another of her “characters.” If we’d gone into our retirement money to get a consultant or a self paid school or wilderness camp, instead of using only the places covered by our HMO.

If I had made myself have real conversations with her instead of sometimes being relieved she was holed up in her room avoiding us, because conversations that started fine could turn into attacks.

If I’d followed through with keeping her phone, with grounding her, instead of caving after ten straight hours of her screaming on the floor in the middle of the dining room, where we all had to walk over her to get anywhere in the house. She has always needed to be around people; she literally can’t manage when alone. I was not able to handle the pain in my head and the fear that the neighbors would fear the worst. But what if I had followed through?

If we’d somehow found a way to keep her safe and healthy at home instead of sending her to so many residential treatments, therapeutic boarding school, calling the ambulance when she was punching holes in the walls and throwing things.

Who knows? Maybe if we’d done things differently in some crucial way, she’d be a happy well adjusted young adult right now instead of being in pain and confused about what she can do next with her life.

Even if I didn’t have that little nagging internal voice telling me certain decisions were not the best, all I have to do is listen to my daughter, when she’s dysregulated or in a manic episode, and the accusations she makes. She knows what to say to stab me in my heart. Not sure how she knows, except that I’m prone in certain relationships to confiding too much and then hearing my inner fears thrown back at me to hurt. She’s told me she wishes I’d succeeded in killing myself. She’s called me a failed abortion. She’s called me cold and unloving. She’s told me I have always wanted to get rid of her.

I tell myself she doesn’t mean it, that she’s sick and not thinking straight. I think this works. Later she will apologize and tell me she loves me more than anything. and I know she does, and I love her more than anything too. No matter what.

I know we can’t change the past, and regrets do no good. I know that there is no blame, that this is just the way things are. But I feel a heavy weight on me nonetheless knowing that where we are is not where we expected to be. The decisions of the past are what they are, but there are decisions ahead and I don’t want to think of the impact they could have.

This is yet another newsletter/post about my daughter, and about other daughters (and probably sons) who have dealt with complex mental illnesses. Before I get started I need to mention that the metaphors about weaponry in the title and subtitle (and probably throughout the post) are a mess. This is not because my Quaker pacifism somehow makes it impossible to conceptualize dangerous things that emit fire; it’s just my not-infrequent lack of coherence and specificity.

We always called Molly a firecracker when she was growing up. This is a common designation for a daughter in Texas (where we lived for the start of her life), when she’s spunky and sure of herself, and likely to go off at any minute. Having a firecracker for a daughter is generally considered a good thing, but lurking beneath the excitement and fun there’s a bit of a caution: she’s fun now, but just you wait till she’s a teenager. When a firecracker grows up, she can be a formidable person. That spark can set off more than you expected. Maybe even start some grass fires. Maybe even something bigger.

Molly was called a firecracker because of her spark and intensity. She made every situation or conversation more exciting and interesting (often in good ways, and sometimes in bad ones). For the three family members who were here before her, she really shook things up. There we’d been, two mellow parents and a quirky but quiet son, going through our days calmly and with intent. And suddenly we were joined by a baby girl who was constantly making noise, causing stirs, shoving us out of our common comfort zone. While we were jarred by all this, we were generally grateful for the entertainment factor. It was a big change, but we found ourselves in awe of her most of the time.

One of the things that social workers like to ask in introduction meetings with parents is to describe the best things about their kids. I like this because it starts the conversation off with a positive vibe. Much more helpful than the more open-ended “what brings you here,” which nudges the parent towards talking about all the problematic behaviors and mental health issues that are causing distress for the family. In our case, we always had a very long list of wonders, because Molly is amazing and we love talking about her. And every once in a while I like to go through that list again, to remind myself of what a fabulous creature she is.

Everything bright can have a dark side though. With Molly (like others of course, but as I mentioned previously, she goes up to eleven), both the highs and the lows are noteworthy.

I decided to pull together some examples of Molly’s best traits,1 and how they can turn “unhelpful” (as they say in the trenches) if they are aimed the wrong way:

• Intelligence: Molly can come up with fantastic ideas and plans, make connections, and figure almost anything out. On the other hand, she can and does craft elaborate deceptions and stories that keep us in the dark about the unsafe situations she puts herself into. One time in her early teens, she left her phone under a bridge near our house and told us people were hanging out there, then hopped into a car and went to a party in a different suburb. We tracked the phone to that spot when she didn’t come home on time, and found no one there.

• Verbal skills: She started reading at four, and is an articulate and compelling writer. Her vocabulary is enormous and accurate. And when she is manic or dysregulated, she knows which accusations and insults will be the cruelest and cut straight to our hearts.

• Leadership and charisma: Somehow Molly is always the leader of groups. This could be a class project, band, or group of friends. It could also be something more annoying or even disruptive. One time in preschool, she started a protest. The teacher told us that all the kids were standing on their cots yelling “No more naps! No more naps!,” and the teacher had had to leave the room to stop laughing. Another time in a PHP2 program when she was older, we learned at the end of the day that she had gotten all the patients to perform a sit-in instead of going to group, because she had a complaint about the staff member leading it. Oddly enough, that was not one of the programs she was asked to leave.

• Chameleonic nature: Molly has an ever-shifting sense of who she is, and she jumps from role to role wholeheartedly. When she was five and on her first soccer team, she ran onto the field with a bounce in her step, swishing her ponytail back and forth, somehow changing her whole posture and expression to that of an “athlete.” When she is studying or hanging out with clean-cut folks, she wears prescription-free glasses, holds herself more still, and embodies “college kid.” This ability (or need) to transform herself has made her a compelling actor and storyteller. The downside is, she sometimes shields herself from looking into herself deeply, because she’s looking for something new to be.

• Social agility: A related skill Molly has is that she can talk to anyone, any time, and be accepted. She can get along at country clubs, dance clubs, and with people of any age and ethnicity, and come out of every interaction with connections for later. And unfortunately she’s also able to connect with drug dealers and worse, which has gotten her into some tricky situations.

• Strong sense of justice: When Molly feels that either she or someone else is being wronged, she takes action. Sometimes (see examples above of strikes she’s led) this takes the form of disruptive protest. Sometimes it’s using her privilege to speak for others who can’t: a few years ago at the ER, Molly was so horrified by the way an old man was being treated by the staff that she wrote a letter to the head of Emergency Services at the hospital, and got a response and a meeting, where she was thanked and told that this treatment would be improved. On the other hand, she was so overwhelmed by a patient situation she heard about in Utah that she lost her job because she kept calling out and/or crying through her whole shift.

• Tenacity and drive: I think this is the one that pulls it all together. No matter what Molly decides she’s going to do, she will make it happen. She uses all of her other traits to put together a plan that not everyone thinks is feasible, and then she just goes for it. Of course there are good and bad outcomes for this. Some of them have gotten her accolades, some of them have gotten her into awful situations. But she pushes through, and does not take no for an answer.

Gosh, I have gone on. That’s just me being in awe of my Molly again. Even when she’s at her most frustrating or dangerous, I am conscious of how strong she is.

We often tell Molly that she’s got a ton of superpowers. Our job as parents is to help her understand them, temper them, and use them for good instead of “evil.” She is getting much better at pointing the energy in the right direction.

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I hear a lot of criticism from older folks, about seeing toddlers glued to iPads and phones instead of entertaining themselves. Before that, older folks would criticize the practice of “parking your kid in front of the TV.” When my kids were younger in the first decade of this century, the smartphone had not been invented yet. As a rule, we also tried to avoid the TV, encouraging them to play with toys or enjoy nature or whatever was handy. But there were some emergency moments when the use of a magical screen was necessary to keep a kid sitting in one place so a parent could make dinner, clean something, do laundry, or frankly just sit down and chill for a minute without little people clinging to her legs. And so we used it.

For my son, this generally worked. Put on Thomas the Tank Engine or a Star Wars movie, and he’d sit there for as long as it took, sucking his thumb and rubbing his ear, fully engaged in the story. And then when we were done with whatever we needed done, he’d get up and rejoin us.

For Molly though, it was different. She did not (and does not) like to be alone. She loved playing and talking with other people, but ask her to play alone, or sit alone even with screen entertainment, and she would last only a couple of minutes. Later on, she did not take to reading on her own either. She called both reading and TV “boring,” and I think it was related to a lack of back-and-forth engagement and feedback. She’s very connected to the world and the people around her.

We always joked when she was a kid that Molly had no neutral gear: she was 100% angry, 100% sad, 100% happy. Also amused, frightened, offended, tired…. If not one of these, she was asleep. Nothing in between, and nothing involving just sitting in one place, at rest, sitting with her thoughts, brain and body taking a break.

When Molly was happy, she’d come out with an enormous guffaw that was contagious. When angry, she’d scream and throw herself on the ground, and when sad she’d sob and wail as if her best friend had died. And all these intense reactions were triggered by events or conversations that would not even register for other kids. When she was a toddler this was hardly distinguishable from what other kids were doing. Every two year old has tantrums, right? But as the years went on, it was clear that she was more volatile, more “labile” as they say in the trenches. She managed to keep it together in school or other situations where it was necessary, but when at home she let her emotions run free, which often resulted in intense afternoons and evenings. A social worker told us that she was holding all these emotions till she reached a space where she felt safe. I was flattered, but as time went by I was almost always the recipient (target?) of all the negative words, the accusations, the screaming, the slammed doors, and it was exhausting.

As a parent, how do you know what is “normal” behavior? How do you know what’s developmentally and emotionally in line with what other kids are doing? When your elementary school daughter is perfectly composed and attentive in school, but more and more difficult to manage at home? We knew something was off, but only when Molly was a teenager and her intense moods, risky behaviors, and impulsivity escalated exponentially did we know that she needed more help than we could give her. What followed was hospitalizations and residential programs, various diagnoses and medications, and a rollercoaster for all of us that was more and more difficult. Could we have done something earlier that could have prevented this? Who knows? Where is the line that makes you realize your child needs help?

For the past several months, she’s been out of state, living with a new boyfriend and working for his company. Three months is a long time for Molly. I still text her every day and FaceTime about once a week. Her emotions are (as always) all over the place: She’s in love, as happy as she’s ever been! She’s on her way home! She’s thinking about marriage! She is so done! She is learning office skills! She will never get this stuff! She’s a failure! She’s on a plane! She’s going back!

By now, we know that we should not put too much stock in any of these announcements. Molly really does feel the emotions she feels, but they may not lead to action. And they may be different an hour from now. She lives her life intensely, but we are not in charge of it. All we can hope is that she’s making good decisions, she’s being safe, and that she’s happy more often than sad. We love her no matter what, now from afar. We are all doing the best we can, at whatever gear we can manage.

Last March, I started this Substack with my thoughts about the prospect of my daughter moving out of our house. Having her live with us had become impossible (because she was increasingly volatile, and did not live by the house rules), and both parents and Molly1 needed to have our own places. She moved to her own apartment on April 2, 2024, with rent paid by us. The agreement was that she had one year to get on her feet, get a job and a GED, and then our financial support would end.

On Monday of this week, I returned the apartment keys (one set of them, anyway - more on that in a bit) to the property management company. I had spent Sunday cleaning the place thoroughly so it would pass inspection, and the month before going through all the contents and finding new homes for them. I had a project plan in Smartsheet2 (natch), and by the end of the month everything had been marked as “Donation,” “Friends,” “House,” or “Trash.” The apartment had been freshly rehabbed before she moved in; a year later it was in pretty good shape other than some spills and smudges and some burn marks (from incense, I choose to believe) on the floors and furniture. I was sad about the burns, but overall fairly pleased. She had filled up the entire bedroom with clothes and makeup and randomness, but she’s a packrat and impulsive spender, so that was understandable too. Even so, it was a long month and hard work, and included taking apart a bed frame that had not been put together correctly and taking it to the alley in the pouring rain in about 10 trips.

But where was Molly? Why did she not participate in this move-out? Wasn’t she the one living there? Well, it’s complicated. Everything with Molly is a little complicated.

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Over the past year, Molly has grown up a lot. She’s done her laundry in a shared laundry room with machines that take quarters. She’s paid her electricity and gas bills. She’s learned to cook and keep her space clean not because a parent was forcing her to, but because she feels better when she does. She can use public transportation like a pro. When she’s not dysregulated, she’s mature, thoughtful, and caring.

On the other hand, she never got a legitimate job this past year, and she didn’t pursue the GED. She always had money but wouldn’t tell us where it came from. She mostly ordered food delivery, and mostly Ubered instead of taking the El. And her dysregulated spells seemed more frequent and more intense, although that could be because we mostly saw her when she needed us. On Christmas Eve she came to visit and I had to kick her out and then call the police because she was so loud and abusive and throwing things at our house (and you can see a recent post about why holidays and birthdays are so hard for her and therefore for all of us).

She had a few hospital stays and encounters with the police over the year. I’m not even sure how many, because she’s an adult now and I am not privy to these things unless she calls us to ask for help. She’s still on our insurance, which means she can still visit the doctor. And she spent a lot of the year believing she was rotting and dying, and that she was emanating a foul odor that was making others sick, so there were emergency room and urgent care visits for this too. I tried keeping track of all this, but eventually I accepted that I did not really need to know.

Towards the end of 2024 she lost and regained her phone and wallet, lost her ID twice, and got arrested and hospitalized in a different state. She tried to go to rehab once on her own, and once with me, and backed out at the last minute both times. She was a candidate for a program designed to help with independent living,3 and backed out of that too. She seemed to be at rock bottom and talked about accepting that she needed help. And then a couple of months ago, she abruptly left.

In January, Molly moved to Florida to live with a boyfriend. It seems like she’s doing well, even though she announces every week or two that it’s not working and she is flying home (but then an hour later reverses course). This is the longest relationship she’s had in years, and she says it’s serious. Not to mention, it’s the longest she’s been sober. She cooks, she cleans, she keeps regular hours, she has a legitimate job, she is about to get her drivers license. When I talk to her she seems happy, regulated, and full of energy and ideas.

I know that this may all come crashing down at any moment, and I’m not sure what will happen then. She’s stable and happy right now, so of course I want it to last for her sake. But also for my own. It’s so much calmer here now. I don’t have to hide things, or worry that she’ll visit unexpectedly and take five showers in three hours and cause the bathroom to look like a hurricane came through. And then text the next day to say, “I’m sorry I made a mess and said those terrible things to you and I love you. Also, I took your wine” (true story). If she suddenly returns, she can’t go back to living here, and our financial support is over.

What does “support” even look like at this point? I’m not sure. We love her no matter what, and that will always be true. But we can’t give her money or a place to stay. Molly and I text each other every morning and every evening, and we talk once a week. She’s very guarded about details, but she’s always been that way about her life. She told me to convert her bedroom here to an art studio for myself (which I am doing), because she wants me to do more painting. Yesterday she told me that I’m always beautiful.

Boundaries are so important with Molly. I tend to overlook or minimize how bad things are, and how she takes advantage of my softness by selling me a story which I almost always believe. And then I get burned, again and again. But I love her so very much, no matter what. She’s my daughter, and I always hope this time will be different.