Fixing the Chronic Problem Solver
[Music]
[Applause]
i work in
social environmental impact which means
i spend a lot of my day thinking about
some big
hairy problems think climate change or
social injustice and i didn’t get into
this work by accident i have been
addicted to problem solving for most of
my life
some people like my mom my
husband my boss my sister
my kids most of my friends and
probably my dog might say i’m a chronic
problem solver a fixer and
it’s not just the big stuff i like small
problems too
if you hand me a necklace chain with a
knot in it you are not
getting it back until it’s undone you
know when one of your
drawstrings disappears yeah i’m your gal
i’ll check your hair for lice i will
help you get your keys out of your
locked car
i’m the first one to tell you if you’ve
got a little bit of spinach
right there and i might even try to get
it out for you
as a kid i like to tell people what to
do
i actually still really like to tell
people what to do
i feel like i’m helping offering free
advice
though it’s not always seen that way
at 16 i told my parents that they were
clearly not happily married and they
should get a divorce
problem solution
now this fixation of mine can be a gift
i have helped so many friends through a
marital challenge or
a job change or even a fashion crisis
but there are also those times when my
determination to solve
a problem becomes the problem itself
most recently this has been with my
daughter who just graduated from high
school
yeah she is among the thousands of teens
around the world who graduated from high
school during
covid19 these kids lost their prom
the end of their high school sports
career their
senior week their senior trip and the
moment that marks
13 years of hard work high school
graduation
now the thing about my daughter is she
is no stranger to disappointment
for two years running in fifth and sixth
grade when playing
volleyball and soccer her teams never
won a single game
not one i kept wanting a win
and she kept playing and having fun it
was like the
pizza parties and snack time were the
highlights not the scoring
for all eight years of doing musical
theater
hoping one time to get the leading role
it never happened i felt the loss every
time and
she persevered she showed resilience
seemed unflappable
i felt deflated one time
she came bounding in the house so
excited announcing
i got the crow in the wizard of oz oh
finally your breakthrough roll you are
the scarecrow in the wizard of oz that’s
amazing
she looked confused no mom i’m one of
three crows in scene two i had to bite
my tongue from asking
what crows in scene two instead
i just responded that’s great you are
going to be so good
and honestly she was so good
and then the letdowns got more personal
eighth grade and freshman year her
friend groups changed a lot
her longtime friends were no longer her
friends and her new friends came
and went now this may sound familiar to
you
adolescents kids are cruel and friends
groups change in high school
a lot of kids go through a rough patch
they make
movies about the mean girls in high
school like
the one called mean girls but
she cried a lot in those years and it
scared me
at one point she said she felt depressed
so i
sent her to therapy she started
eating lunch in the bathroom a few times
a week and would call me
crying i listened i
ached for her i tried to make her feel
better
i bought her little gifts a set of bee
happy cards in a
gratitude journal convinced that those
things would turn it around
but they didn’t her bad days
became my bad days too and then
sophomore year junior year things got
worse
and then a lot worse fast
she started cutting class and stopped
doing her school work
she was lying and sneaking out and
lashing out
things were spiraling downhill so fast
and i was just trying to keep it from
hitting bottom
the day we learned that she had cut
herself
with a razor blade for the first time
i took a leave of absence from work
i was now in full-time rescue mode
as she became addicted to vaping was
getting drunk and started smoking weed
every single day to dull her pain
i called doctors i took her in for a
mental health assessment i kept trying
to
fix it fix her until i couldn’t anymore
was december of her junior year and we
dropped her off at a wilderness therapy
program
that’s where struggling kids go to live
off the grid for a number of weeks and
do some deep
transformative work it wasn’t until
after she was gone that i was told that
my problem-solving ways were
probably part of the problem i was told
that
maybe i was a rescuer and that i hadn’t
given her
a chance to learn valuable coping skills
when she was younger
learning to struggle and suffer is part
of growing up they explained
as things had gotten harder for her i
tried
harder to make it better to make it stop
hurting so much
even in her early years when she was
dealing with loss so well
i may have overcompensated i learned
words like
enmeshed that i may have been overly
involved
and emotionally attached to her
experiences i was told to practice
detachment now those were
a lot of new words and a lot of new
information to digest
i had invested so much in being a good
mom
whatever that means and i know
that i have no idea what i’m doing in
this job of motherhood
i’ve made mistakes but i’d read books
and listen to podcasts and saw experts
speak about raising self-reliant kids
i believed in the blessing of a skinned
knee and i wanted my kids to learn how
to deal with
failure and discomfort but i was
starting to realize that
i couldn’t deal with it i was the one
who couldn’t tolerate the discomfort of
her
emotions she came home
the summer before her senior year sober
stable self-aware with a tool kit of
coping skills at the ready
we agreed she couldn’t go back to her
same high school too many triggers
so she started at a brand new high
school for her senior year
where she knew no one that was rough
the difference now was that she could
cope in healthy ways with all that
disappointment
now me a recovering rescuer kept
jumping in and trying to problem solve
when i’d see her struggle but now she
could tell me hey mom
you don’t need to solve that for me we
were learning
together she was learning how to manage
her difficult feelings as they would
come up using her new coping skills
and i was learning how to manage mine
sometimes with the help of a therapist
and
sometimes with the help of wine
and then coronavirus said shelter in
place started the week she turned
18 so we cancelled her big birthday
party
she still had a great day and while
she’s
sad she never got a high school prom she
had fun doing
fake prom outside with her boyfriend i
was
watching she was coping so well through
such a difficult time
i might even say she was thriving she
was
sleeping more and playing guitar
exercising and face timing
you add all the binge watching and she
might say she was living her
best life me not
my best life i was dwelling on all that
she’d lost
as graduation day drew closer the fixer
in me started
freaking out see i had a vision of doing
an entire re-enactment of graduation
in our backyard just for her we would
have chairs
six feet apart for family and friends
she would walk across our
deck to receive her diploma from her dad
i would give a commencement speech that
would be
so touching that everybody would cry
and she’d give the valedictorian speech
of course and talk about
all that she learned we would be so
inspired
i was ready to do cardboard cutouts for
everyone that couldn’t be there in
person
i had picked out my dress i was excited
she was less so i pitched her on my
graduation plan and she listened and
said yeah mom
that’s okay i’ll probably just hang out
with friends but you could
make me a video a video
i was excited and then crushed
i wanted to save her from another
disappointment
to keep her from living through another
loss
but i couldn’t graduation
came and went we took family photos
picked up takeout and yeah watched that
video
i had made for her and then she went out
with friends
for the next few days she was sullen and
moody
it was hard she said to see all the
pictures on social media of her friends
from kindergarten
graduating from the high school that she
left just one year before
she was sad that she didn’t get to
graduate with them
that she didn’t get invited to any of
the parties that
her high school experience was so
different from so many
she felt left out i felt like
the only thing i could do was give her
space
now you may have figured this out
already but it took
me a while to realize that my graduation
plan
was not just about saving her from a
graduation
it was about trying to save her from a
lifetime of disappointments
the many traumas her therapist had
called them
that she learned to overcome while she
was away
the one she’d overcome without me
i know now that she has everything she
needs inside of her to take on life’s
disappointments as they come
i just need to get out of the way that
little girl who is so
excited to be the crow in the wizard of
oz
the one of three crows in scene two
she is the young woman before me now who
is so
excited to get on with her life to go to
college
study psychology and help struggling
teens
i made a decision then to stop rescuing
my daughter when she doesn’t need
rescuing
i need to trust that she’s going to
figure it out
this pandemic has been a reminder that
there is so little in life
that we can control and my daughter
taught me to stop trying to control the
things that i can’t
i’m a chronic problem solver and maybe
you are too
i’d like to think that i’m a more
enlightened one now
my call to all of us fixers is to stop
trying to control
and solve things that we think are
problems we gotta let go
don’t get me wrong if you have me a
necklace chain with a knot in it
i’m going to try and get it out i just
might not be able to
and i’m still going to give you
unsolicited ice you can take it or leave
it
and then second thought i don’t actually
want to check your hair for lice
what i do want is for all of us to see
the global shift that is occurring with
everything going on in our world right
now
my hope is that we see it as a time
to learn and grow within ourselves
looking inside versus only
outside for change let this shift be
not just global but personal
as well thank you for listening
[Music]