The Emergency.

Sorry. You Can Only Be as Happy as your Unhappiest Child.

The artist Jen Thorensen, I think, illustrates panic and anxiety perfectly. The way it is a silent obstacle. The way it makes us feel burdened, encumbered, mired in the weeds, weighted down, off-kilter, immobilized, claustrophobic.

Wednesday morning, last week, I’m only slightly awake to hear Edie (20) calling David at 5:30 in the morning.

What I hear with my single functioning ear is David’s voice. Gentle. Curious. Concerned. But also urgent at the edges. Something is up. Edie saw friends in Sweden, and is now in Dublin to see more friends, backpacking, hostels, couch surfing through Europe, a few stops on the way to a summer university physics program in Sussex, England.

She shouldn’t have a care in the world. But the last few days were tough. Lots of calls home. Lots of anxiety. David and I talked her through panic attacks and deep saddness. It’s rare for Edie, who loves traveling, to get stressed on a trip. She lived for a year in Munich as an au pair, and there was never this level of panic. David and I tag team. We tag team the emotional support, providing her with practical things that bring that might ease and comfort her.

There is no obvious reason for the panic, and yet, here she is, unable to breathe, unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to bring herself peace. I hadn’t seen it yet, but sometime in the night she texts us: I think I want to come home. The message itself is almost unbelievable. She loves to travel and has been looking forward to this experience for months. The message itself cries out that something is very wrong.

David wakes me up.

Come out to the patio, he says gently, but with some urgency.

I assemble myself and go out. Barefoot and bedheaded. His voice is tight and serious. Edie is on speaker phone, hyperventilating. She can’t calm herself. He has his laptop open. I recognize immediately that he has gone into airport dad mode, that tunnel of hyper-focused flight-planning and organizational skill-base that gets us safely and efficiently from travel destination to travel destination. He is typing into the keyboard and looking through flights.

We make a plan: You are flying out to Dublin to see Edie today, he says, but I knew that before he said it.

I’m packed and at the airport in under an hour and a half.

This photo! The anxiety that gets produced at family dinner can be real! This could be its own essay.

I’m writing this on the first and second legs of my flights. Vegas to NYC, NYC to Dublin.

The intention is that I would post something here for you. But Edie is so debilitated when I get to her in Dublin that I abandon all writing. I’ve never seen her so fragile. She can’t sit or relax. We walk Dublin for miles, all hours of the day and night, because she can’t right herself or calm her thumping heart. She is a caged, pacing animal, needing to move, to walk off the doom. We go to a clinic, and then to an ER, where she is tested extensively (for 300 euros, which for Americans is insanely cheap and for the Irish is absurdly expensive. Can you imagine $342-ish for an ER visit in the US as a non-citizen, visitor?)

The attentive and caring doctors there determine she’s having a severe reaction to a drug she was prescribed in the States. It is inflaming her nervous system. Throwing her brain into fight or flight. They give her meds to help the symptoms, even if they can’t fix the root problem. We are told to wait it out, that the drug will eventually leave her system and she will be okay. Except she still feels like hell and so this is little consolation. She is convinced the feelings of doom will never go away and this will be her life forever.

We walk arm in arm. We watch hours and hours of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. We watch The Hangover for the hundredth time, because it reminds us of Vegas and makes us laugh out loud. We watch Love, Actually because it’s our Christmas tradition and it’s FINE to have a Christmas tradition in June when you really really need it. We breathe through the hard moments. We make each other laugh. We get on each other’s nerves.

She isn’t eating. The panic has thrown off her ability to digest. When you are running from the bear, your brain sends energy to your legs, not to your stomach. I grab a sub at Subway while we walk, because I’m starving and she can’t sit or eat. They don’t have olive oil and vinegar. I like lots of pickles, mayo, oil and vinegar, salt and pepper. But I put it in my face anyway.

I eat from kebab stand. I eat while moving. We stand outside of pubs and brown bars, and watch The World Cup, and try to distract ourselves with wins and losses, and fanatical spectators.

Head in the tension, the clouds, the fog, airhead.

I love how this photo illustrates the passing of anxiety along to children, and how easily this happens.

Next leg. I’m writing this to you all in Sussex, with Edie. Brighton Beach, really.

I’m in a cheap, buzzy hostel right on the water. It’s the right price point for an unknown length of emergency stay. We are booking night by night now. I love the energy of students and tour groups loading off buses into the common areas of the hostel. So much excitement for their summer plans, the World Cup games blasting downstairs in the hostel pub, a group of women friends from India collected in the alleyways, taking group photos of each other. You can tell they have a long history of friendship together. There is so much comfort there. There are high schoolers from Berlin and backpackers on their way to Denmark. I remember when it was this easy for Edie.

There is a board walk here in Brighton. It reminds me of Santa Monica Pier in California, a long wooden, man-made monstrosity protruding out into the ocean, with people fishing off the sides, fish and chip stands, soft serve, and a raft of rides and flashing lights. Churros seems big here, which suprises me. There are little cobblestone streets with cute shops, pubs, tapas and Thai restaurants. But the feel by the water is more Coney Island than Santa Monica. Kind of ragged at the edges, a little worn. A closed, idle aquarium, graffitied walls, a few shops boarded up. Everything gets super quiet on week days, but crowded and rowdy on the weekends.

I love talking to the shop keepers at kebab stores and smoke shops. Edie hates this. She rolls her eyes and walks away in embarrassment. LOL. But for me, talking to people and hearing their stories is the point of traveling You’d be surprised the depths of things people will tell you, while they cook your food or help you select the perfect jeans that make your butt look good.

I like that every boardwalk store offers soft serve. I like that there are cold cans of Diet Coke in every store, unlike Ireland, where it’s Coke Zero and always in bottles. Or that Europe has widely banned all high fructose corn syrup (Good for them. Can we do this?) but not the UK, so even the cans taste just a little off from the US version. Edie and I agree, the tastes are not the same. But I’m happy for what I can get.

Edie, when she is feeling better, gets an iced latte in the mornings from a kiosk across the street at the beach. We joke that only Americans understand the proper amount of ice in a coffee or soda. The two measly floating cubes the Brits give us is not nearly enough. We get to know the young adults working the kiosk and I give them my best American ice tutorial. She triples the ice for us going forward. We become besties with the latte lady.

We eat cheap, but decent, sushi train. We walk the boardwalk every day, every night, multiple times, up and down. I make her eat salmon sashimi at this Briazilian restaurant, that is quite good. I do this even though she has no appetite. It makes her feel better. On the boardwalk, we stop to watch soccer playing on big screens at outdoor beach bars. We walk up and down for as long as she needs. Her arm tucked into my elbow. The weather is perfect, balmy, cool, salty. There is wind to our backs. There are sea gulls that are so aggressive, they try to steal the hot dogs out of tourists hands. I love them for their boldness and take-what-they-need aggression.

Edie will be okay now. The medicine they gave her in Dublin helps take some of the edge off, and the drug she was prescribed in the States has worked its way, mostly, out of her system. Everyday she gets to be more like her beautiful self. The fear stays though. She worries it will come back and envelope her again. She needs some distance from the anxiety to feel herself again.

It’s hard to watch yourself out of control and not worry that it can happen again. That knowledge makes you more fragile. Wiser, but a little brittle. A little less invincible. It comes with age, I think. We do not like to learn that we have vulnerabilities, that we are all vulnerable in a million ways, that dependency and a shitty time are possibilities for all of us.

Buried, smothered, exhausted.

I’m on a flight from London to Calgary, and then Calgary to Vegas. I’m posting this in the Canadian airport. There are a lot of life-sized stuffed bears in the airport. And I like this.

Edie is herself again. Mostly. She is taking classes and planning to meet her friend Kissa in London. Traveling is an adventure, a gift, a privilege, and extension of ourselves. But it can takes its toll. It can wring out the best of you. It ocurs to me that the old adage is still true: You really are only as happy as your unhappiest child.

Even Lucy, who was driving and solo-camping through the Mid and Pacific North West these last few weeks. She had her own road moment. She had a rough night, called David. He put her up in a hotel. She drove 15-hours straight to get back home to her bed and food cooked in a proper kitchen. We all Facetimed last night, our last night in Brighton.

On this trip, I learn how grateful I am to be the mother of my children, all of them. And how they let David and I love and care for them, even as adults and teens, when they really no longer have to lean on us in the same way. It is such a gift that it made me think about my mom. She would’ve loved to love me this way, to swoop in and calm me, to be my hero, my comfort, had I let her.

I never really did.

I also know, more surely than ever, that my happiness is rooted totally and completely in how David and our kids are fairing in the world and in their lives. And so I’m sending extra special love tonight to parents of children who are complex individuals in complex situations, the parents of our incarcerated sons and daughters, of our chronically ill children, our severely mentally ill children, our children in active addiction, the ones broken by life, poverty and circumstance, the kids experiencing unnecessary injustice. I know you, as parents, struggle with your own happiness. I know you worry alone.

I see you.

Almost home. Boarding soon. Thanks for hanging with me while we figure this out. Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim