As I pulled out of the doctor’s parking lot, my hands gripping the steering wheel while windshield wipers furiously scraped away snowflakes, I couldn’t shake the feeling.
Why didn’t I do this two years ago?
Later, I sat at the public library, struggling to focus on work emails, periodically staring at the snow falling outside. I thought of my daughter, who would spend the next three and a half hours in an extensive neuropsychological assessment, after our hourlong interview with the doctor. How is she doing? What will the doctor uncover?
But the hardest question was the one that pointed the finger back at me. Why didn’t I make this happen earlier? What would have been different if we had known?
The Test We Didn’t Take
Years ago, I was part of a women’s group that met twice a month to share our lives and pray for each other. We supported each other in our faith, our relationships, our jobs, and our children. Almost everyone had a child who either struggled with mental health issues or faced developmental disabilities. Several of the women spoke about the value of neuropsychological testing for their kids, citing it as a game-changer.
I was not convinced.
In case you don’t know, this type of evaluation is quite expensive (plus our insurance barely covers half) and requires a full day of testing, which means a day off work or school. It can take six months just to get an appointment. Even though my daughter suffered a mental health breakdown and came out with more diagnoses than I ever expected, I didn’t think we needed any more assessments. Didn’t we have the eyes of a treatment center team, a psychiatrist, and multiple therapists? Wouldn’t they catch everything? I told myself we could skip the “neuropsych eval” and consider ourselves covered.
Three years after my daughter’s mental health breakdown, I found myself taking the day off from work, driving with my daughter on slippery road to a little office building about forty minutes away. Because when our daughter’s first experience with college became so overwhelming that she dropped out, we realized that we’d been missing an important piece of the puzzle. We’ve spent the past five months exploring a new condition, but I needed a neuropsychologist to officially diagnose and document it, both for our sake and as a ticket to getting her certain school-provided services.
This week, I got the doctor’s report which verified this new diagnosis in black and white. In hindsight, maybe I never sought out this test because deep down, I didn’t want to know if there was anything else wrong with my daughter, after all we’d been through. Last week, I wrote about the tendency towards denial in parenting teens with mental health challenges. As I try to move towards acceptance of this new diagnosis, I’m aware of so many emotions. Sadness that my daughter has developmental delays. Fear of how she will manage now that I know more about her struggles from a medical perspective. Anger that she carries so much.
Regret: The What If’s
But the hardest emotion is regret. This shows up in a million different questions of “What if…” and “Why didn’t I do this?” or “Why didn’t they do that?” and “If we had done this differently, could we have prevented our child from suffering?” For today, my question is, “What kind of help could I have gotten for my daughter if we had known about this years ago?”
To be honest, this is not the first time I have wrestled with these types of questions. They haunted me when my daughter first admitted to suicidal thinking. They nagged me when she confided that she had an eating disorder. They yelled at me when she relapsed so profoundly that we had to send her to a residential eating disorder program after she had been discharged from the same program’s partial hospitalization program six weeks earlier with celebration bells.
What could I have done differently to prevent this? Is this somehow my fault? If only I knew then what I know now, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten so sick. What about the mistakes I made last week, last month, last year?
I think regret is one of the hardest parts of parenting a child with mental health challenges. First, we feel so powerless over their illness; our lack of control is beyond frustrating. We desperately want to help them get better and sometimes our motivation can carry them when they have none of their own. But eventually, they must be the ones to choose healing. When they seem hesitant, slow, or even unwilling to choose life, we may be left panicking, grasping for options, desperate for a path forward. We can get lost in regret when we feel stuck.
Second, many of us are aware that our parenting has shaped our child, often in ways that we cannot know. Even though we did not cause our child’s mental health issues, we also know that every young adult will eventually realize how they were molded by their parents, both by the best and worst parts of who we are.
Some of us may be overly conscious of how our choices, our communication, and our patterns have hurt our children. Some of us, like me, want to catalog mistakes and cast judgment on ourselves. Some of us blame someone else for our child’s suffering. We are stuck in regret – if only we could do this parenting life over.
Moving Out of Regret
A therapist encouraged me once on this subject. He said with a gentle laugh, “I wish I could say to parents, ‘Get over yourselves! You only have so much control over your kids. You will wound them in ways you aren’t even aware of and that’s just part of the parenting deal. It’s their work to process those wounds as adults.’” This therapist knows this journey intimately himself, in parenting a young adult son who is finally sober after years of wrestling with drug addiction.
Another friend reminds me, “You’ve stood by your kids as a thoughtful mom. That doesn’t mean you were perfect.”
Sometimes I can receive these messages. Other times, it is too painful to accept the reality of my daughter’s illness without wondering how things could have been different. Sometimes I need more time to process and pray through it all.
But in the end of the day, unchecked regret is a waste of time that prevents me from showing up for my daughter. While I love self-examination and try to embrace a posture of learning about myself and how I affect others, it’s mostly useful as a place of gentle awareness and new direction for the future. Sometimes we need to make amends, often with apologetic words and by changing destructive patterns. But we cannot get stuck in the past or in self-recrimination, which leads to even more exhaustion and discouragement.
I also think this is the Biblical message of grace, that there is nothing beyond God’s ability to heal and redeem. Both Judaism and Christianity offer the hope of restoration alongside the reminder that we were never supposed to get it all right. That’s why the practice of confession was instituted in Christianity (practiced differently in various denominations) and Yom Kippur provides a similar place of self-examination in Judaism. That’s why we need grace. In Genesis 50, Joseph’s brothers wept over their vengeful, selfish decision to sell their brother into slavery. Joseph replied, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good” (Gen. 50:20). How do we know how God will use our choices, even our mistakes and detours, and our children’s challenges long-term?
Whether or not we subscribe to a certain religion or theology, we all face the same question: can we give ourselves grace for our mistakes in relating to our children? Can we make amends as necessary and then trust that healing will come? Can we look towards the future with hope and faith, even if the past feels heavy?
I’d love to know how you’ve navigated your own regrets, especially in parenting! Thanks for being here - I’m grateful to know I’m not alone in the journey and glad to support you too.