Light in the Darkness

Parenting Teens with Mental Health Challenges

Dec 09, 2024

When my kids were little, I decided to begin the Christmas season not with Santa Claus or chocolate-filled Advent calendars, but with sitting in the dark.

A Wreath of Candles

I’m not sure what first drew me to the Advent wreath. But at some point, I bought a twisted circle of silvery metal, inscribed with simple prayers and Scripture, and stuck in it four candles: three purple, one pink. If you haven’t heard of this Christian tradition (originating in 19 C. Germany), it’s an evergreen wreath which symbolizes the four weeks leading up to Christmas. Every Sunday in Advent, we light a new candle, each of which represents a different Christmas theme: hope, peace, joy and love.

Before my kids learned to read, they knew how to sit around candles and sing. I still remember hoisting toddler William (who is now a senior in high school) on my lap, which was cramped because I was pregnant with Leah. Four-year-old Ellie and my husband sat across from us. We flicked off all the electric-powered lights, set fire to our candles, and said and sang the same words then as we do today, fifteen years later.

A simple prayer. A Bible verse. A Christmas carol.

Then the inevitable fight between the kids about who gets to blow out the candles.

In this season, before the artificial lights come back on and my teens disappear to their separate corners, I take a deep breath at the familiarity of night. Because as a parent of a teen with mental health challenges, I am a person who often walks in darkness.

The Darkness of Mental Health

Often, parenting a kid with health issues feels like a long stretch of sitting in the dark, wondering if there will ever be light.

When we “do Advent,” my teens insist on turning off every single light before we light candles. For a few moments, the darkness feels all-encompassing; I can barely see my hands. I remember times when we’ve lost electricity and groped for flashlights, trying not to bump into walls. If we sit in the dark for too long, it can feel like the light will never return. These feelings of uncertainty aren’t new. For much of history before anyone invented electric lights, the darkness of night was terrifying, an experience characterized by suspicion, insecurity, and danger.

For me, Ellie’s health struggles have sometimes felt like an endless black tunnel. We keep trudging through, without knowing when we’ll emerge into a sunny field of flowers. Sometimes with chronic health issues, maybe all we hope for is tiny pinpricks of light.

vehicle on road between trees — Photo by chmyphotography on Unsplash

Friends share their own forays into the night. One friend’s daughter won’t stop acting out with her eating disorder, and now she’s found her way into drugs. Another friend texts her son is “sick again,” which means he’s back on a drug-induced psychotic journey. Another teen refuses therapy after years of treatment, insisting that her eating disorder was not really a problem and could her mom please get off her back?

Sometimes, the journey feels momentarily hopeful. After being plunged into a darkness that seems inescapable, someone “lights a candle” for our family. But after enjoying the light, someone blows it out - maybe it’s our teen, maybe it’s someone we trusted, maybe a medication stops working. And we are left in the dark again, scrambling for hope.

In the best circumstances, our teens find their way into a stable place of healing light, and we are immensely grateful. Yet we know our teen is prone to darkness, aware that it quietly nags on the corners of their lives, and we worry that someday they may descend again.

Share Evidence of Grace

Embracing the Darkness

In this season of Advent, I’m trying to recognize the darkness rather than run from it. There’s comfort in realizing that I’m not alone in this experience of persistent night. It’s universal.

I’m struck by the reality that Christmas, in a Christian sense, was never designed to be an extravagant, financially consuming gift-giving festival. It’s about hope coming to an oppressed people who felt like the darkness never ended.

As parents, our darkness can be a combination of fear, despair, anger and grief as we consider the tension between where our teen is and where we want them to be. Maybe we are grieving how mental health has overshadowed our child and the life they once had or the life we hoped they would have. Advent itself is the space between despair and hope, between suffering and joy. We have to allow ourselves to grieve even as we reach for hope.

In Prayer in the Night1, Tish Harrison Warren writes:

“We just don’t want to feel sad. We’ll do almost anything to avoid it. And if we must feel sad, we at least want our sadness to end when we see fit. We want grief to be a task we can complete; the oven timer of our soul dings and we’re onto something else. But that isn’t how grief works. We control it as much as we control the weather. It is not simply an intellectual activity, a cognitive recognition of loss. Feeling sadness is the cost of being emotionally alive.”

Perhaps allowing ourselves moments to pause, even during the frantic pace of the holidays, and embrace our pain, is the way forward to our own healing, even as we cannot control our teen’s journey.

Candlelight

Lighting candles in the darkness feels hopeful; it also feels appropriate to me. We are in a sightless season of waiting, lamenting our daughter’s health. Like the Israelite community thousands of years ago, oppressed by Rome and unable to hear God, I don’t know when or how the answers will come. But regardless of their discouragement, many Jews faithfully lit candles and recited prayers every Shabbat. There is something to be said for persistence in hope, even in our darkest times.

This week, I confided in my spiritual director, Evelyn, about my daughter’s health struggles.

“Even though insurance finally approved the medication we’ve been fighting for, it’s not helping enough,” I said, tears spilling down my cheeks. “She’s still struggling to eat, she’s losing weight, and she’s exhausted all the time. I’m scared. When is this going to end? Where is God?”

I paused and wiped my eyes.

Evelyn asked, “Have you tried imagining that you’re holding your daughter and all her struggles up to God? Just hold all of it there. You don’t even have to say anything. It’s a different way of praying.”

I agreed to try it. In some ways, this feels like lighting a candle; holding my daughter and her darkness up to God as an offering. Perhaps I’m offering my darkness, a tangle of anxiety, grief, helplessness, and fury, while hoping for the gift of peace in return.

Artist and writer Jan L. Richardson says,

“In these Advent days of darkness and waiting, it may indeed seem that God’s face is hidden from our sight. But the sacred presence is there, breathing in the shadows. This is when we learn to trust senses other than sight and to seek the face of God beneath our fingertips.”2

Walking Together in Darkness

Finally, we turn towards hope, the theme of the first week of Advent. Hope: how fitting for the first candle to disrupt the darkness. For parents like me, we can hold out hope for our loved one, even in the shadows. We can also hope for other families on similar journeys.

Days ago, a friend reached out. Her husband just entered a mental health facility. She is wrestling with shock, grief, and loneliness in parenting their two sons alone. She wants to know when her husband will recover and when this stint of solo parenting will end. Unsure of who to trust with her family’s struggles, she worries that some will recoil from this type of darkness.

I assured my friend that I will walk and grieve with her. I told her gently that no doctor can predict how long a mental health recovery will take or when her husband will get “better.” But she doesn’t have to walk alone in the darkness. As I prayed for her, I felt as if we were lighting a candle together.

Another friend, Jane, whose sons are in middle school, showed up at church with a baby in her arms. Just a few weeks ago, her former colleague Carissa asked her to take care of her baby as a foster parent. A group of us have eagerly agreed to care for this baby’s needs while Carissa undergoes intensive mental health treatment. I ache for Carissa, even as I grin at her sweet baby girl.

Sometimes, when the darkness is too overwhelming, we need others to light a candle for us in ways like this. Other times, we need the courage to let others into our darkness and to ask them to help us find a glimmer of light. I don’t believe we were ever meant to navigate the darkness on our own.

I’d love to hear your stories. How have you wrestled with the darkness around mental or physical health challenges? Where have you found hope?