After my father died in 2018, I fell into a deep depression. It was like nothing I had experienced before. I was heartbroken because he was gone, angry at the injustice of how—and how soon—he died, filled with self-recrimination for being unable to do more to help or save him when he was sick. The depression was a result of not knowing how to face or cope with all of these feelings at once, but I didn’t know that then; I believed I was “only” grieving. My father’s death was the first major loss of my life, and for all I knew, this was just what it meant to mourn: to move through your days in a kind of fog. To force yourself to go through the motions of daily life without caring about most of them. To sometimes wish that you could simply cease existing so the pain would end.
I told myself that I had to hold it together: My children had their own grief to process, and they needed, and deserved, a stable mother. I once joked to a friend that a half hour after their bedtime was my “crying time”—the efficient mourner, scheduling my grief—but my friend refused to laugh. Sounds of distress can be especially upsetting to my younger child, who has sensory sensitivities. I was worried about scaring my kids. But the intensity—the scale and breadth of my sadness—also scared me. Not only did I try to hide it from others, sometimes I hid from it, denying it or burying myself in work, which only made my depression worse.
I knew that I wasn’t okay. “You had better go talk to someone and work this out,” my mom said to me one day in a tone that brooked no argument. I talked to my doctor; I found a good therapist. I began to learn how to exist in this new world of grief without constantly looking for more ways to punish myself. Since my mother died in the spring of 2020, I have missed and mourned her every day. But that deep despair hasn’t followed. I don’t feel like a stranger to myself.
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Now, the most hopeless time I’ve known, the darkest thoughts I’ve had, live in a book my 15-year-old wants to read. When she asks, I find myself wavering, even though it’s usually an easy yes when she wants to read my writing. She has seen a few chapters from my new book, as she has veto rights she has yet to exercise when it comes to her brief appearances in my work. Still, I’m anxious about giving her the full story. Not because I feel ashamed of having been depressed or ashamed of writing about it. And not because I am under any illusion that she is too young, too innocent, to understand what depression is. She’s read many books (she reads so many books) that are heavier than mine, and we’ve talked a lot about mental health, especially in the last few years.
But as often as I remind myself that she’s not a little girl anymore, as honest as I strive to be with her about life, about loss, about our responsibilities in a world filled with so much collective and personal suffering, I am still her mother. I will always have that deep-down urge to protect her. I don’t want her to feel afraid, reading about her mother being so despondent. It’s a corner of my life I consciously shut her out of at the time, believing that was what a good parent should do, and a part of me wonders if it is wrong, irresponsible, or just too painful to open it up to her examination.
Parenting often requires you to try to balance fear and love, honesty with the urge to shield. Even when acknowledging that something deeply painful has happened, I know I have a tendency to want to jump ahead, skip to the comfort. I want to reassure my children or find “solutions” or identify something we can do, together, that might help us feel better. Sometimes we imagine that we need to protect them from things they may already be intimately familiar with. How many articles were written about how sad and anxious many children were during that first year of the pandemic, isolated from their friends, with many grieving loved ones? How many continue to struggle now? I lost my parents and my grandmother, all that was left of my adoptive family, in a two-year span—but of course those were my children’s losses too. Three years into a pandemic, many of our kids and their peers are increasingly aware of what it means to not always be okay.
Before my 15-year-old and I start reading my book together, I warn her that there are some upsetting things in it, and I say that I want to talk with her about them first. I try to preview the chapter about my depression so it won’t come as a shock to her. I let her know that we can stop to talk, or stop reading altogether, whenever she wants to. She can ask me anything she wants beyond what’s in the story if she decides that she wants to know more.
Despite how hard I tried to conceal my struggles at the time, of course she wasn’t unaware of them. She remembers our conversations about missing my dad, plus the grief and shock and pain I couldn’t fully hide. She also remembers moments when I seemed “lost.” Talking honestly about this, as well as the grief I continue to carry, has allowed us to have deeper conversations about mental health, about trauma, about what it means to try to take care of yourself and show yourself grace. My aim is not to burden her with my experiences but to let her know that if she ever feels the way I did then—hopeless, anxious, even lost—it’s not her fault, and it is possible to find help and support and even forgive yourself.
I’ve come to see that these are good and necessary discussions to have, and to keep having, though I’m still learning how to have them with my teenager. She needs my love and support, and she needs to know she can depend on me to be there for her, but perhaps she doesn’t need me to constantly model an outward projection of “okayness” at my own expense. It’s occurred to me that I don’t want her to learn, from me, to keep the hardest things to herself, even if she thinks she is doing so to protect the people she loves.
Sometimes I still want to do the impossible and keep the harder things in life from my children. I think anyone who cares for children is familiar with the instinctive urge to protect them from some painful knowledge, however unlikely or hopeless we know this wish to be. But our kids are always watching and listening, absorbing things we may not realize, living through their own upheavals and losses. Sometimes, as much as we might wish to, we can’t make everything okay for them, let alone ourselves. We can’t build them a safe, unassailable refuge where they will never need to fear or worry or mourn. Sometimes the best we can do is sit beside them in our heartbreak and our suffering and our love and let them see how we feel, let them tell us how they feel, let them know that we are with them now, even if we cannot make everything all right.
Nicole Chung is the author of the new memoir A Living Remedy (April 2023) and the national bestseller All You Can Ever Know (2018).
