I Was An Emotionally Absent Mom Until My 10-Year-Old Got Hospitalized For Punching Through A Glass Door
A suicide threat, an ER visit, and inpatient therapy for our young daughter changed our family forever.
Courtesy Of Author This piece originally appeared on Another Jane Pratt Thing.
In a white, windowless room, I lie on a queen-size beanbag as Francine, one of my ten-year-old twins, layers weighted blankets on top of me and then belly flops onto the pile. It knocks the wind out of me, but only for a second.
“Francine, did you ask your mom for permission before you jumped?” asks Audrey, one of our family therapists, and an “OOP! Sorry, Mom!” She sounds like a cartoon when she says this, and I can’t help but laugh.
Francine’s twin sister, Sofia, shrieks through the fabric of a giant cocoon-like swing suspended from the ceiling as my husband, David, pushes her like one of those stomach-dropping pirate ship rides at an amusement park. My youngest daughter, Carolina, jumps up and down on a mini-trampoline while dribbling a medicine ball and venting about her day to Anna, the other therapist.
Our family spends two hours each Friday afternoon in this space, called a SMART room, where Audrey and Anna teach our family communication and coping skills through movement. We play theater games, like mirroring and charades. We do puzzles, make slime, and paint.
And we get active with one another. My favorite activity was the day my husband and I whipped a giant exercise ball at one another while standing on balance boards.
These days, inside and outside the SMART room, our family life feels manageable, enjoyable, even. But it has taken most of the current school year in intensive therapy to arrive here.
Our journey towards family mental health began last October … with a smash.
Shards of glass glittered on the hardwood floor of our home office, sparkling like diamonds in the autumn sunlight that streamed through the window. But what had happened? I felt so shocked and confused by all this broken glass that I journey outside myself, floating above the room.
A French door with a grid of fifteen rectangular panes of glass separates the office from the long hallway of our apartment. Only now, there were fourteen panes, and one wooden mouth full of jagged glass teeth.
“I’m sorry,” Francine wailed, “I’m so sorry.” Yet her words seemed slow and muffled. I drifted farther and farther away. I spotted Francine on the floor of the hallway, rumpled up, head on her knees, with her curtain of dark hair obscuring her face. On one gray sleeve of Francine’s long-sleeved Hamilton t-shirt, patches of blood seeped outwards.
Blood. My baby was bleeding. This brought me right back down to Earth. I leapt across the shards on tiptoe, sidestepped Francine, tossed on a hoodie and a pair of sneakers, and grabbed my purse, shouting down the hall:
“Francine, honey. It’s okay. I’m taking you to the emergency room. We are going to get this taken care of.” A sense of calm and focus overtook me. My sole purpose in life at that moment was to get Francine the care she needed.
Francine’s needs were serious, and they required serious treatment.
Prostock-studio / Shutterstock
Before Francine put her fist through the window, she had screamed for the better part of an hour about all of my failings:
“I’ve been gone for DAYS, and you don’t even want to talk with me.” “You care more about your students than you care about me.” “You’re barely a mother. You can’t even take a moment for us.”
Francine wasn’t wrong. When Francine and Sofia walked in the door from their fifth-grade overnight camping trip earlier that afternoon, Carolina embraced them, and David offered to make them whatever they wanted for dinner. But I said only the briefest of hellos. My butt remained glued to the swivel chair, my eyes fixated on my computer.
I am a high school teacher, and grades were due that evening. My jaw and neck clenched from squinting at the screen; our district’s ancient report card software uses the smallest fonts visible to the human eye. I wanted to finish this chore as quickly as possible, so I could get back to my family. But Francine couldn’t wait.
A few minutes after my non-greeting, Francine burst into the office and demanded,” I NEED my phone now.”
“Francine! You’re interrupting me.” “Mom, it’s my phone. Give IT TO ME.”
I tried to ignore her. I kept trying to look at composition books, decipher handwriting, mark the pages with checks and x’s and numbers.
“Mom. MOM! MOOOOOOM!” Francine dropped to the floor and began stomping her feet. We live on the top floor of a triple-decker, and we have downstairs neighbors. I flung my pen across the desk and shut the computer.
“Francine! STOP IT!” Francine didn’t let up.
“If you GAVE ME my PHONE, I would STOP.” “Francine! You can never just WAIT! Stop FREAKING OUT! YOU JUST FREAK OUT FOR NO REASON.”
Francine balled up her fists and pounded the floor. “IT’S YOUR FAULT I’M LIKE THIS BECAUSE YOU BIRTHED ME.”
Francine didn’t have to say this for me to know it. I know my broken brain requires seven prescriptions to manage my Bipolar II moods. I know I drank heavily and secretly almost every night for the first six years of the twins’ lives. And I know the pain of feeling lonely and unlovable. I know the confusion of being smart and high-achieving yet remaining incapable of controlling your body and your words at home.
That’s what Francine is like. Francine scores in the 99th percentile on academic achievement tests. Francine gets elected as vice-president of the student government at her elementary school. Francine earns featured roles at our local community theater.
Francine makes friends wherever she goes; she loves to make people laugh. And I have never received a call from school or anywhere else that Francine was misbehaving.
But, for years, home had been a different story. The trouble began in third grade. That year, Francine began picking fights with her sisters in the car on the way home from school.
If Francine didn’t get to ride “shotgun”, she would kick the back of whoever got that coveted front seat. And no matter where she sat, she would scream at her sisters until everyone, including me, started yelling. Sometimes I pulled the car over halfway through our eight-minute drive from school to home because I felt too worked up to safely operate our family van.
I refused to restart the car until everyone quieted down, and this could take up to twenty minutes sometimes. And then, once we got home, Francine sprinted past her sisters up the stairs, so she could be the first one inside the apartment.
I didn’t understand Francine’s rage, but I convinced myself that it was within the realm of normal. Lots of kids struggled after COVID; that’s what everyone said. I told myself it was just a phase.
And, every day, as soon as we got home, I handled this phase by handing Francine a phone, a tablet, a computer, whatever device got her to sit down and shut up and give me a moment (or an hour or two) of peace. My husband and I both did this. And I know we both felt ashamed of it, but we didn’t know what else to do.
Sometimes, we let all three girls stay on technology all weekend. When all three girls played on Roblox, a video game platform, together, I told my husband, “At least they’re bonding over something.”
But I knew the truth: I was a bad parent with no idea of how to deal with my daughter’s meltdowns.
Once during the ride home from school, Francine jumped out of the van when we were still a few houses away from home. When Sofia, Carolina, and I walked up to the apartment door, we found that Francine had locked us all out. Despite my pleading, she refused to let us in.
I walked Sofia and Carolina back down the stairs, and we sat on the front step for half an hour before she let us in. This incident frightened me so much that I scheduled an urgent care visit at the pediatrician’s office for the next day. The doctor put Francine on a low dose of fluoxetine, and she referred us to therapy.
For the remainder of third grade and most of fourth grade, I picked Francine up early from school on Thursdays, so we could do online therapy from home on video chat. Dr. Jerry, the therapist assigned to us, looked very, very young.
Dr. Jerry’s dog barked loudly and jumped at the screen during our sessions. And, no matter how many times I told him that Francine’s behaviors did not happen at school, I got the sense that he didn’t believe me; he kept insisting that I have her tested for special education classes.
I tried to make Francine stay on screen with him to participate in her therapy, but Dr. Jerry discouraged me from doing this. During a forty-minute session, I stayed at the dining room table with the video chat, but Francine would be making snacks in the kitchen, curled up on her bed with the phone, or hiding under the dining room table. It was stupid and ridiculous, and Francine and I both knew it, but she liked getting out of school early, and I wasn’t about to quit therapy when she needed help.
Towards the end of fourth grade, Francine’s pediatrician added a guanfacine prescription on top of the fluoxetine, and that seemed to set Francine on the right track, at least for a few months. During this time, Dr. Jerry decided Francine was doing well enough to discharge her, and I can’t say I was sad to terminate those sessions.
Last summer, I made a big effort to wean Francine off technology, but it did not go well.
Francine never took her phone to theater camp. She couldn’t care less about YouTube and TikTok when rehearsing for and performing in Newsies and Willy Wonka with her sisters and her friends. But theater camp ended at 3 p.m. each day. We would want to take the girls to the outdoor pool that I paid several hundred dollars per summer to join, but we couldn’t make Francine go without a major argument.
So one parent took Carolina and Sofia to the pool while the other stayed home with Francine and her phone. We didn’t even take a family vacation last summer because David and I were too burnt out from the cycles of trying to take technology, having a screaming match with Francine, and then giving in anyway. A few times, Francine even threatened to kill herself if she didn’t get her way.
“Do you want to kill yourself?” I would ask. If she said yes, I would ask, ”Do you have a plan? How would you do this?”
She would back down and say she didn’t mean it, but it frightened me, and I often cried. Recently, Francine revealed that she only did this to frighten me, to get her way, but she knew she would never end her life. That came to me as a great relief.
It was depressing and sad and unnerving and terrible, but it was also our regular way of life. At the time, I honestly didn’t think something better was possible.
On the night that Francine punched through the glass, we spent hours together in the emergency room at Faulkner Hospital. At intake, a nurse cut through the sleeves of that long-sleeved Hamilton t-shirt. These cuts and the blood stains ruined her favorite shirt forever.
The nurse led us to a cubicle partitioned off by a curtain. There were no other kid patients on the floor, and we heard the theater of pain and suffering all around us. An old woman pleaded in Spanish. An old man groaned and grunted. Machines beeped. Walkie-talkie conversations took place through static. And, anytime a patient needed the restroom, including Francine, a police escort was required.
Treating Francine’s cuts only took a few minutes; the glass had not gone deep. The doctor asked us what had happened, and, after we told her, she said that we had to wait for the psychiatrist on duty before Francine could be discharged.
Francine wanted to know how long we would have to wait, but I didn’t care.
I was so relieved that someone took this incident seriously, to see that this was more than just glass in an arm, but a psychiatric issue.
A serious one. One that immediately required a psychiatrist to come while on duty in a busy big-city hospital.
The psychiatrist was a woman with thick black hair and almond-shaped eyes and olive skin that didn’t even look sallow under the horrible fluorescent lighting. She asked a few questions, and I talked and talked and talked about Francine’s history and her, and she had a pad to take notes, but she didn’t take many notes. She listened, and she looked concerned. Concerned, but not shocked.
When I finally finished, the doctor asked Francine why she smashed the window. Francine sank into the bed and closed her eyes. Tears slid down her cheeks, and she put her head between her knees.
1st footage / Shutterstock
“It was a mistake. I just wanted my way. I just wanted to punch something. I never wanted to hurt myself. I never wanted to hurt anyone.” Then, the psychiatrist asked me to leave the cubicle so she could ask Francine a few questions privately.
I recently asked Francine about this conversation. Francine can’t recall the specifics. She remembers not wanting to answer the questions, but she felt that she had to respond truthfully because she knew she was struggling. By the time the psychiatrist called me back a few minutes later, she had a whole plan set up for us.
“Call the Boston Emergency Services Team as soon as you get home. A clinician will come to your home, and the clinician can refer you to an Intensive Outpatient Treatment program for Francine. She will need to be out of school for a few weeks to attend. Your insurance will cover all of this. I will put all of the phone numbers and information on the discharge papers.”
Maybe I should have felt sad that Francine needed to go to the ER and see a psychiatrist, but instead, I felt validated.
Francine’s needs were serious, and they required serious treatment. And serious treatment meant the serious possibility that things could get better.
The next day, David and I both stayed home from work. A clinician from the Boston Emergency Services came, and he supported us in getting a spot for Francine in program near our home at a place called The Italian Home for Children. The Italian Home, with its sprawling campus full of grassy fields and Victorian architecture and statues of saints everywhere looked not unlike the grounds of the extremely expensive Catholic elementary school I attended.
For a few weeks, Francine attended the Italian Home instead of her regular elementary school. The schedule there consisted of talk therapy and art therapy, and play therapy. Each day, she seemed a little calmer than the day before. The Italian Home also had a fantastic chef who prepared lunches that Francine loved and described to our entire family in mouth-watering detail.
After Francine graduated from the program, we started with Aubrey and Anna through an organization called the Justice Resource Institute. At first, all of the therapy happened in our home.
On Thursdays, David and I would meet with Anna for an hour and a half without the children to share our own childhood and family histories and to discuss parenting questions and needs. And, on Fridays, before we started our SMART room sessions at the Justice Resource Institute, Aubrey and Anna came to the apartment with board games and games they created for the whole family to play together.
My biggest takeaway from all of this, something that Anna taught David and me from the start, is that a mental health issue with one person does not live only in that one person. Francine’s needs are needs that involve our entire family. I learned through the therapy to understand Sofia and Carolina’s feelings and reactions as well as to realize the impact of David and my own childhood histories on how we relate to one another in our marriage and how we parent our children.
Every Christmas, we travel to Maryland to visit family, and every Christmas, I hate the car ride, I hate staying in close quarters, and I hate being embarrassed by my daughters’ behaviors. But this year was … fine. Nothing worried me. Everyone got along.
And, starting last month, David and I took away the internet technology completely. The girls can watch TV whenever they want, but phones are only for when the girls go to the park or the library or the corner store without an adult. And using the computer is a privilege reserved for maybe an hour or two on a Saturday. And it has been … fine.
A few weeks ago, Francine came into my room, curled up on the bed, and asked me, ”Mom, now that I’m better, can I stop taking my medications?”
I understood why she was asking. For a long time, I cycled through feeling bad, taking medication, feeling better, stopping medication, and feeling awful once again. My pill organizer looks crazy, like something from Valley of the Dolls, filled to the brim with a rainbow assortment of drugs. Sometimes I want to throw it in the trash. But I can’t.
“Francine, that is a very good question. I’ll tell you the answer, though. You will always need to take these medications. Always. Because I always want you to feel better.”
I almost teared up. It was a moment of honesty. I birthed her, and she has these needs, and I was giving her my candid advice.
But Francine took it in stride. “Okay, Mommy.” And left the room and returned to her life.
If you or somebody that you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, there is a way to get help. Call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or text "HELLO" to 741741 to be connected with the Crisis Text Line.
Jennifer Dines is a Boston-based teacher and mother who writes about mental health, social justice, and pop culture. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Another Jane Pratt Thing, Current Affairs, and Memoir Monday's First Person Singular.
