SPIRITUALITY | PARENTING

Helping My Son Through Stressful Times

Finding Faith As We Face Fears Together

Not a Medium member? Read the full article here.

My spiritual beliefs are still evolving. When my children were little, I searched for a warm, open-hearted faith community we could call home. Moving across the country, then ‘over the hill’, followed by the chaos of life with kids left this dream by the wayside.

I was raised Catholic with an atheist father.

A lifelong devout Catholic, my mom took us to church every Sunday. We usually sat in or near the front pew. She worked as a church bookkeeper to cover Catholic elementary school tuition for my brothers and me.

My atheist father helped us plant gardens. He let us play ‘king of the mountain’ on his compost heap. One year, he built a biplane out of used pallets to help our imaginations soar beyond our suburban Chicago surroundings.

I grew up believing in God and Heaven but knowing others believed different things, which was ok. I’m not sure when I stopped going to church. A college art history course cured me of any innocent beliefs I had about Catholicism.

In 2000, I married my college boyfriend in the Catholic church where my mom still worked. She convinced the priest to condense the required marriage preparation course into an afternoon so we could complete it while visiting from D.C. Our Catholic wedding made my mom, his mom, and his grandparents happy.

Our daughter Evie was born in 2005. With a little help from my mom, she was baptized in that church. By 2007, when our son Jack was born, my mom had retired and could no longer pull strings. So, neither Jack nor his younger brother Henry was baptized.

Unitarian Universalism offered a good alternative.

When Evie was two, we joined the Unitarian Universalist Church in Alexandria, VA. I ended up teaching the preschool religious education (RE) class and loved how the curriculum differed from the Catholic teachings of my youth. The goal was to help children develop moral compasses while offering a taste of several world religions.

While participating in a yearlong fellowship at Stanford, we attended a Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto, CA. Jack and Evie attended their RE classes.

We fell out of the Unitarian habit when we moved to Santa Cruz, CA. The closest Unitarian Church was 40 minutes from our house and had few families with young children. Henry was only two then, so he has no memories of ever attending church and he’s never been to an RE class.

Henry’s Encounter with ”The Egg”

A few months ago, Henry, who is now 12, invited me to watch a YouTube video about “what he believes.”

The video by Kurzgesagt was an animation of “The Egg,” a short story by Andy Weir. In it, a man who has just died interacts with a divine being who explains that when we die we are reincarnated. He then says that we each live the life of every human who has ever existed before ‘growing up’ to be a god. Concluding that all religions are right in their own way, he says, “Whatever we do to others we are doing to ourselves.”

I thanked Henry for sharing the video with me. “It’s similar to what I believe. While I also believe in reincarnation,” I said, “The thought of living every human life before we can reach our ‘god stage’ feels extreme. I think every one of us already has god consciousness. It awakens when we slow down enough to feel the miracles all around us.”

Henry asked, “What do you mean?”

I thought for a minute, “Doesn’t it feel like a miracle to see the first sprouts in springtime? How about the intricacies of every unique snowflake?”

He replied, “Sure, I guess so.”

I went on, “If you sit anywhere outside and spend a long time looking around as carefully as possible, you’ll see evidence of god everywhere. I believe every flower bud is a miracle and every human too.”

Henry appreciated my taking the time to watch the video with him and the fact that I took his views seriously.

Including His Thoughts On Death

The next day he asked me how I would feel if I died. I said it seemed like an impossible question to answer.

He said, “I would be relieved.” This caught me off guard. He went on to explain, “Most of us walk around with a bit of sadness because we don’t know what happens when we die. I like the idea from the video that I’ll be reincarnated and that there is something bigger than us.”

Thinking about this conversation, I realized that by not raising my children to believe in a specific religion I have left them pondering big questions like this.

At 11, Henry already had reasons to be contemplating death.

Some of Henry’s formative experiences growing up in climate-intensified times have given him a tangible fear of dying.

When he was 8, the pandemic kept him out of school for more than a year. During that time, we evacuated from a wildfire that burned over 400 homes in our mountain community. Two years before that, a wildfire 4 hours north of us had killed at least 85 people.

A few weeks before this conversation, one of many ‘atmospheric river’ storms had blown a massive redwood onto the cottage next door.

Although we’re a white family living in a fairly affluent area, my kids’ life experiences to date have been scarier than anything I experienced at their age. Living in New York during the 9/11 attacks when I was 30 was my first truly scary life experience.

I can’t begin to fathom what my son or I would be feeling during this lifetime if we had incarnated somewhere on the frontlines of war or climate catastrophe.

Our kids face new fears.

Unlike Henry, I had little fear of dying in my early years other than reoccurring nightmares after I watched the 1983 post-apocalyptic TV movie The Day After.

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I don’t recall thinking deeply about anything.

My friends and I watched John Hughes movies. We danced to songs like “Material Girl,” “It’s the End of the World As We Know It,” and “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun.” We weren’t thinking about the downsides of materialism or the world actually ending. And it would be years before school shootings became a societal norm.

My kids have many more worries than I had at their age.

Last April, while pleading for some screen time Henry exploded: “Do you know how difficult it is having a mom who often reminds me and my friends how harmful screens are?”

He kept going, “That we need to spend time outside appreciating the real world instead of spending so much time in Minecraft worlds? Why silly trend toys are bad? I know how bad things are and I don’t want to be reminded that the world is ending!”

Not long after that, he called me from his dad’s house around 11 pm, “I can’t get to sleep because I keep thinking about school shootings. They’ll probably be even more common by the time I’m in middle school.”

I didn’t know what to say so I just tried to help him center himself in the present moment knowing he was safe in his bed. We did some deep breathing together which seemed to help calm his mind. Then he asked what to do if a shooter was at his school.

All I could suggest was, “Listen to your teacher, hide, breathe slowly and deeply, and remember how much I love you.”

My heart aches for Henry’s lost innocence.

No children should worry about their safety or their future.

It’s not his fault that our government allows shops to sell automatic weapons as if they were normal hunting gear. Or that careless profiteering corporations are still mass-producing pointless plastic toys and advertising them to children.

Of course, kids in our ad-driven society torment their parents to buy more and more. Should we tell them that the children where these throwaway products are produced breathe smog-filled air?

On top of his other worries, Henry now contemplates nuclear war.

After hearing the news one day, Henry brought up growing fears of nuclear war. My mind immediately flashed to my “Day After” nightmares.

Henry calmed himself by saying, “But we’re not close to anything they would want to destroy, are we?”

I thought of the Lockheed Martin Missile Fuel and Rocket testing facility up the road from my house. Then I realized our Santa Cruz Mountain community is just ‘over the hill’ from Silicon Valley.

I had been following the escalating tensions between the U.S., Russia, and China and the U.S.’s ridiculously increased military budget. I’d heard about recent nuclear weapon tests. Still, I hadn’t considered our proximity to potential nuclear targets before that bedtime conversation.

I don’t remember what I said to distract him. Once he brought it up, I too felt fearful and I don’t like to lie to my kids.

Feeling Our Way Forward

None of the parenting books I devoured when my kids were little prepared me for the types of questions Henry has been pondering or the intricacies of this digital age.

I often feel annoyed when my kids waste time on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. So much of what they watch seems shallow and meaningless.

That said, I realize Evie and Jack sometimes engage in activism on these platforms. It’s heartening to know that despite the many dangers of social media, kids their age are also finding healthy ways to learn from one another. I suppose the same goes for people my age.

The truth is, I too have found much of what I currently believe on YouTube.

While separating from my husband in 2022, I lost my job and found out I was no longer in the running for a position that would have been a big career boost. Those disappointments combined with fear and uncertainty about just about everything in my life and our ailing world sent me into a downward spiral.

That’s when I found Eckhart Tolle videos and a variety of guided meditations for deep sleep, healing, patience, and more. This story of the Hopi Prophecy offered meaning. I now find the perspectives of spiritual guides and astrologers — that relate to things happening today — more comforting than anything I might read in the Bible or another ancient text.

Videos like these and my puppy got me out of bed each morning. I began taking barefoot walks and sitting quietly on the mountainside noticing ants, bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and tiny weeds poking through the ashy, needle-covered soil. My spirit awakened to new insights and possibilities…

I’m grateful that my kids and I are learning together.

I’ve been working to respect Henry’s autonomy now that he’s started middle school and has a cell phone. In the past, I sometimes turned the TV off abruptly or took his iPad away when he seemed too glued to screens.

Now a polite request usually does the trick.

Since I failed to shepherd Henry’s early religious experiences, I’m glad that he found his way to meaning on YouTube.

I’m also thankful he has expressed his fears to me rather than keeping them inside. I don’t remember ever talking with my parents about my “Day After” nightmares. Instead, I had them over and over again.

I hope that when Henry shares his worries and we practice calmly breathing and feeling safe in the present moment, he’s developing mindfulness skills to help him cope with whatever the future holds.

I continuously learn from him, Evie, and Jack. Perhaps they’ve lived many more lives than me.

We’ll keep figuring out how to love each other in healthier ways as we adapt to our changing world and do our best to make it a little better each day.

Gail McNulty 🕊️ 🌱 is raising three teenagers while getting to know herself and her parents who are in the late stages of life. She writes to explore how we can love our way through these times and work together to create the tomorrow we all want and need. If you’re dreaming about the future we can co-create as we save what we love, regenerate what we need, and learn to live in just and joyful ways, let’s connect! LinkedIn • Twitter