The Kids Are Not Alright
The photo I’ve shared in this blog shows me with my brother and one of my best friends during our senior beach week. In our school district, invading the Outer Banks of North Carolina was a rite of passage—one last week of freedom, fun, and reflection before scattering into college and adulthood. When I look at this photo, I remember the adventures. But if I am being completely honest, it also reminds me of a time when I carried a deep, silent resentment toward my parents.
For a long time, I never spoke about this chapter of my life. I never shared with my parents what I was navigating at the time. Please know that I have forgiven them. I found my own path to healing, and I share this not to cast blame—I love them dearly and know they were doing the best they could with the tools they had—but because being honest about my experience is the only way to shed light on the message I need to share today.
In the middle of my senior year, my parents hit a severe marriage crisis. Hindsight is 20/20, and it is pointless to resent people who were simply trying to survive a storm. However, the fallout of their choices fractured my teenage world during one of the most pivotal moments of my youth. Left with a heavy emotional burden I didn't know how to carry and a lot of unsupervised time, my grief turned into rebellion. I felt abandoned and hurt. In my teenage mind, the only power I had was to hurt them back. The irony is, I did everything in secret. Because I hid my behavior, I wasn't actually hurting them—I was only hurting myself.
What this photo doesn’t show is that I was forced to leave beach week early to move to New Hampshire. At the time, it felt like I was being robbed of my final summer and the closure of my childhood. Even typing these words years later, I can still feel the faint echo of how confusing and jarring that abrupt transition was. Even with an adult brain, I still cannot reason why there was such an urgency to steal me away from the center of my world.
But my anger hadn't started at the beach; it started months earlier on my birthday, when the stability of my family unit abruptly shattered. Up until that day, I had been the "good daughter"—polite, studious, and fiercely committed to the rules. In my pain, I did an about-face. I began skipping school, forging signatures to cover my absences, and partying with a boyfriend I knew my parents disliked. Because the adults in my world were consumed by their own crisis, I felt completely left behind. My teenage brain couldn’t process the trauma, so I used the exact behaviors I knew would disappoint them as a shield against my own pain.
Anyone who knows me today knows that my entire world revolves around my children. I intentionally waited to become a mother until I was emotionally and financially prepared to be fully present. I know down to my core that this fierce protective instinct was born from the experiences of my youth.
Anytime there is a disruption in a home—whether it is death, illness, or divorce—the children feel it. Even if a single word is never spoken aloud, kids absorb that energy shift instantly. When their world shakes, they look to their parents. How we respond to them in those defining moments monumentally shapes how they will navigate challenges for the rest of their lives.
We have to stop lying to ourselves that "the kids are alright." If you want a baseline test to figure out if your children are okay, look in the mirror and ask yourself:Am I okay? If you, the adult, are not fine, your kids are carrying that weight. They are not fine either.
Right now, I am practicing this brutal truth myself. I am not okay. With the devastating loss of my son August and the ongoing health issues of my husband, my world is in a place of deep, uncontrollable pain. It completely sucks. Because I am being honest with myself, I know it is impossible for my son Alrik to be perfectly "fine" right now. He feels the shift.
But here is the difference, and the core message I want to share: We are walking through this mess together.
I am making the conscious, active decision to show up for Alrik’s well-being. Even in the depths of my own grief, I am keeping our communication open, protecting him, and making his stability my absolute priority. As parents, we cannot always prevent hardship from knocking on our door. We cannot stop life from breaking our hearts. But we can control how we navigate the wreckage, and we must choose to shield our remaining children from the blast radius of tragedy and adult drama.
We only have our children for a brief, fleeting blink of time. Their childhood years are finite, precious, and irreplaceable. Our adult needs, romantic entanglements, and personal desires can wait if pursuing them means disrupting the stability our children depend on.
True parenthood requires inherent sacrifice. It is the conscious decision to put our own desires on hold for the greater good of the next generation. We have a profound duty to be present for our children—both emotionally and physically. When we fail to do this, we aren't just fracturing our homes; we are fracturing our collective future. A safe, healthy society depends entirely on how we protect our youth today.
Leaving our children emotionally unattended while we navigate our own storms—and lying to ourselves by saying they are fine—is actively harmful. It is damaging to our kids, destructive to our families, and dangerous for our future.
Our children’s emotional foundations depend entirely on our willingness to put our egos aside, embrace the sacred sacrifice of parenthood, and put their security first—especially when our own worlds are falling apart.
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