It’s been a few years since I shot these guys and my how they’ve all matured so much! Well, more physically than emotionally, as you see from the
rowdy behavior below. :0
Reasons I enjoy this. 1. John was making it awkward because he’s hilarious. and 2. look at the connections with all the bodies. I told them to sit down
and relax and they all just comfortably rested against each other. I love that. Also, John, is that the super masculine pose that won Kate over?
I don’t remember what happened here but according to my image time stamp, they went from this to…
this in under a 30 second! Kate, you birthed models!!
I’ve never photographed a family, much less of 6, where 5 are the same height!
” What are you looking for? This? Or maybe a little of THIS?” as he shifted positions like Zoolander. This is totally Jack and I love him. The
comic relief who gives no cares to others impression of him. Good work, son. Don’t lose your zest!
Blow it uuuuup in your house!
So gorgeous!
John asked me to take a portrait of Kate by herself, again. I just think that’s the sweetest.
I was keeping myself busy during Will’s wardrobe change. 🙂
Will is a senior this year so I spent the last half with just him.
I love how relaxed Will was for me. A natural born model.
The sun finally came out to play and not so ironically, it was while we were having a heart to heart.
I say it time and time again that when I think of God, I think of light. And whenever I know He is near, the sun shows itself. It was magical for me
because we were talking about our deceased loved ones at this point and suddenly the sun was so strong in my lens, it hurt my eye. I love those
moments. Those God winks.
So I’m bout to get heavy on y’all. Just before shooting, Kate emailed me some emotional words regarding her family. They very much give the appearance of the perfect family, the type we are all jealous of. Heck, it was because of them I was certain I wanted to have 4 kids! When she told me this shocking personal info, I couldn’t believe it. Just proves that “perfect” is never reality for anyone. She knows I talk about a lot of both happy and sad on my blogs and knew this could be a good platform for her to share their story in hopes it could save a life of one of my followers. Will’s story to beat the inner voices complicating his life. He gave her permission to write what I’m posting because he now knows the importance of sharing your own vulnerabilities to everyone before it’s too late. Because it was too late for one of his close friends leading to a downward spiral in his own life.
………………..
“I’ll start off by saying that it is not easy to expose my family’s wounds. At the very core of motherhood is the innate instinct to protect. Talking about Will and what he has been through is really tough. Sharing this type of thing sets us up for judgement. nike air maxschoenen It’s easy to share if your child has an illness that has a lab value attached to it. air max pas cher That really isn’t anyone’s “fault” but when it comes to issues of depression/anxiety and substance abuse, the world looks at these things differently and perhaps asks two questions…”What did these people do to screw up their kid?” and “Wow, what is wrong with that kid? If he were mine, I would not put up with this shit.” So I guess judgment of how we parent and/or judgment of our son are the two things we fear. The cruelty of this type of judgement is that as a parent, I have laid awake many nights reliving Will’s infancy and childhood and wondered what I missed. I wonder where he started to struggle that I was too busy to notice. I wonder where I failed to protect him when someone hurt him. I tortured myself with thoughts of whether or not I let him cry too long as a baby at times, hindering the development of feeling secure. The list goes on and on. By the grace of God and through vigilant prayer, I know the truth and the role that genetics and personality type has in much of this. I have heard God whisper that this would be a cross Will would carry in life and because of that, He chose us to love him through it. And I do believe that. But every once in a while, those thoughts still creep in and like to shake things up a bit.
When Will was in the fifth grade, we noticed extreme swings in his normally happy go lucky demeanor. Will was a sweet boy with a delightful sense of humor. He loved all things funny. He was easy going and really liked everyone he met. He was also the peacekeeper in the family, always trying to make things better if mom was in a bad mood. He was sensitive and loving, always willing to crawl in my lap or snuggle up with me. So when we noticed that his naturally easy going nature was shifting, we blamed in on hormones and exhaustion. But soon the episodes of distress were too frequent to ignore and after a visit to the pediatrician and a formal diagnosis of “Major Depressive Disorder”, we knew we were in for something big. We talked at length to Will about this. Coming from medical backgrounds, John and I both understood the biochemical component of Will’s diagnosis and we educated him on this. We made the decision not to tell family. John lost a brother to suicide and we felt that informing his parent’s of Will’s new diagnosis would ignite fear into them. We also didn’t tell my family. At the time, I still considered this a “private family issue” and I didn’t want the family viewing Will any differently. I wish I could go back and change that so badly. Both John and I have loving families that are so supportive and they love Will so unconditionally and nothing would have changed in their treatment of him. We also unintentionally were sending him the message that “this is not your fault but we don’t really want this to get out…” I can’t think of a more mixed message to send a kid than that. Sadly, it happens in many families. I often think of that scene in Rudolph when his father discovers his blinking nose and sticks a fake nose over it so that he would be accepted by Santa and the other reindeer. I always thought Rudolph’s dad was an ass for that… until I examined my own parenting. Now you can put us in that same category… and Rudolph’s dad is still an ass, I just understand his decision a little more now.
I thought I was armed and prepared with all the knowledge in the world and that I could somehow avert crisis. But I’d never had a teenager.
Will did very well through the remainder of middle school and junior high. At this point, he was not taking any medication and not receiving therapy. Although he did well, I still wish I would have gotten him into see someone so that he could go to high school prepared for the social challenges and pressure. In my opinion, a kid with Will’s diagnosis needs to be armed BEFORE he is thrown into the fire.
He had a great freshman year from what I could tell. He ran cross country, played lacrosse and kept his grades decent. He was engaged at home and involved in family life. He was social, had friends and seemed very happy. I had no concerns.
Sophomore year things began to change. I noticed Will began to withdrawal from the family a bit more. I got a phone call from a concerned friend whose daughter was worried about Will and said he seemed “depressed”. Will assured me he was fine and was upset with his friend. I believed him. But not because I really did, but because I WANTED HIM TO BE OK. I have learned that wanting something to be a reality doesn’t make it a reality. My gut instinct was beginning to rumble that something wasn’t right. I found out that Will began experimenting with alcohol. I came down HARD on him and thought I had completely wiped out any chance he would do it again. This was the beginning of hell.
In February of Will’s sophomore year, AFTER Will began to noticeably decline, his friend and chemistry lab partner committed suicide. Grant wasn’t open about his depression so when Will found out about Grant’s death, he was blindsided, no one saw that coming. He described Grant as the happiest and smiliest kid he knew. He talked about how well-liked he was and how much fun they had in chemistry (that fun was reflected in his chemistry grade…). Days later, the principal at St. Xavier sent a letter out to parents and revealed that Grant had been suffering from depression.
Hard as I tried, I had no clue how to reach Will in his grief. He was already struggling and now was grieving the loss of a friend. More and more, his morale and his moods deteriorated. I was beginning to get very afraid. Thankfully, after many refusals and insisting that he was fine, Will finally told me he needed to talk to someone and agreed to take an antidepressant. We were unable to get him into the therapist of choice for a couple of months and figured starting the medicine would help a little. After a month, Will insisted the medicine was enough and he didn’t need to go to therapy. Again, I wish I would have pressed this issue further, but I didn’t. It was around this time, he came to us and described that he was feeling weird. His face was flushed and he seemed nervous and he wasn’t sure what was going on or why. He said he couldn’t pinpoint anything to feel nervous about. He seemed afraid. He was experiencing his first anxiety attack and John recognized it right away.
As his anxiety episodes increased, he begged us to take him to the doctor and get him a prescription for medicine that would take those feeling away. When I refused, saying “You can’t just fix all your problems with drugs, Will” (another decision I will forever regret), Will immediately shut me out. To him, I took away any validity of his struggle. Air Jordan 4 Premium To him, I was saying he just needed to “get a grip and get over it”. I’ll never forget his face when I said that. It’s as if his whole world shifted. He looked at me and said, “Ok. Fine.” And he walked away. Unbeknownst to me, he would find a way to get what he thought he needed with or without me.
The first part of Will’s junior year is what I will call survival mode. He wasn’t ok and he wasn’t willing to talk to us. He was still on his antidepressant and insisted it was helping, but his moods told a different story. His grades began to suffer a bit more and I justified it with “Everyone says junior year is really hard…”. In my gut, I absolutely knew better. He was making a lot of bad decisions that I didn’t know about until later. He was not ok and I had no clue what to do.
Christmas came and went and in January, on multiple evenings I received a text from Will’s friend, who loved him like a brother, asking me to go check on him because he was worried about Will. I was deeply touched by this young man’s compassion. Each time he told John he was fine, so I thought this was a bit odd. I assured his friend that he was ok, and told Will he was really lucky to have friends like that. He then asked his friend to stop texting me. Except, his friend’s worries didn’t stop and they continued checking in on him. We could no longer ignore the elephant in the room. We confronted Will and discovered the very disturbing reality that he was struggling so badly and unable to sleep at night that he was routinely using alcohol as a sleep aid before bed. Yes, this was going on right under our noses and we had absolutely no clue.
This earned Will a 4 day stay at Lindner and this was when we finally knew it was too big to keep a secret. We told our families and went public with our struggle. All I can say is that we received nothing but love and support, not the judgement I was so afraid of. But sadly, this did not help him. He needed much more, even though he was on a new antidepressant and was now in weekly therapy, as well as a recommended outpatient substance abuse program.
The next two months were horrible. He wasn’t better. He did not care about school. He did not care about family. He did not care about life. He saw nothing to be happy about. I feared waking him every single day, wondering if he would be alive when I went to his room. He told me that he did not care if he lived or died. John and I were an absolute wreck. We didn’t know a single soul going through this and we were sick. I did not sleep. I socialized very little. In my mind, no one could possibly know what we were going through. Everyone else’s kids (in my mind) were thriving and awesome. Facebook said so! Note—- Facebook is a painful place to be when your family is suffering. So I left. I was also trying to parent Emma, Jack and Lucy and thank God, they were all doing ok. They knew what was going on and I talked to them a lot about it. I wanted to make sure they understood and didn’t feel scared or confused. We are so blessed with the children we have. To them, Will was the brother they loved, not anything else.
It wasn’t until Grant’s mom sat with me one day at lunch one day that I knew I had to act. As I described some of the things Will was doing, she looked me in the eye and said, “Be afraid”. This mother who had lost her son to mental illness was telling me to be afraid. My body went numb right then.
They say crisis can cause short term memory loss and I know this to be true. If you asked me about the details leading to Will’s leaving for wilderness therapy in Utah, I would have very few. Some of them are also too personal to share and Will deserves some privacy when it comes to these matters. We do know that his life was in danger and he was suicidal when he left. We do know that being removed from home was absolutely necessary to save his life.
We made the heart wrenching decision to withdrawal Will from school during the 4th quarter of his junior year and send him to an intensive wilderness therapy program out West. Will was gone for eight weeks. With the help of an awesome therapist named Brandon, a lot of learning and healing took place for him and for us. Thanks to the wonderful and caring administration at St. X, he is back at school for his senior year. He is doing well now and talks often about the future and plans for college and what he’d like to do, something he didn’t talk about before. Although I will always worry, I know that he has the tools now that he didn’t have before. Will is always going to have to wrestle with the black dog of depression. But he is armed and educated now and that gives him power over his illness that he didn’t have before. I think sharing his story also gives him a lot of power over the shame and secrecy attached to mental illness. It cannot keep him a hostage in his own head anymore. He knows a lot of others struggle too and that he isn’t alone or the only one. We are also armed and educated and know that we have the strength to do things we never believed we could when it came to our children. We have connections to the right resources and a lot of family and community support.
In July, I did something I never saw myself doing. I allowed Will to get a tattoo. He is only 17 and needed my permission and given all we had been through and his reasons for wanting it, I agreed to allow it. Will’s tattoo is in memory of his friend, Grant. It signifies a bond neither one knew they had, the importance of telling someone, the reminder of this painful time in Will’s life and the memory of the smiley, kind friend he knew and loved. I hope it always serves as a symbol of hope for him. I hope it always is a reminder for Will to fight when he is feeling weak. I want it remind Will that by fighting the beast that defeated Grant, he honors him. Before I allowed it, I asked Will to imagine he is 80 years old and he is looking in the mirror at his sagging chest muscles. The tattoo will look very differently on an old man’s chest. Then I asked him to imagine regretting the decision. He said he still would not. And I believe him. So after making sure I was not violating any kind of religious law (we are Catholic and I would give permission for something that is against church teachings), he and I went to get it.
If you were to ask me what has been the most effective thing we’ve done for Will, I will tell you prayer. The power of prayer is unmatched and I honestly believe he would not be alive today had we not walked closely with God through all this. God has often reminded me in my moments of anger and despair, that he loves Will more than we do. He simply asks that we listen to him as he guides our decisions and let Him do the rest. This is called surrender and it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. In my many moments of “Why HIM???”, I’ve often heard my own answer…”Why anyone?” or “Why NOT him, but someone else?” If it isn’t fair for Will, it isn’t fair for anyone. I know God does not cause these things. A mysterious mixture of science, biology, culture, personality and many other factors cause this. But God does allow it and sometimes that seems unfair. I have learned if we trust Him and let Him navigate and not try to control and get in the way, He will make something so beautiful from Will’s trials. He does it for all of our trials in life. We just have to have the faith, courage and humility to get out of the way and let Him work. Imagine a world where we always did that!” – Kate
…………
The bracelets he never removes say, “I fricken love you Grant” and “You are loved!” If only Grant knew he wasn’t alone.
You are so brave, Will. High school was a train wreck of emotion for me too and I wish I had this message to read. It’s so easy to feel alone, when in
fact, you are far from it. Thanks for sharing, Kate and Will! You are such genuinely awesome people. I’m grateful you were brought into my life years
ago. I’m so thankful this didn’t have a sad ending, because Will’s story is far from over.
