A tough week, that I wouldn't do differently

I’m Jake, Casey’s husband, and I’m writing her weekly newsletter today because I wanted to share the challenge I faced this week with our 9-year-old PDA son, Cooper.

And that challenge is summer camp. Or more specifically, basketball camp.

This Monday morning I walked Cooper into a high school gymnasium with about 150 kids of all ages taking shots on six different hoops. 

The first issue was we didn’t have a ball. The camp had said they’d provide them, but all theirs had already been grabbed. So we wandered around the gym looking in corners and behind bleachers for a lost ball. When that proved fruitless I asked a coach for the one he was holding (but not playing with) and tossed it to Cooper. 

He approached a hoop other boys around his age were shooting on, and took about a half dozen shots. But he missed most of them, and that’s when I saw him literally wobble, the way he often does right before he collapses on the floor in a panic attack. He walked off the court, sat against the wall, and huge tears started rolling down his cheeks. He said he wanted to go home.

Now, before I tell you the rest, let me explain how we got to this point. You see a few months ago Cooper finished his first basketball season, and was obsessed with basketball. 

And that was also the time when we needed to register for summer camps. We saw that most weeks there was a camp offered at his school - where he knows almost everyone and brings his service dog - with a theme that he was interested in. But not the week of June 24. That week he wasn’t interested in what his school offered, and so I mentioned a basketball camp.

He was thrilled, and even when I told him it would be a large camp, competitive, and that I didn’t know if any of his friends would do it, he said he still wanted to. So I signed him up. 

But in the months that followed Cooper gravitated back to football, and barely touched a basketball. And the camp's gymnasium packed with kids - many of whom were clearly quite good at basketball - was nothing like the team he’d played on. That team was comprised of barely ten kids, many of whom were good friends. And even though they lost every game, he was among the stronger players on the team, and so felt pretty good at each practice and game.

And perhaps the final kicker - I’d volunteered to be an assistant coach on his team, so my safe nervous system was always present. But on Monday at camp - where parents weren’t invited to help out - I’d planned to drop him off.

But as his tears fell, I saw that plan would have to change. 

At first I tried to reassure him, to remind him that it was OK to miss shots, and that he was there to learn and get better. 

But it didn’t help. And when the head coach called all the kids to sit at center court for his introductory lesson, Cooper didn’t budge from his seat by the wall.

So neither did I. And as I knew my attempts to convince him camp would be OK weren’t going to work, I told him that he didn’t have to do the camp if he didn’t want to. He asked what he would do instead, and I said I didn’t know, that me and Mama have to work this week, and his school’s camps weren’t ones he liked, so he might get kind of bored. 

He continued to cry, and so I said we should just go. 

“No,” he said, “I’m not sure.” 

And this is when I knew we might be stuck for a while. He’d hit what Casey calls a cognitive loop. He wanted to do something, but his nervous system wouldn’t let him. I’ve seen him get stuck in these loops many times before - sometimes even more dramatically, like when he’s actually shooting baskets and can’t make one, but refuses to stop trying even as his muscles stop functioning - and they can be long and devastating. 

So I told him there was no rush to decide. He wasn’t in a full-blown panic attack (yet), so he heard me, and we sat and listened to the coach’s lesson from afar. 

“He’s too strict,” Cooper said a few minutes later, as the coach started challenging all the kids to jump into basketball-ready-crouches anytime he shouted “Gotcha!”

“I know,” I said to Cooper. “This is how some of these big sports camps are.” 

“But,” I added, “he’s also boring a bunch of the kids. Look at that one barely even looking the right direction.”

And that made Cooper smile. “Look at that kid,” he said, “pointing out another youngster so sick of listening to the coach’s lecture he was aimlessly rolling his head around on his neck and staring at the ceiling”

We chuckled. 

And then Cooper saw someone he knew. And not just anyone, but someone on his football team who he liked and had spent time with outside of the team. A FRIEND.

The prospect of a friend - also known as a safe nervous system - changed everything. 

Cooper was still anxious, and didn’t want to be noticed walking across the gym from our spot on the wall, but he was now trying to figure out how to get to his friend. 

“Don’t worry,” I said. “When the coach is done talking and everyone gets up no one will notice.”

He was still hesitant, but when the moment arrived I got up and he followed me over to his friend and slid into his group.

Still I didn’t leave. I took a seat on the floor against a different wall, near but not too near to where Cooper was now. And for another half hour or so, I just waited. 

I waited to see if he’d be able to handle it, or if he’d break down. I waited to see him smile with his friend. I waited to see his body re-regulate.

And then I surreptitiously got Cooper’s attention and flipped him a questioning thumbs up as I started to walk towards the door. He nodded, so I left.

As I drove away my breathing was tight. I hoped he’d have a good day, and worried he wouldn’t. 

But when I picked him up that afternoon he was pretty happy. Except for one of the better basketball players in his group teasing him - which he asked me to raise with the coaching staff - he’d had a good day. 

He wanted to go back the following day, and wanted to go home with his friend afterwards for football training with the boy’s father (who’s a coach on Cooper’s football team). I thought this might be too much for him, but Casey and I agreed that the time with a small group of people he knew might actually help regulate his nervous system after the full day of camp. So we leaned on our old friends trial and error, and letting Cooper lead. 

And then Tuesday went well, with him only asking me to stay at camp for a few minutes in the morning. During those minutes I saw him looking pretty anxious, but even when he was absolutely exhausted Tuesday night, he was also happy. 

And by the end of the day Wednesday he was even happier, albeit unsure if he wanted to go back on Thursday, the final day of camp, when they’d be competing in games all day. 

But Thursday morning he decided he did want to go, in part because it was his friend’s birthday and he wanted to train with him and his dad after (which I told I’d take him to even if he skipped camp). And that morning we got there before his friend, and while Cooper didn’t ask me to stick around, I did for a couple minutes. 

From the balcony I watched him calmly dribble across the court to an empty hoop and start shooting on his own, looking content. He smiled when he saw me, and then his friend arrived, and once again I departed, breathing so much more freely than I had Monday morning. 

And from a parenting perspective, that’s the end of the story. I still worried some on Thursday, but there were no more decisions for me to make (or hem and haw over).

For Cooper of course the story continued through Thursday, as he participated in the camp tournament. The report he gave me is that the day was not good. His team lost in the playoffs, his teammates stopped trying in the consolation games that followed, and they stopped passing him the ball. He was also awarded fewer ribbons than other kids in the camp (and fewer than he believes he deserved), and said his coach forgot to include him in one of the final activities. 

He says he held it together through all of this, but I believe it is a large part of the reason that in his post-camp football workout with his friend last night he had a full panic attack. He eventually pushed himself through the end of the workout - despite being told he didn’t have to - but was very frustrated by the experience. 

In the car ride home, after I’d bought him some ice cream and french fries, we talked about the week. He said the camp sucked, rated it a six out of ten, and said it may have made him like basketball less. But he said he still may want to do it again later this summer, when three of his school friends are also enrolled. 

I told him that’s probably what I had learned from the week, too. That whenever he wants to try a big, new, competitive anything we should see if there are friends who will do it with him.

And even if there are, I thought to myself, I'll have to follow his lead through the uncertainty.

Thanks for reading. Wishing you all a good weekend!