Parenting in the Upside Down
Remember that moment in Stranger Things when they realize the Upside Down isn’t somewhere else?
It’s home. Or at least…it’s a version of home. It has all the same streets, the same houses, the same schools. Everything is familiar, except it’s covered in vines and ash and the overwhelming feeling that if you let your guard down for even a second, something is going to crawl out of the wall and eat you.
Although, I don’t think the most terrifying part was the monsters.
It was Joyce.
It was watching a mother slowly realize that the place where she exhaled had become the place she held her breath. Her own house had become a portal to hell.
Once that happens, your nervous system adapts. That’s what nervous systems do. They don’t stop protecting you just because the danger becomes ordinary. They simply stop asking whether it’s still there.
The thing nobody tells you about surviving the Upside Down is that eventually you stop noticing you’re surviving it. Hypervigilance starts to feel like common sense. After enough years, vigilance feels less like an emotion and more like a personality trait.
People call you driven. Responsible. Prepared. You call it Tuesday.
My body has been living in the Upside Down for so long that it no longer waits for monsters to appear. It assumes they’ve already arrived.
I keep waiting for the season finale where everyone hugs, the music swells, the portal closes, and somebody says, “Well. Glad that’s over.”
Instead, every morning I wake up and discover Netflix has renewed adulthood for another season.
It’s exhausting. My body doesn’t ease into consciousness anymore. It launches.
Before my eyes are open I’m already negotiating with the future. How many therapy clients do I need this month? Did insurance pay that claim? Can I actually write this book and build this collective?
These are not thoughts. They arrive fully assembled. Like somebody has been holding a staff meeting in my brain all night and I’m walking in just as they’re reviewing the minutes.
And then, because the universe has a very specific sense of humor, my children wake up wanting pancakes and trampoline parks and long conversations about Minecraft, and I’m standing in the kitchen trying to determine whether the sensation in my chest is anxiety or just the physical manifestation of capitalism.
They’re not wondering about Google rankings or whether Different On Purpose will survive. They’re wondering whether IHOP still has smiley-face pancakes.
One of them wants to tell me a story that somehow always begins with our pug, detours through three unrelated Kirby and the Forgotten Land facts, and ends with an argument for why bedtime should probably be abolished.
The other has already found a rollypolly outside while walking the pug and assigned it a name…Rollo.
They are living in the regular world.
I’m trying to join them.
I really am.
But part of me is still standing in the Upside Down with my shoulders up around my ears listening for monsters.
I’m so tired of parenting while scared and I often just feel fucking sad about it. The kind of sad that reminds me what an attention hog grief can be. It sits between us at the breakfast table. It comes to birthday dinners. It insists on riding shotgun to the trampoline park. It has opinions about retirement accounts while I’m trying to watch a movie with my children.
It’s honestly rude.
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If this felt familiar, I hope you know you’re not the only one.
Different On Purpose exists because no one was meant to carry the world alone.