A Heart Like Mine: Parenting a Child with Selective Mutism and Anxiety

My youngest son is still very small. He speaks little at school, selective mutism holds his words, and some mornings he refuses to go at all. Anxiety shadows his days, and he feels everything, deeply.

He hears the faintest hint of disapproval and immediately tells himself things no child should say: “I’m a bad kid. You don’t love me. That’s why I’m naughty. I’m going to leave this house. I won’t love you when I’m older.”

He takes everything personally. When I hold a boundary, when I say no to the thing he wants, he does not hear care in it. He hears proof that I don’t love him. I know the boundary is the love, that I am keeping him safe and well, but by the time I try to explain it he is already gone, carried off somewhere by his own feeling, and there is no talking him back. Sense cannot reach him there. I have learnt that trying is often pointless. The feeling has to move through him first.

Still, I can see the beauty in him. He is caring, deeply empathetic. When I am unwell, he strokes my arm and speaks soft words of comfort. He is generous with his praise, and can make you feel like the most important person in the world.

At school the words do not come, the selective mutism closing over them. At home they pour out of him. He does not have the vocabulary yet for every feeling, but he reaches for them, and what he finds is often truer than what an adult would say. He tells me he loves songs that are sad, not in a crying sort of way, he says, but the kind that makes you “just a little sad, a nice kind of sad.”

One day, I tried to comfort him. I told him that if he missed me at school, he could think of me and hear my voice in his heart. He shook his head and asked me not to say that. It would make him sad to think about it.

In his mind, my words had cast a shadow I never intended. He had heard, underneath them, that one day I would not be here. What I meant as comfort had become, for him, a thought about losing me.

For many years I worked in oncology, close to the end of life, close to the people leaving it and the ones staying behind. I know what it is to sit with mortality in a room. I did not expect to meet it at my own dining table, in the mind of a child still so small, who had reached it on his own, unprompted, and could not put it down.

I knew I should not avoid the subject. I also did not know how much to say, or how to begin. So I held it, the way I once learnt to hold a silence, and let it be for now.

He asks big questions for someone so small. “Why do people want to do bad things? Why do people litter, why do they pollute the earth?” His mind reaches past himself, trying to understand the parts of the world that feel senseless to him.

I do not know how to answer, because the honest answer is that this is simply the condition of life. We teach our children that you reap what you sow, that you treat others as you wish to be treated. And then they watch the world refuse to run so cleanly, cause and effect coming apart, good things happening to no one in particular and hard things happening to people who did nothing to deserve them.

It is a difficult thing for a tender child to hold. It is a difficult thing for anyone to hold.

I see myself in him. I know this heart because it is mine.

I cried as a child, over all sorts of things, and I carried the crying around like a shame. I can still feel the beginning of it, the heat behind my eyes, the blur, my nose twitching and tingling. The thought that came every time: here I go again. I need to stop.

I do not remember anyone really scolding me for it. I did not need them to. I called myself the crybaby. I shamed myself, and I set about burying the heart that kept betraying me, because I believed that hiding it would keep me safe.

But it is not a thing you can tuck away. It simmers beneath the surface, stewing and bubbling, waiting for its moment. The cost of burying it came anyway, in a different currency. My sensitivity to everyone’s feelings, my confusion in the face of office politics I could never quite read, spiralled me into a hole that cost me my first job. Burnout, depression, the sense that I could not meet the demands of life. The feeling that everything was simply harder for me than it seemed to be for others. These have been the long-running themes of my life.

And here is the part I have stopped arguing with. I thought I was too sensitive, too emotional, for a field like palliative care. Yet it was exactly that sensitivity, that emotional openness, that drew me to it in the first place. I left it for years to raise my children, and I have found my way back to it, in a different form, in this. I have spent a long time trying to circle away from this heart, but I keep coming back to it.

I have stopped calling it a gift, and I have stopped calling it a flaw. It is neither. It is simply who I am. Perhaps I live a little more intentionally because of it, with more care, because I feel so much. I would not know how to be the other kind, the ones who move through the world a little more lightly. I am not that. I will never know how it feels.

So when I look at my son, I do not want to teach him to bury his heart. I do not have a clean path to hand him, a set of steps for holding a feeling without being swept away by it. I only know what it cost me not to find one.

We were listening to The Nights by Avicii the other day. He turned to me and said, “Mummy, I know what he means by ‘learnt our lessons through the tears’.” Then he added, “I like the words of this song. Like, ‘don’t let it slip away’.”

I do not know how much he understands of it yet. But I heard it as a small reminder, passed back to me by the person I am trying to teach.

Yes, son. Don’t let it slip away.

The conversation with this same child about death, the question that comes from this kind of sensitivity, is in When Your Neurodivergent Child Asks About Death. The exhaustion of parenting a tender, anxious child sits underneath When Doing Our Best Doesn’t Feel Like Enough. And the larger arc of becoming the mother to children like this is in The Circle of Life. The misreading of his meltdowns, and what I learnt to do instead, is in Meltdowns vs Tantrums. The mornings he could not let go of me at the school bus, and what the crying was really telling me, are in The Morning He Wouldn’t Let Go.