Mental Health Days Are Worth Their Weight in Gold

On Wednesday, Chad came into the kitchen and quietly warned me, “Ellie’s really tired and is saying she might not go to school tomorrow.” He’d just brought Ellie and her twin sister Emily home from Ultimate Frisbee practice. Telling me she’s tired is his way of warning me – she’s feeling sensitive. Careful what you say and how you say it. 

Ellie, like any teenager, has her sensitive moments. Hers tend to be a bit more….intense. She can have strong reactions to things that seem fairly mundane. Every week I go to Bakery Nouveau and buy pastries. One week I brought Ellie a cheese danish. When she saw it she went silent. She closed the box and walked away. She wasn’t rude. It was like she knew she couldn’t say anything nice, so she didn’t say anything at all. Two days passed. She’d been really quiet around me. We were in the car together,  and I asked her, “are you okay?”

“Yeah. I was just really looking forward to the loaf cake. And I don’t like cheese danish. I was just really disappointed. I’m over it now.” And that was it. Episode over.

Sometimes Ellie feels down. That’s the easiest way to explain it. You can see it. She’s quiet. Her energy is low. She doesn’t engage with the family (not even to roll her eyes at Chad’s silly Dad jokes). She goes off to quiet parts of the house, away from the rest of us. We’ll ask if she’s okay, and she’ll shrug. As if she’s not sure. She’s not trying to be difficult. I don’t think she knows how to describe how she’s feeling, let alone why. 

Today was one of those days. After taking a shower, she came downstairs, cut up some radishes and went back up to her room (she rejects cheese danish but snacks on radishes. Whose daughter is she? We’ll unpack that another time). The rest of us sat down to eat dinner. We weren’t sure if she’d join us. We let her be. 

Chad tentatively asked Emily, “Do you know what’s made her sad?”

“No, but I think she’s tired.” 

“Maybe a day off would be good for her,” Chad considered out loud.

Emily agreed, “I think she needs it.”

We’ve never let our kids stay home from school for feeling sad before, but none of us hesitated. We could all see that Ellie wasn’t herself. She wasn’t acting sad to seek attention. That would have required energy she didn’t have (and would have required a completely different response).

In his book Permission to Feel, Marc Brackett taught me there are degrees of emotions that we rarely reveal because we use so few words to describe how we’re feeling. I pulled out his book, knowing there must be better words than “sad” to describe what I saw in Ellie. I looked at his Mood Meter. It’s a grid with four quadrants and emotion words within each quadrant. I focused on the lower left – the low energy, low pleasantness.

Apathetic, sullen, disheartened, tired, bored, lonely, morose, glum, alienated, depressed, desolate, spent……

Combine sullen (Miriam-Webster’s definition: “dull or somber in sound or color; dismal, gloomy) with “spent.” From the outside looking in, that summed it up.

Ellie eventually came downstairs. She ate a little dinner and curled up in one of the chairs in front of the TV. Per our usual, we were watching a British mystery. In between episodes I looked over at her. 

“Ellie?” 

She looked up. 

“If you want to stay home and take a mental health day tomorrow, you have our support.”

“Okay” was all she said. But I think I saw a tiny hint of relief. 

We didn’t say anything more after that. Everyone went to bed. The next morning, Emily was up and ready as usual. Ellie was still in bed. Chad emailed the school, “Ellie isn’t feeling well today, so we’re keeping her home.”

When I was growing up, not feeling well required a cough or fever or some physical symptom. I think my Dad would have laughed at me if I’d said “I’m feeling spent and down, can I take a day?” He would have responded with something along the lines of, “We all have tough days. Get up and get yourself through it. You think I want to go to work everyday?” To be fair to my Mom, I think she would have been more open to it. She had a knack for sensing what people needed and was open to the idea of taking a break as a form of recovery. But I never asked her. 

I work from home, so I was able to see how Ellie spent her day and watch how she was feeling. She woke late, then made herself a small breakfast and curled up in the same chair she’d sat in the night before, wrapped in her blanket. 

“What are you going to watch? You can choose anything you want!” I said it intentionally. I didn’t want her to feel like she had to act sad all day to justify staying home. I wanted her to spend the day however she needed to. She gave me a small smile.

Just before lunchtime Ellie came upstairs and closed my bedroom door. My desk is in my bedroom, and I was on a call. I thought I was being too loud. My kids have told me I sometimes yell into the computer. I assumed that was it. When I came downstairs later, I apologized. “Oh, you were fine. I wanted to vacuum and I was afraid it would be too loud for you.”

The family room floor was freshly vacuumed.

In the early afternoon, I was on another call. Ellie came in and handed me a freshly baked muffin. 

‘Ooooh”, I exclaimed. I looked at Ellie. She smiled before quietly retreating. Her light was coming back. 

Ellie joined us for dinner that night. I asked her, “did you get what you needed today?”

“Yep,” she replied. And she smiled.

Mental health days are worth their weight in gold. And we have the opportunity to make them acceptable, normal. If we’re going to keep demanding so much from ourselves and the people around us, we also need to give ourselves and each other space to rest and recover when we need it.