A few years back, my about-to-turn-18-years-old daughter announced that she was planning to go to Uman for her birthday, by herself, with a friend.

I totally freaked.

The last time we’d been in Uman was that horrible ‘Covid Rosh Hashana’, when we spent a whole day being guarded by a squad of Ukrainian soldiers in a Kiev airport, who put me and my girls on a bus in the middle of the tarmac and then let loose a couple of killer dogs to circle the bus, and make sure we weren’t going anywhere.

Long story short, we got out of that by an open miracle, ten minutes before Shabbat came in.

But I had PTSD in the sky from the experience, and the thought of returning to Uman literally made me tremble.

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And so, the stupid kid came along two weeks before her 18th birthday, 10 months after that horrible experience, and told me clearly: I am going to Uman for my birthday, and you can’t stop me! I’m going to be 18, and can fly by myself, wherever I want.

My first reaction was rage and blind panic.

When that didn’t work, at all, to put her off her ‘stupid’ plans, that’s when I realised God was giving me a big choice, here. Either, I could support my daughter’s decision, even though I totally disagreed with it, at that point – or, I could pull out every manipulative tactic in the book, to give her so much guilt, stress and anxiety about going, that even if she went, she’d hate every moment and hopefully never do it again.

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Let’s back up to explain my dad was a super-anxious parent, with a ton of his own unprocessed PTSD.

That meant my childhood was spent waiting for snakes to drop out of trees and bite me; car accidents waiting to happen; such a massive fear of ‘broken glass’ somehow getting into my foot that I couldn’t walk on that particular bit of floor until at least three days had passed and I’d forgotten about it – and the piece de resistance, when he would stand by the door and tell me about all the rapists and murderers who were just waiting to jump on me, if I went for that jog around Hampstead Heath….

Because I’m stubborn, I mostly went anyway, and perfected the art of jogging whilst looking behind me…

But. All that anxiety that got sown in my childhood came back to roost in my early adulthood, and I have spent decades, literally, trying to ‘unpick’ all that stress in hitbodedut, so I wouldn’t pass the same problem down to my children.

It’s been a huge challenge.

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So, there we were, with my crazy kid telling me she’s going to Uman, and me telling her she can do what she wants – but I am not going to help you even the tiniest little bit!!! So good luck to you!!!

In hitbodedut afterwards, God started whispering to me that if I didn’t soften my approach,  my kid could conceivably believe that my love and concern for her was conditional on her doing exactly what I wanted.

That made me pretty uncomfortable – because it was true.

Next, God started whispering about all the times I’d gone for a jog against my Dad’s OTT fearful wishes, and how him heaping all his fears on my head had been extremely unhelpful for my own mental health, going forward.

I could still remember those conversations… And how much anxiety they caused me long after I’d stopped jogging.

Long story short: God was giving me a very difficult test with my daughter, which was to dump all the fearmongering and vengeful ‘control’ tactics, and to actually respect and support her decision.

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The next day, my kid came to me and asked for a 300 shekel loan, because she needed the expedited passport, and she’d run out of money to pay for it.

(She’d already bought her ticket to Uman).

The whole project could have stopped right there…. But instead, we paid up.

I also told her that I would drive her to wherever she needed to go, to get the passport. And I also told her that if she ran into any problems, God forbid, we would do whatever we could to help her, but please keep a very low profile in the Ukraine, they are psychos over there.

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All this totally broke the ice with my daughter, who started to open up about her own PTSD, and her own fears about going back to Uman after what had happened last time.

Instead of judging her harshly, I started to understand that my daughter was having her own big test of emuna, and of not letting fear and anxiety stop her from doing something she felt she needed to do, in order to move forward in her own life.

Suddenly, the whole picture changed.

And I went from thinking she was totally crazy, to actually feeling proud of her.

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Long story short, she went, had a great time, came back again.

And in the process of doing that, she ‘opened up Uman’ to me and my husband again, because after seeing her bravery, and how it turned out OK, we also decided to risk going back again.

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For sure, teenagers are often reckless and don’t think things through enough.

At the same time… We ‘adults’ are often so stuck in our own bad middot of anxiety, fear and worry, that we live life always looking over our shoulders, scared to move forward.

We can learn a lot from our teens, it’s a two-way street of education and middot development, and working on real emuna.

If we let it be that.

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I wonder what would have happened, if I’d kept trying to squash my kids to fit in with my own (OTT…) fears and anxieties.

I know from myself, how hard it is to be around a parent who just ‘worries’ and makes everyone anxious about all the stuff that could ‘go wrong’ all the time. It’s super, super stressful, and not enjoyable.

It makes it very hard to have any sort of real relationship, because the PTSD-induced anxiety likes to spell out in minute detail, all the billion and one things that could ‘go wrong’, with anything a person wants to try, or do.

All the dangers lurking.

All the snakes, just waiting to drop out of a random tree, that will bite you.[1]

It gets way easier just to keep all the interactions banal and ‘safe’ – let’s talk about the weather, or something. Nothing that will get you too worried, or stress you out, Pop…

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I’m not saying I can stand up to these tests of emuna all the time with my kids, because I can’t.

But for sure, I WANT to live in a world where I try to emphasize to my kids – and also, to myself – that God is controlling everything, and there is really only God in the picture.

That, and paying pidyonot, is how I ‘manage’ my own anxiety, and my own OTT PTSD and worries about ‘what could go wrong’.

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Bottom line, the last thing I want is for my kids to grow up dealing with the kind of crippling anxiety and fallen fears I’ve had to deal with.

That meant making the decision, that the buck stops with me.

That I have to deal with the sometimes overwhelming anxiety that can still appear out of nowhere and make me feel like I’m going to throw up, literally, in my own dalet amot, in my own hitbodedut, and do my best to NOT pass that onto them by verbalising the fallen fears, or pressuring them to change their plans to make me feel happier.

I want them to really live in that safe, peaceful spiritual space of knowing Ein Od Milvado.

As a parent, it’s one of the biggest presents I can give my kids – to live life joyfully, not pulled down by all the fallen fears of their nutty mother.

And to have the courage to follow their own path, even when it seems a little dumb, or ‘dangerous’, or fraught with difficulty.

Because living authentically and dealing with the fallout from their own mistakes is how they will discover the real ‘them’ God created them to be.

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Kids of OTT anxious, ‘worried’  parents cut their parents out of knowing what is really going on with them.

That’s not what I wanted to happen.

Even though it’s for sure uncomfortable to know if your kid is smoking, or having a crisis of faith, or a relationship with someone you really don’t like very much – it’s way, way better to know, and to continue to have a relationship with that kid.

Getting to that place takes an awful lot of work, especially prayers, hitbodedut and working on parental tendencies like harsh judgments and ‘trying to control’.

I give us all a bracha, that God should help us to stand up in the tests of ‘teenage emuna’.

Both for our own sakes, but also, and more importantly, for the happiness and mental health of our kids.

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[1] In fairness to my parent, it turned out that one of my dad’s uncles apparently died after a snake dropped out of a tree and bit him. What can I tell you…. It’s a Moroccan family, there were a lot of strange things going on.

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PS: My friend just sent me a link to a site called ‘Crappy Childhood Fairy’ that she says is doing wonders for her mother:

https://crappychildhoodfairy.com/2025/02/26/cptsd-behaviors-that-look-like-narcissism-2025/

If you are struggling to break all this stuff down in hitbodedut yourself, for whatever good reasons, maybe take a look and see if it’s helpful.

In the meantime, thanks to S. for the link.

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PPS: She seems to be pretty good:

But as always, think for yourself and make your own mind up, if this is something that could help you.