RealMental

by Kelliqua

Some days the load is too heavy. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep and the pressure bearing down on my shoulders drives my body, like a wooden peg, into the ground. The sadness is all consuming, the fear overwhelming. I don’t want to think, but the thoughts rampage unstoppable through my brain. I am frustrated that I am powerless and that no amount of physical or mental exertion will conquer the greater forces at hand.

I am not bipolar. I am not clinically depressed. I don’t have unspecified mental disorders. My beautiful, intelligent, twenty year old son wears the label, but the burden that he lives with emanates outward and is carried by all of us – myself, the Husband, and his siblings.

Weeks, maybe months pass when he is employed, looks forward to attending an apprenticeship course at the VoTech school, is seeing a nice girl. He is holding steady, striving to sort out his mind, to be comfortable in his own skin. He has goals, dreams and is optimistic. Family dinners and evenings are a laughing, teasing riot. The husband comes home from work and doesn’t feel the crush of walking into a war zone or a fog of heavy emotion. I can sleep at night, the worry-meter quietly humming on Low.

Then the hostage crisis occurs. Our household is enveloped in the black cloud of tension, rage, despair and/or irrationality. On the front lines, husband and I are taxed to the limit counseling, coaxing, searching out treatment centers and therapies. We try to ensure as little disruption as possible to the siblings’ lives, but we all know that the true ruler of our kingdom isn’t any one of us individually or as a group, it is bipolar.

The teens sigh at the “Crazy” brought on by the most minor of upsets (in their eyes), or often, from seemingly out of the blue. They cancel plans, advising friends that spending time at our house is not an option for awhile. When the resulting withdrawal of self-medication attempts make sharing a bedroom an uncomfortable predicament the Other Son stays over at friends’ houses – in essence kicked out of his own room. Girl retreats to the sanctity of her bedroom, escaping into the world of teen-aged romance novels, text messages and music.

Years of high dose psycho-tropic medications have rendered his liver swiss cheese. There is no pharmaceutical “cure” for him.

We are left to our own devices.

Some days we are all so, so tired.

I’m still about 17% iffy on the whole Bipolar II diagnosis, but I will say this: if I don’t take my L & L–lithium and Lexapro–I will put a cap in your ass.

I’ve never experienced the good side of mania, if there is one, which is arguable; I don’t become wonderfully productive, I don’t spend, I don’t feel superpowerful. I have agitation and rage. So life is pretty much about bouncing between depression on the one hand and agitation and rage on the other, and sometimes if you’re lucky you get them both together in a mixed state. When I’m depressed I hurt myself. When I’m manic I might give your ass a Boston Beatdown.

People don’t expect a Boston Beatdown from me, probably because I’m a suburban mom and kind of a little woman, but I can keep a smile wheat-pasted on my face while I assail your kneecaps with furious anger. I will hurl invective in the east Texan hyphenated-compound tradition: you shit-ass pig-fucking butt-sucker. I said something in a session yesterday that made my therapist laugh; you know how Dan Rather gets when he flips out? Well, it just made me angrier, such was my impotence, my insignificance, my inability to be menacing while boiling with rage inside.

Yesterday after kindergarten dropoff I went to a nearby coffee place to work, and I realized something: Adults in public are so noisy! A shit-ass pig-fucking butt-sucker two tables away was braying into his cell, wanting the number of that girl Melissa in Round Rock and then calling her to tell her about his upcoming bus trip in Central and South America and how he had to exchange a plane ticket for his brother. I was furious that I had come to a quiet place at last, had sat down, and had been assaulted by useless boring information broadcast by a shit-ass pig-fucking butt-sucker. I was ready to beat his ass down. And Melissa? Girlfriend, he didn’t ask you one question. No “How are you today, Melissa?” He’s a dick, possibly a narcissist. He wants to talk about himself while you go, “Wow, that sounds awesome.” I should have beat his ass down.

But I didn’t. Instead I came home and realized I’m several days behind in my L & L. I’m still acclimating to getting the household ready in the morning at 7:15. I’m distracted by profound struggles over going to school. The cat meows at me. I have fifteen things to do at once, and while none of them are individually insurmountable, their multitude edges me closer to a nervous breakdown. I deal with my child’s chronic health problem. I forget mine.

Watch out.

I am not my mother’s daughter.

My mother has been Bipolar since puberty. She’s allowed to say that in certain company. I am not.

I know that I’m not even allowed to say that Mommy reads the National Enquirer.

My mother got up one morning, having not woken up from her drunken nightmare state. She called her step mother and told her what she thought of her. My mommy would never do that. She doesn’t have the back bone for it.

My mommy came flying down the hall to my room to tell me that it was my responsibility to get my brother ready for school. And my brother’s best friend Isaac. I knew it was easier for my mommy to think that way, that my brother was my son too. Mommy couldn’t tell her husband from her brother. But why did my mother think that Isaac was my responsibility too?

“You had better be sweet to him, Daughter! Or he’s going to leave me and it will all be your fault.” My mommy was so desperate. My mother was so apathetic.

My mother has been Bipolar since puberty. She’s allowed to join a book group and write about it in her memoir. She’ll publish it when she retires, so she won’t be fired for what she’s written. I am not allowed to tell this story on the blog that has my name attached. I know that my space on my blog is not really my own. Mommy’s friends might read it.

The Truths I know will get us by. If the front yard is well manicured, then no one will see the Crazy barely contained just behind the front door. If we smile for every picture, then we have happy memories. Expensive straight teeth are the same as a smile. Do not ever let yourself go, self-control is beautiful. If I start to gain weight, then the world will know things are not ok at home.

If I plunge myself under water when I scream, then it’s ok to scream: “Things are not ok at home!” I can swim away, I can run away, but a lap just brings me back to who I am. Read more »

Every once in a while, you run across something that makes it easier to explain yourself. I belong to a huge support group for the loved ones of people with bipolar disorder.  I share and receive information from lots of other people who are in similar situations.  I read just about every study that gets published, and every opinion piece that I see on bipolar disorder, its treatments, its ramifications, etc., because I have learned, since my husband’s diagnosis, that some cliches (“knowledge is power” and “forewarned is forearmed” both come to mind) are borne of truth. But it was a passage from a pop novel last year that crystallized some of my own feelings about loving someone with a mental illness–a Stephen King novel, at that: Lisey’s Story.

“There’s a period of time–two weeks, maybe–when she goes on trying to believe that things are getting better. Later she’ll ask herself how she could be so stupid, so willfully blind, how she could mistake his frantic struggle to hold onto the world (and her!) for any kind of improvement, but of course when straws are all you have, you grasp them.”

“…when straws are all you have, you grasp them.”  I read that passage over and over, tears flowing, because it GOT me.  Right in the heart.  My husband, the man that I love more than my own life, is saddled with a heavy variety of the mental illness that is bipolar disorder, and like the writer character in this book, he is highly conscientious in his dealing with what is basically one of life’s “unfair” afflictions, and he does what he can to shield his loved ones from the worst of it, sometimes to his own detriment. Read more »

Kindergarten starts on Monday, so between now and then I am white-knuckling the days. I veer between “I’m not ready!” and “Fucking hell, can I get a village?” Sometimes I get schmoopy. Sometimes I get anguished. Sometimes I have the trots. Sometimes I think I’m going to run away to Montana and wait tables and have sex with cowboys. Sometimes I think it’s been about fifteen minutes since he was a baby. Sometimes it feels like he must be driving the car and shaving by now.

We got the official class letter from his teacher yesterday, and I couldn’t get through it without sniffling and plotzing.

“You cry so much,” my son said. “I’m going to help you.”

Of course my moods are not his responsibility, but under his own steam he came up with a plan: scaring me. I guess he reasoned that having the shit scared out of me will distract me from my tearful emotions. I have to say that he’s right–it does work, at least temporarily, when he jumps out from behind the door as I’m leaving the bathroom and yells, “ATTACK!” I forget all about our rite of passage and nearly soil myself instead. Babies are like cats with bells, but the five-year-old can be stealthy enough to give you a legitimate shock.

Helps with the hiccups, too.

This story is re-tooled from a post on my personal blog, and illustrates the importance of finding the right therapist. Unfortunately, sometimes that requires some trial-and-error. You’ll have to excuse the overuse of CAPITAL LETTERS in this post–it was right before my hysterectomy, and aside from the emotional/mental turmoil in our lives at that time, I was hormonal, in pain, and frightened to death about what was to come. Just setting the context.

Today, Alex and I saw our new “potential” therapist, for about the third time. And we frightened the living wampus out of him. I kid you NOT. He is not our new “potential” therapist any more, though he is not yet aware of that.

We have been with a psychologist that we both like VERY much for over three years. He’s local, accessible, “gets” us, KNOWS OUR RIDICULOUSLY INTENSIVE “HISTORY”– much of which you would not believe in a million years even if I decided to tell every bit of it to you, which I most certainly ain’t gonna–and most importantly of all, we always leave his office feeling better, like a weight’s been lifted off our shoulders, than we did when we went in. He’s not an M.D., but he is a doctor, and he practices the type of therapy that is said to be most effective with bipolar patients (those who, like Alex, are stable enough for therapy to be helpful–never ask me how much therapy money we tossed down the proverbial rat-hole without FIRST achieving chemical stability–ever), and he seems to keep up with peer-reviewed studies and texts that are current in the profession. He sees us both as a couple and individually, depending on whatever that session’s circumstances seem to dictate, and he’s quite intuitive as to what issue most needs attention at any given time, and then getting to the meat of it, and helping us work it out. Read more »

Zyprexa, that is.

Zyprexa gentled my psyche for four months after I had a mixed episode in April–a terrifying bout of mania and depression combined. I was resistant to it at first–anti-psychotic medication?–but finally I punched my ticket on the Z train and was ready to ride.

What was it like? Zyprexa is like pot that doesn’t get you high: quiets the mania immediately, makes you doddering and forgetful, and inspires a ravenous hunger. I’d been warned that I could expect to gain weight on Zyprexa (a small price to pay in exchange for not being, like, dead) and that I’d be hungry while I was eating, which was true. One user told me she used to bake a cake at night for her 3 a.m. munchies. After bedtime I’d start at one end of the kitchen and work my way to the other: Craisins, Lego fruit snacks, cereal, soy milk, SpongeBob Cheez-Its. All of it wonderful! So crunchy!

The ordinary disappointments of life glanced off my psychopharmacological armor. Professional rejection? Fuck it, let’s have cereal. Tough day at home? I’d curl up in a chair with a spoon of soy-nut butter. It was too easy, and it would have to end.

I stepped down to 2.5 mg for two weeks.

“Call me if you have any problems,” said my shrink. “Have me paged.”

I’m still waiting for the problems. So far it’s better than when I cold-turkeyed Serzone in 2000, better than when I was manic from too much Lexapro. I guess I’m pretty satisfied with how it’s all worked out–no, I have not lost weight–but one of the peculiarities of bipolar is that you’ll inevitably swing one way or the other sooner or later; the other shoe will eventually drop.