RealMental

This video from Momversation made me cry a little bit. It made me cry because so much of what everyone was saying made so much sense to me, and because I knew that so much of it wouldn’t make sense to people who hadn’t felt it themselves. It hit me firmly in the gut because some of the women (and the one guy) talking about their depression are bloggers I read on a regular basis, and they seem to have their crap together. I, on the other hand, feel like I’m a hot mess, even when my depression and anxiety are allegedly under control.

I want to get to a point in our world where mental health issues carry the same weight as the ones that can be clearly explained by some definitive test. I want people to know how to see that something is wrong, and know what to look at and how to ask for help. I went on way too long before I knew that what I was feeling wasn’t just the way it was supposed to be for me. I feel like maybe I waited too long to see that my children were struggling with something not being right before I got them tested and treated. I want other folks to be better than I was, and what I forced my kids to be.

It’s not unusual for a family of five to have five pill bottles of regular medication.  It’s just not generally all for the children. 

I never thought I’d be the person who was giving her children SSRIs and mood stablizers and stimulants.  But I’m thankful now that I did and, since the effects have been worth it. If turning to the pharmacological community gives me some family harmony, count me in.

Not to get all Blood, Sweat and Tears on ya with the title, but we all know that what goes up must come down, yeah?  Maybe I should go Harry Chapin instead- “all my life’s a circle, sun up and sundown.  The moon rolls through the nighttime ’til the daybreak comes around…”

When I was in middle school or so, we all passed around this book about a girl with bipolar disorder (or “manic depressive” or whatever they were calling it in the early 80s) called “Lisa, Bright and Dark.”  If memory serves me correctly, the chapters had black or white circles as headings, to indicate whether Lisa’s mood was going to be up or down.

Hoss doesn’t come with easy-to-spot headings.  Truth be told, I can’t say for sure he’s bipolar (the latest documentation said “mood disorder NOS”) but he’s certainly got some pretty clear up times and down times.   He’s not nearly so extreme at either end as he used to be (thank you, risperidone!) but his moods do swing a bit more broadly than most people’s do.  All of Hoss’ trusted adults (and he has a myriad- Hubby and myself and grandparents and his aunt and uncles on the home front, teachers and administrators and school psychologists and counselors and special educators and before/aftercare staff in the school building, a panel of mental health professionals…) have learned to recognize the subtle indications.  He gets a bit of a wrinkly forehead when darker moments start to emerge, and a tendency toward cocooning into his hoodie sweatshirt.   We give him his space then, and watch carefully from a comfortable distance.   The corner of his mouth hints at a smirk and starts most of his sentences with “hey, guess what…” when he’s about at risk of getting too hyped up.  Most days fall somewhere in the middle.  More days fall in the middle than they did a year ago, and certainly more than those scary weeks last spring, and for that I am more thankful than I know how to say.

Nights are harder to judge or react to.  Some nights (and mornings), he sleeps so soundly, so deeply, that no amount of the dog barking or bright lights or tickling him causes much of a twitch.  Other times, the dreams that he can’t articulate shake him to the core.  Sometimes I check on him before I turn in, and the bedsheets are twisted tighter than a pretzel from his tossing and turning.  I fix them as best I can, and tuck him back in as comfortably as I can manage.  I was watching the late news one night last week, when I heard a breathy, high pitched moan.  Before I could even move to investigate, Hoss had scurried down the hall and launched himself into my lap, face buried in my shoulder.  Talking made his tearless sobs and breathing more agitated, so I just held on.   He doesn’t always remember the dreams later on, and if he’s anything like his Mama, sometimes he won’t remember the dreams even in the moment.  

 I guess that’s all I can do when the nights get rough- hold on to Hoss and try to smooth things out.  Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what we have to do every day, too.

It’s been a tough couple days.  Hoss ran away from an event on Sunday- he wasn’t happy about being in a big group of kids, and was not very interested in making cards for soldiers.  So, while I was in the parent meeting, he just scooted out of the room, headed to the playground and didn’t look back.  I should have warned the adults in charge when I dropped him off, but I didn’t think he was at the point of running away from situations the way he did six months ago.

I let someone get under my skin at work.  I got a comment that was not meant as a personal criticism, but I couldn’t help but take it that way.  This woman comes across as quite critical, so most of the things that upset me are probably not really meant to be as scathing as they are.  It shook me to my core, though, because the administrative stuff is the only thing where I am the expert, the one in charge.  When someone is dismissive and snarky about it, it’s insulting to me.

The bills are mounting faster than the paychecks are right now.  The kids need new school clothes, thanks to some growth spurts since the last time long pants and sweatshirts were needed.  I can put off buying stuff for myself, but sending Princess to school with high water pants would be a bad thing.  The van is due for service, tuition is due, we’re almost out of covered sessions for Hoss’ outpatient therapy. And I’m not sure what to cut to find a way to cover it all.

I was clearing out the cup holder in the van, and I found some pieces of paper.  One side had some printing that looked to be questions to spur discussion at the outpatient therapy program, the other side was filled with Hoss’ handwriting.  “I <3 electronics.”  “Milks [sic] close to the only thing I drink.”  “I hate my mom.”  I know he doesn’t mean it.  I mean, when I poured his juice so he could take his meds yesterday, he told me he loved me.  But it still hurts to see the words on paper.

But I don’t have the luxury of falling apart right now.  Hubby has a bunch of night events at school, so I’m on my own.  The tears, like the rum and vodka on the shelf, like the ice cream in the freezer, are something I need to push aside.  I’m afraid if I start, I won’t stop.  Maybe I’m overreacting, maybe I could stop at a reasonable level.  But I can’t take the chance.  I have to help Princess solve for “x.”  I need to record how many minutes Lil Joe spent reading his picture books.  I need to verify that Hoss’ spelling words have been written three times each.  I have to oversee the tooth brushing and baths.

Sometimes I miss the days when I could wallow.  When I could hide in bed and pull the covers over my head.  There was a time when I could hole up, and there was no chance that I would need to be on call to attend to anyone else’s needs.  No one else got hurt back in the day if I went crazy and ate a whole pound of Oreos.  Now, I have to be grown up and responsible and dependable.  I know it’s better for everyone when I am in control, that the days when I could be crazy were not OK.  But I’m tired.  I’m just so darned tired.

As I was driving home after picking Princess up from school a few days ago, she said, “I kind of had an outburst on the playground today.”  I steeled myself for what came next, since, in our household, “outburst” can mean a myriad of things.

“We were playing tag and it got out of hand, and two of the boys said some things that made me really mad, and I started yelling a lot,” she said.  “They called me some other stuff I won’t go into, but they called me fat!”  Sigh.  And so it begins.

“You’re not fat,” I reassured her. 

“I’m not just a little pudgy?” she asked.

“You’re just fine.”  And she is.  She’s not the stick she used to be, but she’s not overweight at all.  Her growth spurts mean that her pants get too short before they get tight in the waist.  Although we’ve already purchased the first bra, there really aren’t any developing curves to speak of yet.

I was a bit younger than Princess (fourth or fifth grade, I think) when I had my first experience with weight concerns.  Those were the days of my hard core dancing, 5 classes a week during the summer and 3 a week during the school year.   There was a cereal commerical asking “Can you pinch an inch?” to encourage the world at large to pay attention to their body masses, but I doubt I could have pinched a millimeter.  One of my dancer friends left class mid-semester, and the teacher sat us all down for a heart to heart about the fact that she would not be returning.  She was being hospitalized for anorexia nervosa, a condition that very few people in my neighborhood had even heard of.  I knew she was very skinny, as almost all of us were, but didn’t realize how it had taken over her mind.  It was also aroudn that time when I first had someone called me fat in an effort to insult me. In retrospect, I should have laughed, since it was a ridiculous thing to say.  Instead, I bit my lip to keep from crying.  Thus started my continuing concern about my size and shape.

Puberty was not kind to me, giving me curves below the belt with nothing to balance me out on top.  And I quit dancing when I started junior high, taking away my main source of calorie burning.  Gone were the days when I could eat what I wanted, knowing it would not cause any significant expansion.   But everyone kept telling me I was fine, even that I was slim, even when I knew that I was getting bigger.  And somewhere along the way, I lost the sense of what size I really was, and I’ve never really gotten it back.  I look at pictures of myself, I look at myself in the mirror, and I perceive myself as larger than I really am.  I laugh at my concerns about size in high school, since being that tiny now would be like a dream come true. 

I wanted so desperately not to pass on my body image issues to my daughter.  I’ve worked so hard for the past eleven years to avoid calling myself fat in her presence, even when I felt like I was.  I joined Weight Watchers last summer because my weight had inched out of the healthy range for my height, and because I saw how tight my clothes had gotten.  I worked hard to focus on having energy and feeling strong, not on being slim.

I brace myself for the onslaught of images that Princess will try to live up to, and all I can do is try to keep her on a more even keel than I was on at her age (and beyond).  I can try to have her body image heroes be more Mia Hamm than Kate Moss.  And I hope she has better luck in that arena than I’ve had.

When I asked to join this site, and Leah let me, I said I would probably post once a week.  At the height of Hoss’ school issues, I could have posted something about his issues at least once a day, but now things have calmed down some.  Strangely enough, since deciding that I would chronicle our tentative journey through IEPs and his new outpatient therapy, Hoss has been very maintstream.  He hasn’t had a full fledged meltdown, he’s starting to pick up on his own triggers and articulate that he’s not feeling good, and he removes himself from situations (mostly with the permission of the appropriate grown-up, but even when he goes off on his own, it’s been in a reasonable way).

So I should be happy.  But I’m more nervous than ever.  I feel like I can’t accept that maybe, just maybe, we have gotten the medication and the therapy level and the coping mechanisms in the right place.  I feel like as soon as I relax and as soon as I accept what we have in place as the right thing for this particular moment, it’s going to blow up in my face.

It’s been one year since Hoss switched schools (translation: it’s been one year since the private school called me into a conference that took place the night before I left town for a week long conference and said “We’ll keep him for another week, but he’ll have to be in public school after that; we can’t deal with him anymore.”)  At the time, I was cautiously optimistic about the new situation.  As the year progressed, I became more comfortable with it, since the staff has been supportive and dedicated.  It’s been six months since Hoss was hospitalized.  The day we admitted him, the school counselor sat with me at the emergency room for five or six hours, handing me tissues when I fell apart and filling in details of the explanations to the doctors when I fell short.  I didn’t ask her to come with me, I didn’t feel I had the right, and yet she did it with full support of the principal and rest of the staff.  I couldn’t ask for anything more.

I had my conference this past week.  The specter of what was happening while I was at last year’s conference, and the specter of the downward spiral of last March, had me on edge.   Hoss forgot to take his medication one day, yet the assistant principal responded to the email relating this saying he’d had a good day.  Hubby met with the doctor about a tweak to the dosage for the ADHD (the risperidone level seems fine) on Tuesday, and it came off without a hitch.  The administration at the school say they are very happy with Hoss’ progress.  He has been getting along in group and interacting nicely at the intensive out-patient program and is down to two days per week.

So why can’t I relax and accept that he’s doing just fine?

A couple months ago, I reunited with a high school friend.  We had a great time catching up at our reunion, but since we live in different states, our continued communication is pretty much electronic- some emails, fairly regular Facebook chats, and texts to alleviate the tedium of most workdays.  In a text over the weekend, sent after he closed up his beach house for the year, he said he was feeling depressed and lonely.  He was vague about the reasons (“…end of summer, job, just stuff…”) So, when I didn’t get any texts from him on Monday, including a lack of response to a text I had sent, I freaked out a little.   Or maybe more than a little.  I called  him on his cell phone, just to check on him, worried because he’d had a rough time over the weekend.  He assured me he is fine, and that he’d had a good day, and that it was really sweet of me to call and check on him, although he sounded really confused as to my concern.

To the best of my knowledge, this guy has never been diagnosed with any mood disorder, yet the word “depressed” sent me into immediate protective mode.  I’ve come to define myself in terms of whether I have done enough to help anyone else work through their own issues.  And I’ve taken what is a commonly used, seemingly innocuous term in our vernacular and turned it into my crusade.

I guess this may be a sign that I need to get back into therapy,  before someone peripherally related to me has a bump in their own mental health or happiness that I flog myself for not preventing.