RealMental

Dear Mom,

I need to let you know that I am no longer mad.

It is possible that you didn’t know I was mad to begin with. Being a mother myself, I could speculate that you may have not known what “it” was, but I’m sure you’ve known that something wasn’t right with us.

When I called you last week sobbing, I wasn’t expecting you to be someone other than who you are. Your way of comforting me can sound a lot like criticism, but this time I heard with ears that are healing. I bristled a little just out of habit, then I realized that this is the way you try and comfort me.

This is how you comfort yourself, you take care of yourself the same way that you were cared for as a child. It is all you know. This makes me sad to know that you weren’t taken care of in the manner that each human deserves, with love and support.

If I was having a particularly hard week emotionally, I would beg my therapist to please tell me how to be around you without becoming sick. Each time I would ask him like it was the first time I’d ever thought to ask, and he somehow held the magic key.

His answer was always the same, “accept her for who she is and not who you want her to be”. This felt like a cop-out, a way to avoid handing me the magic answer that would allow me to be with you free of the knots that would form inside of me in your company.

The therapy work I’ve been committed to for the past two years is all about my relationship with you. The triggers began when I became a parent and took some time to bring itself to the surface enough so that I could begin the work of healing.

This is new territory for me, an area that I will need to tip toe into very gently and with a lot of love and support. Love and Support that I will give to myself. I won’t look to you, or others to love and support me in the way I need to give it to myself.

It’s my job now to take care of the injured one that lives in my belly. I thought being angry with you was the way to rid myself of the pain the abuse left me with. It was the only means I had of processing it all.

This is just a beginning for me, I hope it is a path that I can continue following. Not just for you, but for me. The release and calm I have is something I never got by holding on to the angry.

Just in case you knew I was mad, I need for you to know that I am not mad anymore.

I love you for who you are.

With much love,

Your Daughter

I am a control freak, a perfectionist.  I am sure that some of it is the “nurture” effect of being an ACOA, but that’s not all it.  I am, by nature, a Type A as well, and the need to achieve, to prove, to surmount, to perfect is at the firm core of my personality, like the cookie center of a Twix candy bar. 

The ACOA part of the control freak includes the irrational belief that if things go the way I plan, then everything will be Fine.  But I am not Ganesha, remover of obstacles, equipped with the many arms needed to remove roadblocks and keep all those balls in the air. 

The Type A control freak is a little milder than the adult child—the urge to control comes from self-confidence in my intelligence and skills, coupled with just wanting to win.  Of course, the Type A control freak can be just as dangerous—the insistence on doing it my way is not conducive to cooperative working and family relationships.

And buried beneath all of that it my inner child.  She is all to willing to shed the outer adult skin, ill-fitting, stifling, too hot and too cold all at once.  The inside me wants to cede control, yield responsibility.  I want someone to take care of me.  To take care of it.  To take care of everything, always.  Because I’m 33, and feel 80 sometimes, I’ve been working so hard.  I’m tired of being Right, being Responsible. 

Learning to share control is the hardest.  My Type A is convinced that My Way is Right.  Therefore, everyone else is wrong—why would I do it any way but mine?  My Adult Child is afraid—if I don’t do it, I am pathologically certain that no one else will.  I took up those burdens because no one else was, or could—whatever the reason, the fact remains that I am Eldest, Responsible.  Perhaps I was unconsciously self-appointed at first, but in being reliable, others allowed me to remain responsible, ceded their obligations to keep things going. 

In my friendships and loves, I’ve carried Control on my shoulders—until the sheer weight of it caused me to collapse.  Sprawled on the ground, gasping for emotional breathing room, grasping for a sense of self that had nothing to do with solving other people’s problems all the time, I would disappoint the expectations of miracle work I had encouraged others to believe.  When I let them down, they were, in some ways, right to be angry, disappointed, to never speak to me again.  Some of these friends I’m glad are gone from my life, since now I know they were emotional black holes, never reflecting any light or warmth.  But others I miss dearly, and I regret my failures, whether it sprung from something healthy or not.

I’m slowly, creepingly, glacially, trying to not say yes to everything.  I’m slowly trying to let others volunteer first, and to do it their way.  The world won’t end because I wouldn’t have done it that way.  Often enough, my pride is mere vanity.  I’m painfully learning discernment—what requires my real skills and abilities, and what can be done by others, without harm to anyone.  Most frighteningly, I am trying to listen to my inner child, and hear her when she says “I can’t do this alone,” and ask for help.  But yielding control is at least different from losing control, and since so much of my control comes from wanting to please those I love, yielding, ceding, sharing control, asking for help avoids failing those I love.

The self-control, to not take control, is exhausting, exhilarating, illuminating.  Eliminating the knee-jerk assumption of control?  It will be a long journey.  But after many years, I finally think I have an atlas, and a map light.

That you are more irritable, more angry, every day.

That I am not The Enemy.

That I am here because I choose to be.

That there are so many landmines around currently, I can’t take a step in any direction without setting one off.

That I have made, and continue to make, sacrifices of myself in order to be with you.

That I make these sacrifices because I love you.

That I do not feel like a martyr.

That  following a burst of anger just before bedtime, while you go to sleep with the aid of sedatives and sleeping pills, I am left awake, crying, hurt.

That I don’t have anyone to confide in–not really–partly because I want to protect the way you are perceived by others, and “this” is not “you.”

That I feel very, very alone.

That I temper every single decision I make, no matter how seemingly insignificant, with what possible effect it may have on you.

That I resent not only not being able to look forward to Springtime, but having to dread its coming.

That I feel like I’m being “used up” faster than I should be.

That when I am sick, like I am now, I try to somehow “schedule” my illness and treatments around what I think you can handle.

That I sometimes feel trapped, even though intellectually I know that I’m not.

That I have learned more than you’d believe about detachment.

That I refuse to be manipulated by The Bipolar Beast.

That a great deal of my strength in dealing with these bad times comes from knowing that I am only here by choice, and that the power to stay or leave is all mine.   I can say “I don’t have to take this,” and mean it.

That the fact that, so far, I have chosen to, and have been able to “take this,” does not mean that I always will be able to.

That you do keep getting better.  Even the worst times now are better than the best times “then.”

That I appreciate when you try.

That I understand that it is hard.

That I KNOW it’s not fair.

That I am your single most loyal ally on all of God’s earth.

That if I don’t figure out how to get some of myself back, there won’t be anything left to give to you.

That by the time you could read these words with understanding and empathy, they will no longer be relevant, because you’ll be “yourself” again.

That I’m not sure how long I can hold out waiting for that time to come this year.

I’ve set out to write something for a few days, unable to string anything together that wasn’t angry, resentful and mean. I finally came to just writing about the facts based on my perception, and that would suffice for the message I wish to convey and the need to speak my truth.

I have toiled over writing here too much about my personal life because I do not wish to cause anyone in my personal life unintended harm, even if I do not particularly like the person.

First, some background information.

Our daughter has been living with her birth mother for her 8^th grade school year, and it’s far away. From the beginning of this arrangement, she told us she missed us, and that she wanted to come home.

The outside people involved in our complicated situation told all of us that this would occur. In fact, her therapist, our therapist advised against it her going, based on the situation. Our daughter’s therapist has been in touch with her birth mother.

The agreement between the adult parties and our daughter would be that this was a temporary arrangement based on how our daughter felt about everything.

When you arranged something like this, you have to rely on faith and trusting other adults to always do what is in the best interest of the child.

It reminds me of that analogy of not trusting a snake. If it bites you once, it will bite you again and blame you for trusting them.

Right before our daughter came home for Christmas for her break, we were served with legal documents stating that her mother wanted to go back to court so that she could get full custody and child support.

My husband has primary custody that does not exclude rights of his ex-wife. Her claim is that she wanted full custody so that she could handle any medical/school/other records that came about. The current custody agreement allows her rights.

In fact, she was able to get our daughter on psyche meds and a psyche evaluation without any approval by my husband. This was a breach of the custody agreement, as she was to discuss this with him before the act, and not send a typed note after the fact.

She would later tell my husband that we weren’t supposed to have gotten the custody papers until after our daughter flew back after the holiday.

During this visit, our daughter expressed her very strong desire to come back home. It was not a surprise to us due to the fact that we’d been a family unit for eight years. We are whom she grew up with; she has friends and family here, lastly a baby brother that misses her a lot.

My husband and I met with our lawyer during the visit to find out what we should do, or if we should even be concerned. One suggestion that came about was that since we did have primary custody, we could just keep her here and send for her things later.

In fact, this is what our daughter said that she wanted to do if her mom was going to try and keep her. None of us felt very good about this option and as you can imagine a tough situation.

She spoke to her mother on the phone while here and told her she was not flying back. Her mother got angry with her, and accused us of trying to manipulate her into this.

I must point out that throughout all of the roller coaster drama we’ve had with this situation for over 8 years, my husband has always held firm to being fair, honest and never trying to do anything sneaky. In fact, it has been suggested that we might try and get a “snake” for a lawyer, but my husband is opposed to that.

The Christmas situation got cleared up (or so we thought) when our daughter’s mother promised her daughter and us that she would drop the case. We both told the mother that we had no issue with paying her child support while our daughter was living with her.

She never paid us any child support while we had our daughter, never supported her financially in any way. My husband is a stand up kind of person and didn’t feel it was necessary.

Our daughter’s mother has been unable to retain steady employment for the past 18 years; I can only assume that she is asking for child support to supplement her income. I know how this sounds and I am not trying to be petty, it is what I honestly believe based on her actions over the years.

Our daughter ended up flying back to her mother’s home and we thought all was well. We were to find out later by mail that it wasn’t ok, and her mother would continue with the custody suit. She has not put forth any efforts to communicate with us other than email and written letters.

Typically, when any type of psyche evaluation is done with a minor, all parties involved are to be communicated with including the parents she’s been with for the past eight years as opposed to only living with her mother for four months.

To leave my husband and I out of this evaluation would cause one to wonder if someone was trying to build up a case in order to gain full custody. In addition to this, she communicated false information into the psyche evaluation about my husband and myself.

On advisement, my husband wrote a letter to the person who performed the evaluation in order to correct the errors in the document.

Our daughter is in active therapy and she likes her therapist. After this therapist advised our daughter’s mother to drop the lawsuit and the pressuring our daughter on “where she wants to live,” the mother told my husband that she would be dropping it again until the summer.

She did not drop it. In fact, we’ve been in contact now with our daughter’s therapist and it appears much lying has occurred and false scenarios described in reference to our situation to the therapist.0

Our lawyer called us last week about 11am stating that we have a hearing in court right now, today. The ex flew down here to appear in court for the initial hearing. The last we’d heard from the ex was that she was dropping it again on the suggestion of our daughter’s therapist.

My husband rushed down to the court room and a temporary judgment is presented. His ex will gain temporary custody of our daughter in addition to us having to pay about 15% of his gross income a month in child support, to include back pay for the 6 months that our daughter has been there.

Hearing that kind of news, is a little like feeling your stomach being ripped out of your body through the route of your nose. Suddenly, you weigh 9000 pounds and you are filled with brick.

I called our daughter at school that day to find out if she had any idea what was going on, as well if she was ok with her mother having full custody.

She said she was NOT ok with it and her therapist recently advised her to tell her mother the truth and our daughter did this in front of the therapist.

Lucky for our daughter, there was a witness. In addition, her mother has been blocking communication between her Dad and I to our daughter. This actually began many months ago. Prior to that, our daughter could not go into a private room to speak with us it had to all be done in the company of others.

It was a very difficult decision to allow our daughter to go and live with her mother for the 8^th grade. We had been discussing this for at least three years. It was extremely painful and gut wrenching for all of us and suffice to say our summer last year was painful.

We were honoring our daughter’s request to see what it would be like to live with her mother on her own terms since she was older.

I trust that it’s been a big a good experience for our daughter to live with her mother. We were willing to accept that we could possibly lose her, as long as she was happy and peaceful. She loves her mother, but is very angry with her over this situation. Our daughter wants the freedom of choice, not to be forced by law.

The future is uncertain right now, yet my husband and I have been here before, and we are a united front. We will acclimate with the outcome whatever it will be, even if it is not the one we would choose.

The big picture is there are only a few more years before our daughter will be a legal adult and hopefully all this insanity will be behind us.

As I told my daughter when I last spoke with her, we will go to bat as far as we can even if that means we will have to live in a dumpster.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.

Is that true?  Do names have meaning, power, or can they be shrugged off?  I’d suggest that it depends on who hears it, and what state the hearer is in.

Crazy as a loon/crazy as a fox/crazy as a shithouse rat/Loony/Gaga/Off her rocker/Off the deep end/around the bend/Batshit/Batty/Bonkers/Bugged out/wacked out/wigged out/Psycho/mental/demented/Drank the Kool-Aid/One can short of a six-pack/Not right in the head.

If the hearer of the name-calling is feeling vulnerable, misunderstood, and worthless?  Those terms have wounding power indeed, and only serve to feed the feelings of worthlessness the sufferer is feeling.  If they’re in a better place, mentally, there’s less harm to be done, because they know that the name-caller has no perspective on what it means to actually be crazy.  But when you’re in the midst of it?  You hear it differently.  That name-calling is shorthand for the following internal monologue:  “You’re crazy, you’re worthless, no one loves you.  No one could love you.  You’re not worthy of it, because your crazy.”  Round and round that thinking goes, until your own brand of crazy breaks out into suicide or violence. “But I didn’t mean it,” “You knew I was kidding,” “you taking things too seriously!”  It doesn’t matter if you say these things.  The harm is already done– the name-caller has jump-started the cycle, the circle, that results in black hole suicide or blood red rage.

I have used these words to refer to myself, and to refer to my mother, especially when she’s aggravating me.  I need to make light of my illness, of her illness, for a moment, because things are sometimes too serious to face them full on.  But I would never use these names to her face, and I never describe her as anything but “mentally ill” or “bipolar” or “having some problems” when I’m in public.  When I’m disclosing my illness for the first time, I talk about it in precise medical terms.  Informal comments that “I’m feeling crazy today” are reserved only for those who have proven their understanding, who get it, who would never call me crazy when I really was.  Because then, unlike other times, the words have power, and hurt, and get me going in a bad spiral, down, down, down.  It feels bottomless inside my own head– why would you try to make it worse once I’ve told you how it is?  When I am in my bad space, I’ll thank you kindly to refer to me and my illness clinically.  And while I can only speak for myself, it’s my feeling that other fellow sufferers feel the same way.

The mentally ill/Depressed/Anxious/Bipolar/Manic-Depressive/Schizophrenic/ Disassociative/ personality disorder/mental trauma/biochemical disorder/ hormonal disorder/Survivor of rape/child abuse/sexual abuse/verbal abuse/war/ civil strife/ Functional/Disabled.

Those who don’t know better must be made to medicalize mental illness and mental trauma– to be forced to use the clinically correct terms in discussing someone’s mental state.  Those terms have meaning, that can be ascertained by looking it up.  By doing a little research.  By taking care.  Clinical terminology can provoke scientific curiousity– “what does that mean?” “how does that work?” and “how do you treat it?” Make the discussion serious again, eliminate the “joking” terms that can wound at the right-wrong time.  Those without the experience of a sufferer or a caregiver must learn, must be forced to confront the truth– that names, deployed at precisely the wrong time, can be sticks and stones.

I kept thinking you would turn out to be a good person. I really wanted you to be a good person. You are so very far from being a good person.

Sometimes, denial works to our benefit until we can handle the truth. There have been stories of abuse that I’ve read about, heard directly from a person’s mouth, or seen on television that trigger my denial to say, “there is no way this could possibly be true”.

I’ve done this with you, each time pushing away all the lies and games you’ve played in the past hoping that you’re finally going to be honest, and at least try to be healthy.

Then you would do something else that makes me wonder why I trusted you yet again. I wondered how many times I would continue to believe your “word” or your “story”, saying to myself each time, “this is the last time”. A definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over
expecting different results.

I know why it’s taken me so long to stop believing that there has to be something good about you, but to reveal that would give too much away. It is unfortunate for me that I have been unable to just walk away from you, as I would with anyone else.

You are mean, selfish, sad and a liar. You are a very sick person who has no idea the extent of harm you have inflicted.

Despite my long battle, finally I have “loosed” you. Your behavior used to hurt me deeply, but no more. You keep stabbing, reaching, trying but you no longer have any place in my peace of mind.

This is the public notification of your eviction, you no longer will be renting free space in my head.

Dear Mom:

Brother and I owe you an apology– we have been indulging in a months-long fantasy that you’ve been OK, ever since you left here in November. We should have known that two breaks in two months was too much, and come out to visit earlier. But we’ve been hoping and wishing that you’d be compliant, and take your meds, and go to your shrink, and behave like a rational adult. Why we engaged in this mutual delusion, when you never took responsibility before you were diagnosed, I don’t know. But I’m sorry we let you slide for so long.

Instead, when you stopped answering your phone this week and disconnected the answering machine “because God told you to,” I had a sense of dread that This Was It. And then I got the call from Shrink that you’d missed a second appointment in a row. When Aunt got over there to check on you at Brother’s request, it wasn’t pretty. You answered the door stark naked. The toilet had overflowed, and there was a more than dubious puddle out into the hallway and into your bedroom. The management company had to tear it up.

To be fair to us, even after we discovered that your mania had allowed you to lie about med compliance in a calm and even tone, there were long periods where you seemed really lucid. You had normal conversations, recalled things from past calls, had no trouble recalling words or nouns, and didn’t drift off, mid-sentence. Your intelligence masked how far off the deep end you were—it was only seeing you in person that would allow the observer to see all the things you’d thrown away, and read all the stacks of gibberish God had told you to write.

When Brother got there, he was able to observe those things. He was also able to see how suggestible you were. We’re both worried for what this means to your bank account. And you refused to go for inpatient treatment. Well, your shrink doesn’t want you back as a patient, so if Brother can’t find you a new one next week with the help of the county social services agency I’ll be calling, we may be committing you anyway.

You see, we need you stable enough so that you don’t act up on the plane ride home. Because you can’t stay out there anymore. You can’t be trusted to take your medications or attend your appointments, and we can’t fly out to the West Coast to frog march you into every appointment. Once we get you qualified for Disability, there’ll be a supplement to your income, too, and hopefully we can get you into a nice Assisted Living facility where you can take some of your stuff.

We’re not looking forward to the fight in getting you home. We’re hoping that physically watching you take your meds every day for two weeks will get you stabilized enough that you won’t fight about it. But if we have to have you declared incompetent over your objections, so be it. It might almost be better if you stayed as you are, docile and agreeable, while we pack your things, change all your financial papers, and deal with your current landlord.

If you do regain some lucidity, I know you’re going to think we’re just trying to take over your life, but that’s the furthest thing from the truth. See, I can’t speak for Brother, but I really want very little to do with you. I want you to be happy and safe—I don’t hate you—but I don’t want you in my life, really, except at the outskirts. Bringing you back means weekly visits and caretaking and tolerance of your narcissistic bullshit, when all the while I really want to slap you for being so selfish.

At the same time, Brother and I are happy for you, if not us, inasmuch as your separation from reality seems to have stabilized at a happy point. You’re not paranoid or angry or violent, and you know who and where you are. While a nice scary psychotic break would have at least landed you in the hospital, giving us some leeway in getting them to keep you longer to try out a better medication regimen, I don’t wish you the scary visions and voices that would have required.

We don’t know what’s going to happen—we’ve been worried you were undermedicated anyway, and on the wrong mood stabilizer to boot, so we’re hoping we can get you something back to normal. But it’s been a while now that you’ve been fluctuating in this narrow band of crazy, and that does real damage to your brain, even though you didn’t believe me when I tried to talk to you about the need to take your meds, back when this whole thing started. So, if you remain the precocious and delusional three year old that you are right now, well, it could be worse.

You may never read this letter. Even if you do, your bipolar and your narcissism may prevent you from appreciating the best intentions that Brother and I have in setting you up someplace where you can have some independence, and yet still be taken care of. Despite all your faults, despite all the damage you did, you did instill in us a sense of responsibility, of caring for those not capable. I’m sorry, too, that I can’t end this letter by saying that I forgive you. I don’t, and I may not be able to. But I won’t hold it against you, either, and that’s to your credit, no matter everything else.