Truth Deep Within

  I read a quote from one of my favorite authors (Ilona Andrews) tonight... "I wanted there to be a stretch of normal, if not for a few months, then at least for a few weeks."   I identify with this So. Very. Much.   Every time I think we break free, the riptide pulls her back out.  We made it a whole week this time before she willingly dove back under the wave and surrendered to the tide pulling her out to sea.  Who does that? Why?  WHY!?!?!? It makes zero sense - zero - to willingly walk into something that rips you apart. And yet she does it over and over again. I will never understand this.   But I can't help her unless I understand and identify... right?  I can't help her to swim away (left... right... not sure I care) unless she understands that she is caught by a killer current and that therefore treading water or swimming forward/back are either useless or actively injurious. She can't recognize it as a current just because ...

It’s hard to coach your child through mental illness. Hard to teach them coping skills to challenges you never faced. And wearing to always remember to be the best human - kind, understanding, supportive, encouraging... when sometimes all you want is for them to stop and get out of the car. To coach through STOPP like her therapist has taught us when all I want her to do is just stop!! And it’s tiring to continually push down your innate response to what feels like willfulness - to squelch the anger and the disappointment at yet again not being able to do some seemingly small thing. But that automatic response isn’t helpful. She doesn’t need my anger, she needs my understanding... even when she doesn’t appreciate it. And this is where I need to turn to my own DBT skills and STOPP myself.  To breathe through the anger and disappointment. To take a step back and observe - and realize that part of the anger raging through my belly is really fear that we’ll never get past this. That ev...

There's a concept in mindfulness of clearing your mind, or letting thoughts flow through you without attaching any importance or emotion or attention to them.  They flow in, and are recognized and set aside. Ultimately, you're meant to end up with a quiet peaceful blankness in your mind. That's not this.  This is a a panicked emptiness full of strangled screams that no one hears: What can I do?!  Why can't I think of anything that will help?!  Isn't there anything that can help?!  Anyone?! Anywhere?!  This is a forced silence that recognizes that nothing I say will help to make it better and quite possibly I could make it worse.  If I try to guess what's wrong, I'm just giving her something else to recognize as an issue.  If I ask her what's wrong, I create panic in her that she doesn't know. I already know she feels awful and hates what is happening in her brain, and often hates herself.  So the desire to ask how she's feeling or asking ...

I don’t understand why people cut. I truly don’t. I’ve read about release, I’ve read about control, I’ve read the articles that theoretically explain why a person would do this to their bodies. Leave all of that aside for the moment - why would they do this to their family? Why would my beloved daughter to this to me? I know it’s not about me - BUT IT IS. It’s her story, and I’m just a supporting character in her narrative. But when you gut the supporting characters over and over, your reader notices. And this is gutting.  Just when I thought we were past the danger mark... months had passed with no cutting... months with no suicide plans. We had just talked with her therapist about fully reintroducing sharps to the house, stepping up from the 3 small knives and single pair of scissors that had been reintroduced so far.  And then 36 hours of depression and she took a paring knife to her arm. They were shallow cuts, but still... new cuts on what was a com...

I wrote the below over a month ago, late in April, before the events that have rocked our world in the last week - or from a different perspective before those events brought greater visibility to a deep wound in our collective psyche that has been festering for decades on centuries. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but my heart... it hurts. She’s better... and the world is crazy. Everything make sense except my perception/reaction. I can’t relax. My heart hurts. I can’t trust she’s breathing when she’s quiet. My brain... she’s on fire. And if something happens to me, no one I know knows enough about tech to find anything I own. Even the things they need. How can I take care of them? How can I be sure they will be okay? Alright... that seems like a normal parent concern. I can’t. No parent can be sure everything’s okay. All I can do is my best. And so it makes sense that I can’t breathe. But seriously, I can’t breathe.... "I can't breathe." How different that phrase...

There’s a saying about swimming like a duck... something about seeming to glide across the water while in reality underneath a calm surface your paddling like mad. I’m not sure this is that. That implies progress, while I feel like I’m paddling madly but in no direction. Like someone threw the oars overboard... no, like they detached the paddles from my paddleboat. I keep churning my feet on those peddles, but since they’re not connected to anything.... I can think of many things I should be doing. So very many things. How many of them am I going to get done tonight? Roughly none. My heart hurts... and it’s making my brain hurt.  I want my girl to be safe. That shouldn’t be a hope that makes your heart hurt.

If suicidal ideation were a temperature, there would be a number that marked the danger line.  It could have some grey zone on either side, but everyone knows that a temperature of 100 you are sick.  At 99 you may be fighting something but you're probably fine.  At 104 you are probably headed to your doctor or urgent care.  It's clear.  There are lines.  There are treatments.  There are expectations for when schools should send kids home.  It makes sense. Therapy for suicidal ideation can offer numbers, but they are so much fuzzier.  Are you a 2 today or a 3?  How do you tell?  There's no equipment that can measure it.  There's no impartial arbiter that can smack a metaphorical hand to your forehead to tell if you're "warm".  And besides, how much difference is there really between a 2 and a 3, or 2 and a 4 for that matter?  In my family, we tend to describe a 0 as everything is fine and dandy while at 5 the world i...

When my little one was very little, I bought her books on emotions and anger.  We started really really small with an amazing book called My Many Colored Days, by Dr Seuss. Seriously if you have little ones you should check this book out. This one was about all the colors of emotions.  I bought it as a board book, and we carried it everywhere - from across town to see a friend to across the sea to work and see friends in other countries.  We used different voices for different colors/emotions.  We had to replace it, because we wore the book out....  That was okay, though - we knew it so well, we could recite it without the book.  I can still see the pages and hear those voices rising up and lilting off of the pages: Some days are yellow Some are blue On different days I'm different too You'd be surprised how many ways I change on different colored days..... And we'd end every time with "The many colors of you, my boo, the many colors o...

My dreams can be dark these days, and bear hidden dangers.  A seemingly harmless (even boring) cubicle in some no-name office that I was visiting, my laptop, phone, and various personal items for some reason strewn on the desktop surface as I work.  Except suddenly the space under just that cubicle has turned to lava... the desktop sinks into it, the corner of my laptop is sinking... can I save everything fast enough? Bubbling under my feet and then trying to suck down everything I care about..... When I was young I had similar dreams whenever I was facing a major life turning point.  Should I focus on career or starting a family?  Should I take on that new project at work that will suck up all of my time but be good for my career?  The dreams involved water, being in a vehicle that went off of something (a bridge, a dock, a cliff, ...) into water and then the car ever so slowly floated down into the water.  Could I get out in time?  With the w...

Sometimes it's hard to talk even to people that love us. Hard to either pretend that everything is okay or have to talk about how everything isn't.  I know that they are trying to "be there" for us.  I know that they are reaching out in love.  But response takes effort, and right now all of my efforts are turned internally - keeping her together, keeping her whole, working her plan.  I invest time and energy in things that move that forward.  Want to have a friend sleepover? Watch a movie? Just sit close and do completely different things?  I'm in.  But a friend of mine wanting to talk or god forbid go out?  Nope, not on my radar. Unhealthy, yes. But true nonetheless. Because the truth is that I'm a hair's breadth from crying All. The. Time.  There's a knot in the pit of my stomach that just Won't. Go. Away. And leaving to go listen to music or do some other random thing sounds insipid. I don't want to talk about the latest tiny dram...

I can handle the fact that there are lows. I can handle the fact that the world isn’t all sunshiny all the time. No one’s is. What’s so hard for me to handle, from the outside, is the whiplash. The fact that everything can be relatively normal and fine for a moment and then… something happens. It doesn’t have to be something large, in fact sometimes it can be quite small. But whatever that something is, it destroys the world and suddenly everything is on fire. That smash - that crashing fall - that’s what kills me. I remember a West Wing episode where they were talking about something that had happened and how everyone was focused on inconsequential details.  CJ said something about it not mattering where you land, the fall is what kills you. That’s how I feel. That damned flying free-fall... with nothing to hold onto, no recognizable landmarks, no way to get my bearings, the fluttering of a badly tattered flag of hope whipping past us as we leave all known territories with no...

We’re working on telling the truth of how we feel - both of us. It’s so easy to just give into the polite social fiction that everything’s okay. By the time you’re an adolescent in our society you have some mask that you can slip on to hide the truth of your feelings - that your teacher is an idiot, that your parent is a tyrant, that you like that girl or boy that you would never admit that you like. As you grow older and face more social situations, you gain a variety of these masks that you can slip on and off, sometimes easily, sometimes with great difficulty. But every successful adult knows how to put on a mask and hold it together. When your child’s brain is telling her to stop, just to stop being, you need a new set of skills - how do you help an adolescent learn that sometimes the instinctive and “protective” mask that means no one asks them difficult questions also means no one can help them. It sounds so simple: “This will hurt you, tell us what’s really happening insid...

I know this isn't what the lyrics of the song are supposed to mean, but I can't help feeling parallels to mental illness - to mental health. The 10,000 wars... the wars that are fought every morning, every day in the brain. The struggles that I see her go through to stay on an even keel. I know I feel a smaller amount of it myself, but even that can seem overwhelming. So what must it be looking out from the inside of her brain.... The simplest things can be battles - can we leave the house, can she brush her teeth, did she take her meds, can we just for-the-love-of-all-that's-holy get to school. She asked to stay home again. Am I being a good mother by making her go to school or would I be a good mother to let her stay home where she feels safe, and snuggle and hide her from the world? I believe, deep in me I believe, that the answer is to go to school. I believe - I have to believe - that this will get easier. No plan survives first contact, but the more we face the wo...

Sometimes I wish there was a line... a clear bloody line that we could see and point to... that would show when it’s “better”. I don’t know about you, but I don’t even know what better is. I can’t describe it, I can’t perceive its shape, I just hope that someday we’ll know when we experience it. I can tell you what “better” feels like from the side of “not better”. It feels like it will be not worrying every moment of every day that she won’t be here tomorrow. It feels like it will be not worrying that she’ll lose this fight with her brain and we’ll lose her. It feels like it will be that I’m not fracturing into a million pieces on a moment by moment basis. Is that better, or is that just my hope? And maybe an unrealistic hope at that.  Maybe better is something smaller… Maybe better is just that she knows how to fight her brain, to beat it back when it tries to crush her soul. Maybe I need to adjust my expectations. That could be okay, and I know it’s a long road, path, or wha...

Do other mothers feel this? The listening when she's in the shower to be sure she's still "there". Standing a moment too long in the hallway listening for the small sounds: the movement of bottles of shampoo and condition, the moments when she sings to herself, the small sounds of life. The checking too often when she's sleeping - making sure she's breathing, soothing away the nightmares large or small without ever knowing which they are. This wasn't always our life. Before the panic attacks. Before the suicide threats. Before the constant ball of frantic worry lodged itself permanently in my throat, back far enough that no one should see the way it chokes me. And this won't always be our life. Our day we'll be past the therapy and the trauma and she'll be a grown up with her own life and this constant drumbeat in her head will be gone. And I'll be able to breathe, and swallow, and pray to any god that will listen that she will never ha...