Anxiety/Depression

Medication is Complicated

By / May 11, 2015 / 2 Comments

It was a routine trip to the pharmacy. I had seven prescriptions to pick up. That right there says something. Somehow a seven prescription pharmacy trip has become “routine.” Three of them had been called in over the phone. Four required me to hand signed pieces of paper to the pharmacy staff. I understand the reasoning behind requiring paper with signatures, yet the need for it adds layers of complication to my life. Any time the prescription needs a refill, I have to call the doctor’s office and either physically go get a piece of paper or plan ahead to allow time for them to mail the paper to me. Add in the fact that the insurance companies keep track of when they last filled the prescription and they won’t fill early, so there is a window of only a few days during which I’m allowed to refill a prescription before we run out. I always try to hit the early end of this window because sometimes the pharmacy doesn’t have the pills on hand and they have to be ordered in. Tracking all of this has become routine. I’d done the math, calculated the windows of time, and taken myself down to the pharmacy to pick things up.

Then the pharmacy register rang up at $500 instead of the $35 I was expecting.

When I picked a healthcare plan last November, I paid close attention to the prescription copays. I picked a plan with $5 copays for their Tier 1 medicines. Tier 2 costs $35 and Tier 3 is $175. It is a system designed to encourage people to switch to the Tier 1 medicines. I don’t really know all the reasons that medicines get assigned to various Tiers. We had some stress in January because my kids had to be switched to a different form of their medicine because capsules were Tier 3, but caplets were Tier 1. Then we had to get special permission for Howard to be on the same medicine because anyone over the age of 18 needs a doctor’s approval, but under that age the insurance company doesn’t require preauthorization. So we jumped through hoops, and settled everyone onto their medicines. And all was well for a couple of months. I was relieved each time I picked up a prescription and it cost only $5. We’d paid much more than that in years past and it had been a financial burden on our family.

“That price can’t be right.” I said.
“You can call your insurance company” the pharmacist said. So I stepped over to a bench and called the customer support number on the back of my insurance card. It was a long phone call with multiple waits on hold while I watched my frozen groceries in my cart slowly thawing.

The systems around health insurance are arcane and complicated. I have to make far too many phone calls because automated systems aren’t as automated as they should be. Yet any time I’ve talked to an actual person on the phone, both for my insurance company and for the government healthcare marketplace, they have been very kind and helpful. The pharmacists are helpful. I end up with this sense that we’re all tangled up together in some weird bureaucracy where the key focus is not on best treatment, but on appeasing the computer system so that treatment can be extracted.

The customer support lady looked up the pharmacy order and found that I’d been billed at a Tier 3 rate. She looked up the medicines and they were all listed as Tier 1. Then she looked at another place and they were listed at Tier 3. Ultimately she had to put in a support ticket to…somebody… to figure out which Tier is accurate. There might have been a change in the formulary listing for these medicines or maybe it was just a mistake. She says she’ll call me back once she hears back. I have her name and number, because I fully expect that in a day or two I’ll have to call her because she hasn’t yet called me.

In the meantime my kids are taking medicine once per day and we’re running out of pills. It may be that the insurance company has changed these meds to Tier 3, which would mean that I have to research and figure out which medicines are comparable and are Tier 1. Then I have to call their doctor and discuss a med change with him, discussing the options and what possible consequences there might be from switching medicines. Then I would either have to drive to Salt Lake City (2 hours round trip) or wait two days for the prescriptions to be mailed to me. After which I then have to make another trip to the pharmacy (40 minutes round trip).

Just today my “routine” trip to the pharmacy cost me 2 hours and significant emotional distress. And I still don’t know how much more time it is going to cost.

So when people accuse parents of putting kids on meds for the parents’ convenience, excuse me if I laugh out loud in derision. There is nothing convenient about this. I would dearly love to be able to skip it all. I wish that willpower, diet, and exercise had worked for us. That would have been lovely. I track and manage all of this medical mess only because I can see that the medicines make a positive difference in the lives of my family. As an ancillary effect, my life is better too, for which I’m grateful. But better is not the same as easy and it definitely isn’t the same as convenient. The minute my family members don’t need medicine anymore I will ditch the stress and expense. I think that some of them will reach that. I suspect that others will need medicine for most of their lives. For this week, I’ll be tracking remaining medicine, waiting for phone calls, and making phone calls. Again.

UPDATE: The insurance company called me back the next day. It was a glitch in their system. The pharmacy re-ran the prescriptions and they came up at the correct $5 rate.

Attending a Support Group for Family Members of those With Mental Health Issues

By / March 24, 2015 / 1 Comment

A support group is an odd thing. It was hard to convince myself to look one up through the NAMI website. Then it was hard to convince myself to go. I drove myself to the state hospital which houses psychiatric in-patients, and wondered what on earth I was doing there. I was told “go down the hall and through the door.” But the hallway had about eight doors, so I had to go back to the front desk for better directions. A different woman walked me to the room, but it was the wrong support group. A lady from the wrong group walked me to the right one. All that meant I walked into a room of strangers already intimidated by the location and feeling lost and out of place. I wasn’t sure if I even belonged there. Would I face something intense because all the others were dealing with conditions more severe than what my loved ones had? I really didn’t know what to expect. In the end, the group was small. Just four of us and two were the ones whose job it was to be there.

The point was to talk. I wondered if that would be hard, but it turns out that when the listeners are interested and sympathetic, the stories flow freely. I tried to form a coherent narrative, but I don’t know if I did. My thoughts jumped from kid to kid and all along the timelines of our lives. At first we took turns, but then it became more conversational, thought leading to thought. Person talking to person. Telling the story of what is going on doesn’t change any of it, but somehow it does. There were parents there who’ve felt what I feel and they survived it. Not having to be alone with the struggle, having someone to listen and witness the difficulty, changes me.

A support group meeting is strange, awkward, intimidating, embarrassing, boring, validating, and helpful. As I sat there, the observer part of my brain was watching how the meeting was handled, the ways that the leaders helped people take turns, the careful validations of feelings and providing of information. That observer part of my brain is often so ready to claim that I don’t need things because it can see how the things work.

Yet, when I came home and walked in my house, I was glad to be there. It has been a long time since walking in my front door has been a glad experience. Of late it has always been a re-shouldering of burden. I came home from the support group and was glad for my house and my people. Such a tiny shift, almost imperceptible, but significant things can be tiny. If that is all the group ever gives me, gladness on returning home, I’ll take it. Sign me up for another meeting next month.

Scenes from This Past Week

By / March 19, 2015 / 3 Comments

I talked to another parent with a son who is my son’s age. “He has a job now.” This other parent said. “It’s a restaurant job and he doesn’t like it much, but its being good for him.” The parent went on to describe how this boy is part way through learning how to drive and how he complains about the homework from his three AP classes. I sat there and listened to this father describe a parenting experience that was completely foreign to me. He wasn’t bragging, he was just telling me about stuff that felt completely normal to him. It was a description which matches the high school experience as witnessed in movies and on TV shows. And I vaguely remember going through something like it. I thought of my son, who spends so much time isolated. I thought of the therapy sessions, vocational rehab, and homeschooling that make up our existence. I thought about how none of it seems like enough and how I can’t currently picture my son going to college. It was like this other parent was telling me about a work of fiction, the fairytale of high school.

***

I sat in the elementary school office waiting for a meeting. As I waited for the teacher and the principal to be ready, I tried not to think about sitting in this same chair two years prior to discuss a different child in crisis. Two years is a long time, and you’d think that I’d have had time to process and let go of all the emotions. I haven’t had the time. I’ve been pushing thoughts out of my way so that I could take care of other thoughts. Mostly I don’t notice, until I hit a moment which would be déjà vu, except that I know exactly when and where I’ve experienced the moment before. It is so very familiar, same teacher, same room, same month of my child’s sixth grade year. But things are different too. Different child, different principal. This time there were only three of us in the room instead of five. This time we didn’t have to address behavioral or safety concerns. This time I didn’t show up with a plan for how to fix things. I’m too tired to make plans anymore. All I can do is say “this is where we are.” And to let them know that sometimes the homework won’t get done, not because I don’t think it is important, but because sometimes he can’t and sometimes I can’t. And I tell them enough about the things going on (beyond the those which relate to the child under their care) that they believe me when I say that sometimes the best I can give them won’t look like much.

***

My daughter was unsaddling the horse she’d been riding, so I wandered into the indoor arena. The big space was empty and the dirt was soft under my feet. I looked down at the shoe prints and hoof prints in the dirt and thought about how we all make marks upon the world simply by passing through. I looked back at my own prints, noticing the tread pattern of my shoes. I like going to the barn with my daughter. The priorities there are so different from anywhere else in my life. People tend not to be in any particular hurry. They chat, they pause to watch other people ride. The barn cats are friendly, glad to be picked up and snuggled. It is a space where my time is free of any other assignment than to bring my daughter, wait, then take her home again. Sometimes I bring work with me. Other times I just drift; watching my daughter manage a horse, listening to barn conversations. It is a much more pleasant form of therapy than the kind where we sit in and office and talk about hard things. Instead my daughter sits on top of an animal who outmasses her ten times over and learns that if she wants to control the horse, she has to first control herself. Telling people that my daughter has horseback riding lessons feels self-indulgent. Priviledged. But it is cheaper than office therapy by half. I walked back along my footprints feeling the quiet of the big empty space.

***

The words typed themselves on the screen in front of me. Or at least that is how it appeared. The truth was that my college daughter was typing words into a shared document. I was there to help her make sure the words said what she wanted them to say. It was a difficult message trying to give someone hope while also saying “I can’t be your security blanket. Please leave me alone.” It was the third or fourth time this year that I’ve helped my daughter sort out what words she needed for a difficult conversation. She’s had a semester of difficult conversations and growth.

***

The sun was bright in the front yard as Howard held up a brochure and squinted at the colors of our house. The page of the brochure showed shingles and we examined them to pick what would be on our roof for the next twenty years. The contractor stood in the yard with us. He’d made us a good offer, still expensive, but less than I’d been afraid we would have to pay. I’m just grateful we can pay. Even the contractor told us that the current state of our roof is a bit scary. All the gravel is loose, making the walking slippery. We couldn’t afford it last year or several years before that. I’m looking forward to being able to drive up to my house and not have to think “We really need to replace the roof before something breaks.”

***

After ten minutes of idling, I turned the engine off. My son looked up at this change in the status quo. We’d been sitting, mostly in silence. I’d run out of useful words. Instead I was waiting to see if he could decide to get out of the car and go to class. I could tell that part of him wanted to. When I asked, he said he liked his teacher, his classmates. He liked learning. Yet going was hard. It had been getting harder for a while. His teacher was worried. After twenty minutes I walked him into the building. He walked slow, his feet literally dragging with every step. In the hall we encountered his teacher from last year. She just happened to be there, and she happened to have time to stand and talk to us. She named what I knew, but hadn’t consciously recognized. I hadn’t wanted to recognize it because I really wanted one of my at-home kids to be fine. My son was depressed, chemically incapable of enjoying things that he would normally love. I mentioned that he’s already on medicine. She looked at my son, who was sitting, head down, arms curled around his knees, then she looked at me and said “If he’s on medicine, it isn’t working.” And I knew she was right. It was time for doctor’s appointments and teacher appointments. I am so weary of appointments.

***

“Take all the time you need.” He said to me in a quiet voice. We were sitting across a desk from each other in his office at the church building. I was there because I’d finally come to the conclusion that I should probably let the bishop of my congregation know about the mental health struggles impacting our family. I didn’t come with plans, just to tell him where we are and what feels hard. I tried to believe that I could take whatever time I needed, but I could feel that time pressing on me. LDS bishops are not paid for their ecclesiastical time. This man put in a full day of work and then put on a suit to put in hours during the evening. His job was huge. Bishops are always over burdened. I knew that on the other side of the office door sat someone who was waiting for the next appointment. And waiting. And waiting. Despite not wanting to take up too much time, I was so full of stories that I talked for ninety minutes. He listened to all of it.

At one point I apologized for not coming to him sooner. Because I knew that I should. I knew I needed help that my ward family could easily supply if they knew I needed it. But I didn’t want to be a burden. That seems like the good and kind thing to do, carry my own stuff so that no one else has to deal with it. Except that is the opposite of the purpose of having church in the first place. We’re not here to avoid burdening each other, we’re here to share one another’s burdens. With the weight of all the things spread across all the shoulders, it can be lifted. That can’t happen if we all hold our troubles tight and refuse to share them.

***

My fingers are on the keys and I want to spin out words through them, but the white space on the screen in front of me is empty. I try to find a place to start, a story I can tell. Except it seems like each story is tangled up with two or three things which are not mine to tell. My life and mind are filled with confidences that I must keep. Some of them will be less sharp in the future, less able to hurt. They can be told then. Others… will take much longer to lose their edge. I tell the stories I can, in the places that I can. The rest I hold for now.

Finding Someone with Answers

By / March 11, 2015 / 2 Comments

I cried when I got back to the car. I almost didn’t make it there before the crying overtook me. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I’d talked to someone who actually has the resources to help my son. It was the first time I met someone who had a road map that could take us from where we are to a future where my son is in control of his own life. Some of the tears were relief. Some were just because hope hurts. It hurts because of how often I’ve had my hopes crumble apart. Crumbled hopes are a natural side effect of trial and error. They become sharp and painful when time feels important and the stakes are emotionally high. I’m steal healing from my prior encounters with hope shards.

The meeting was with Vocational Rehabilitation. It turns out that there is an entire governmental department whose mandate is to help people reach independent adulthood. It turns out that they can start helping at age 14, which would have been nice to know three years ago. We have a slow paperwork process ahead of us, but beyond it is vocational diagnosis, social skills classes, and job coaching. We’ll have a case worker who is focused on helping my son pick a type of job, get the education for it, and apply. This is the guidance that I prayed for last September. Or I hope it is. I’m ready to walk out across the shiny hope, trusting that it won’t turn to shards beneath my feet.

It never occurred to me that vocational rehab could apply to my family. What we deal with is subtle, only noticeable when the troubles accumulate. But the counselor says that auditory processing disorder and ADHD are valid reasons to apply. So we have an application and an intake appointment. I expect the process to be slow and paperwork heavy, but I’m happy to put up with that if it gives my son a map and a guide for becoming an adult.

Educational Off-Roading

By / January 16, 2015 / 5 Comments

There are things I don’t realize I hope for until the moment when I realize they won’t happen. In that moment I am smacked with sadness just as I have to figure out how to readjust my expectations. It was somewhere in November or December that I realized Link’s high school education was going to veer sharply from the standard path. He needed it to. I needed it to. Yet I still had to find that part of myself which had expected “normal” and make it let go.

The new plan is a partial home schooling arrangement. Link does most of his coursework through online packets. Most of the time he does that work in the computer lab at school. Sometimes he does that work at home. He still has a few regular classes on campus. I’m functioning as the enabler, assistant, and aide. I don’t make the curriculum, but I assist him in understanding what he is expected to do. Link loves this new format for school. For the first time he isn’t constantly overwhelmed by noisy classrooms where the coursework goes so slowly that he tunes out and misses important assignment details. He doesn’t get surprised by assignments being due when he didn’t even know he had one. He doesn’t have to fret over knowing he has an assignment, but not being sure how it is supposed to be done. All of the instructions are right there in front of him, patiently waiting for him to absorb them and do the work.

I can see how this arrangement is going to be good for him educationally. We’ve spent years adapting his school work to allow him to keep up in a regular classroom. Now he has to struggle with types of assignments that he’s never done before. But instead of simply failing an assignment and rushing onward because the class can’t stop for him, he will be required to re-do assignments until he has learned the necessary skills to move onward. In the areas where the assignments are easy for him, he doesn’t have to sit around and wait for other students to catch up. For a student like Link, who has some significant learning disabilities that impact some of his educational capabilities, this is brilliant. Especially since Link also has some off-the-chart educational advantages in other areas.

It seems like a perfect plan, but I’ve spent quite a lot of time being afraid that it won’t work. I fear that it will cause as many problems as it solves. In this plan Link has to sit for hours in a room mostly by himself. He has to keep himself working. He’ll have to work longer and harder hours than he has been used to doing. Unlike regular classrooms, those hours will all be focused thinking. Some of the skills he’ll have to learn are how to run the necessary software and format assignments for himself. There won’t be a teacher there tap-dancing and trying to keep him engaged. Instead it is just Link, the material, and Link’s own motivation. It is very possible that Link will not step up. That he won’t work at a rate sufficient to keep him on track for graduation next year.

This is one of those hidden hopes which I have had to acknowledge: I really want my son to graduate with his class. Ultimately the decision to do so is up to Link. I’ve done everything in my power to turn that goal from impossible to possible. Now he has to do the work to make it happen. It has been important for me to see that graduation goal. Even more important is for me to consciously recognize that I may have to sacrifice the graduation goal in service of a much more important goal: preparing Link to be a self-sufficient adult.

This is one of the other potential drawbacks of this plan, social isolation. In order for Link to be ready for adulthood, he needs to interact with other people. He needs to learn how to socialize and make friends in ways that he hasn’t yet learned how to do. He needs to figure out how to communicate his needs and how to listen to the needs of others. Sitting in a room by himself does not help him accomplish any of the important social learning which happens in high school. We’re going to have to figure out other ways to make sure he learns those things. That will mean more work for us as parents. This whole plan is a lot more work for me than the standard educational route. On the other hand, I’d much rather do this work than what I have been doing in the past few months. I was constantly manageing emotional crises as Link began to despair and consider himself a failure in all things. This new educational approach means that for the first time in years, Link can picture himself succeeding. We are both very aware how fortunate we are that the administration at his school is willing and able to support this plan. There are other schools in our school district who would not do the same.

We are now at the end of the first week and we have mixed results. Link loves it, but we’ve been confused by assignments frequently. I had to purchase and install Microsoft Office to make sure we had the same tools at home that Link has at school. We’ve spent lots of time just figuring out how to find necessary information, how to take the tests, how to submit assignments. And at the end of this first week, Link had a moment of despair because he could see that the work was all going too slowly. He thought he would fail at this too. I told him it is too early to tell if this will work. We need to keep going, ironing out the wrinkles, giving this our best try. So we’ll keep rolling along bumping our way over weeds and gullies as we travel parallel to the standard path.

Depression and Emotional Depletion in the Past Few Months

By / January 14, 2015 / 2 Comments

What follows is the story of my last few months. It is not my favorite story, because they’ve been hard months. I was depressed and grieving, so was my husband. Mostly because our son was struggling. The other kids weren’t having happy, sunny times either. That is common in families. Everyone affects everyone else. I’m not giving many specific details of the causes of the struggles, because some of the bits aren’t entirely mine to tell. I may figure out how to tell other bits at a future date. I wanted to skip this story entirely, just move onward, blog other things. But this story appears to be sitting in the middle of my blogging brain so that I am required to tell it first before I have space to think and write other stories. I also think it is a somewhat useful corollary to my Married to Depression post. That part where I said that people with depressed loved ones are at risk for depression? It came true for me big time in the past several months.

In November and December I was overwhelmed, stressed, sad, depleted. It was as if all of my ability to care about things had been siphoned out of me and poured into the black holes of need that were my children. They were going through some emotionally challenging things. So was I. Some of those challenges resulted in automated messages from the school notifying me of things.
Your son missed some classes today.
Your son has been absent from this class so often, he will not get credit unless he does some make up hours.
Please talk to your child about his poor choices.

Each notification told me something I already knew. Each poked me—hard— in a place where things hurt. Choice didn’t have much to do with the things my son was struggling to manage, and I felt completely powerless to change the downward spiral. I’d already done all the logical things, adjusted his schedule, gotten medical appointments, signed him up for therapy. None of it had had enough time to work yet. I had to wait, and hope. And get emails and phone calls that reminded me how bad things had become. The emails from teachers were both better, and worse. Automated messages I could delete. People needed answers. So I emailed back, explained, negotiated. There was so much negotiation and decision making.

All of this was occurring right across the busiest part of the holiday season. Customers needed their packages. Some of them where quite stressed that those packages had not yet arrived. I’d made mistakes while packing some orders, so replacements had to be sent. My inbox filled with small tasks, things to which I owed attention. My house was full of small tasks too. There were presents to be wrapped, events to be planned, gifts to purchase. I pared it down to a minimum, but we all suffer when routine house tasks go undone for long periods of time. They were things I usually accomplish without effort or thought. It had never occurred to any of us to share around these tasks, until we realized that I’d become a failure point for many things. When I am exerting all my strength to keep everything together, it is very difficult for me to let tasks go. It feels as If loosening my grip, even for one little thing, will cause everything to fall apart.

And then there was my online life, the social media existence which provides important contacts with friends and is a critical vehicle for our business. Yet every tweet, every post, demanded a sliver of my attention. Each re-tweet asked me to care about the link, or event, or joke. There were hundreds of tweets and posts per day. Hundreds of slivers of caring that taxed my already depleted heart. So just before Christmas, I shut it off. I closed my social media tabs and apps, then did not open them again for more than a week. Business things also slowed down during that week. The hurting places in my heart still wept, but I could finally begin to identify where all the pain was coming from. I spent that space listening to my own thoughts and being with the people in my house. It wasn’t peaceful inside my head, but I could tell that it was a path toward healing rather than further depletion.

I did peek at social media twice during my self-enforced exile. Both times I read a single post and knew that reading more would ask for emotion that I didn’t have to spare. It made me realize that while social media is a blessing when I’m in a place of emotional abundance, when I’m depleted, social media drains me further and I’m better off if I step away for a while. In abundance I have extra thoughts burbling around in my head, I can release them and let them go. When I am interested and ready to have my head filled with new thoughts, the links and comments of my friends can guide me to new places. The key is to recognize my state of being and to adjust accordingly.

I viewed the onset of the new year with caution, because the largest causes of my emotional depletion were still unresolved. I’m aware that the depletion has as much to do with how I’m thinking and managing the things than with the existence of the things. In fact, I had a clear inspiration on that topic once the inside of my head was quiet enough to hear it. The inspired thought was this: I have to find ways to feel happy in my life even if my loved ones are never okay. That’s hard. Really hard. It requires a significant rearrangement of my thinking. It is going to take time and emotional space to sort it all. I’m working on that. I’m fighting my way through the enshrouding emotions and depression. Several times in the week following my break I found my way to where I felt happy. Each time some small event tipped me back into emotional depletion. It didn’t take much. I had so many fears and pockets of grief floating around in my brain. They got bumped all the time, and it hurt in the same way that bumping raw skin hurts.

The good news is that my loved ones are almost certainly going to find their way into better places. They have already begun and this week I’ve seen my son come home from school happy two days in a row. It made me cry, because I realized how long it has been since that happened. Also because I know that two days is not enough to qualify as a pattern. It is a window into how things could be, but definitely have not been lately. I have no illusions that it is all smooth sailing ahead. In fact part of me remains emotionally braced for the opposite. Plans falling apart feels far more normal right now. I can’t control all of the things which affect my life, but I can work on managing my own emotions, fully grieving for things and letting them go so that they’ll stop putting me off balance constantly. I need to react to each thing that happens only as a thing to handle, instead of bringing to it a huge load of emotional baggage. That is where over-reactions come from. I’ve done a lot of over-reacting in the past months.

On New Year’s Day I felt very reluctant to face the coming year. Today I can see ahead to good things that are coming. I’m still attempting to not impose expectation on the year. It will be whatever it is. But I think it will be a better place for me than the past few months have been.

Stories I Tell Myself at the Beginning of the Year

By / January 1, 2015 / 3 Comments

The sun is very bright when I look out my windows this morning. If I only look at the sunshine and the bright blue sky, I might be fooled into thinking it is warm out there. Yet the sun reflects off the snow piles and glints through the icicles that are gradually growing in size from the corners of our roof. It is cold out ther,e and I don’t want to venture forth. I feel the same way about the new year that has just begun. I don’t want to venture out into it yet. I’m pretty sure it is full of cold hard things. Though it might also have bright skies and sunshine. I’d feel better about the coming year if I was able to tell myself a happy story about what is ahead and then believe that story. Unfortunately last year has shaken my belief in my predictive powers.

2013 was a year of transition for our family. The business shifted as we took big steps with the challenge coin project and set up a permanent warehouse location. It was as if the business finally grew up and moved out of the house. That move out coincided with our first child heading off to college, which caused big shifts in our family dynamics as well. Then there was all the mental health stuff that burst open during that year. I reached the beginning of 2014 and I really wanted a year of stabilizing after the year of transition. I wanted it to be the year where everything calmed down. The desire is evident in many of my blog entries as I tried to frame the things that were happening to fit the “life settling down” narrative. There was a lot of “when this one thing is out of the way, then things can really stabilize.” There was an endless stream of “one things” to “get out of the way.”

In some ways we did stabilize during 2014, so I wasn’t manufacturing fiction to describe our lives. In other ways, the year was every bit as emotionally tumultuous as 2013. Much of the tumult was in my head. In hindsight I can see that I longed for quiet stability because I had loads of emotional baggage to process from the transitions of the prior year. Instead I landed in November and December where I had to processes that emotional baggage while acquiring shiny new emotional baggage to add to the pile. Add to that the dissonance of knowing that I have a truly wonderful life, filled with good things, and bright potential. Yet I didn’t dwell in happiness. I spent far too much time just wishing that everything would hold still long enough for me to get my bearings.

So this morning I look out the windows at a day so bright it hurts my eyes. It is the first day of 2015 and I’m reluctant to tell myself a story about what will come in the next year. I know what I would love to have happen, but I have very little power over the pieces that would do the most to make this year a good one for me. I would like 2015 to be the year when mental health issues fade from importance in our lives and stop rearranging my days on a regular basis. That depends on other people growing, learning, gaining insights, and choosing to overcome instead of hide. I only have power to choose what I do, not what anyone else does. I can’t choose what will go well in the coming months and what will go poorly. But I can prevent myself from imposing a narrative on my life and then being hurt when events don’t match up to it.

I don’t know what 2015 will bring to me. I hope for good things. I dread the hard things that are all too easy to picture. Maybe at the end of the year I’ll be able to look back and tell a story about how it went. For now, I need to work on accepting each day as it is rather than spending time sad because the day wasn’t what I’d planned for it to be. If I can do that each day, then I think most of 2015 will feel like a better place than the last few months of 2014.

Coming Home from Church

By / December 28, 2014

I came home from church early with Patch because he was having a rough day. This has been the story of all my Sundays for the last two months. Someone in my house is having a rough time. Someone leaves early. Someone cries because life feels like too much. Often the someone has been me. I guess attending church pries us open and lays the emotions bare. I hope that we will make our way back to a place where church is for peace and comfort instead of raw emotions.

I broke down and bought pill boxes last week. They line up, four in a row, each with a week’s worth of pills sorted into their compartments. When I see those pill boxes, I have to face the fact that five out of six of us are on daily medication or vitamin supplements. There are nine prescriptions which I have to track and refill when they begin to run out. In theory I could get them all onto the same schedule and make one massive medication run to the pharmacy once per month. It never works out that way. I see the pharmacists 2-4 times per month. The pill boxes are an acknowledgement that I can’t track it daily the way I’ve been doing. The effort of remembering who has taken meds and who hasn’t becomes too much. Howard manages his own. I manage the rest and, in the dark of early morning, I must be able to run on automatic. Now I think through the medicines once per week instead of every day. It is a tiny simplification, a small thing that reduces the daily burden. Yet I didn’t quite realize what a burden it was, until I had all the pill boxes lined up like that.

The other thing I must face when looking at those pill boxes is the fact that I’ve become the mother who medicates her children. I was more comfortable with that when I had fewer children on medicine. I could use the non-medicated children as evidence that I was responding to need rather than jumping to pills as the solution to life’s troubles. This self-reassurance is less available now. All I have left is to cling to the knowledge that mental health is a process. I’ve not put my kids on meds and called it good. We have doctors and therapists involved. It is a constant process of evaluation and re-evaluation. Is this working? What does this child need now? How does that compare to what was needed three months ago? Six months ago? Last year? That too is exhausting. There are so many decisions to make. Which really is just a description of parenting whether or not medicine is involved.

It snowed Christmas Eve. I went to bed when things were wet, brown, bleak. We woke to the world coated in white. All the edges were softened and made beautiful. I’d heard this might happen, and the moment I did, I prayed that it would be so. I wanted Christmas to be different. I wanted to get to that day and set down the emotional load I’ve been toting around. I wanted Christmas to be a respite. At least for one day. Then the snow came, and our celebrations were everything they needed to be, and at the end of the day I was at peace instead of weary.

Of course the next day the snow was less lovely as it turned to slush and then ice. There is always a day after. This can be either discouraging or hopeful depending on what sort of a day it was. For me, I can feel the holiday continuing to work in me. I feel like I’m convalescing during this holiday space where the kids are out of school and the work burdens are lighter. I haven’t much time left to rest. Life will resume its regular pace next week and I have to hope that I’m up to speed.

I went back to church after Patch had settled and all the talking was done. There were only ten minutes remaining, but I went anyway. I wanted to be in the building and to be comforted by being near the people there. I came in just in time for the teacher to close her lesson. I sang with the closing hymn and listened to the prayer. Then the meeting was done before I was ready. I could have used a longer time sitting and listening. Just sitting there gave me strength.

In the hallway after the meeting I was greeted by friends. Once again I remembered how complicated it can be to answer the question “How are you?” I want to be truthful. I want to bring my friends in, and include them in my life, but some conversations are much too complicated for the hallway of the church building. Also, I’m kind of tired of crying at church. So I say that I’m fine, because that is true. My life is good in so many ways. There are dozens of joyful stories about the holidays. Our house has been filled with laughter during the past few weeks. So I pull out those stories and tell them. Yet, in the telling, I have to talk around all the worries that continue to plant themselves front-and-center in my brain. It is like being short and sitting behind a tall person at the theatre. I can lean this way and that to see the bright and beautiful display, but the view is not clear and I kind of want to complain about what is blocking my view.

The ice crusted snow crunched under my feet as I walked to my car with Gleek. The other kids had made their own trips home from church already. Gleek made a joke about the cold and I smiled. We passed Howard walking on the drive home and he hopped into the car. The three of us entered the house to find Kiki playing a game with Patch and Link. They were laughing. I watched them for a minute and treasured the sound of the laughter. Next week we’ll go to church again. Perhaps some of us will come home early again, perhaps not. I’m not going to pray for a week when we all stay. I’m going to pray for us all to work our way through the challenges immediately in front of us. I trust that when we do, the other things—like peaceful church attendance—will take care of themselves.

Boundaries and Drowning

By / December 16, 2014 / 1 Comment

A thing happened to my son at school. It was a small thing, but my son’s emotional reaction to it was very large. When this sort of disproportional reaction happens, I know that it usually has very little to do with the thing itself and much to do with a dozen other things which are often invisible to everyone. Even the person having the big reaction does not know what it is about. They think it is about the thing. So it was with my son. He got quite angry with me when I did not respond as if the small thing was a dire and immediate emergency. I got angry with him because I was confused why he was suddenly so angry with me, and because some of his choices about how to handle his emotional reaction were not ideal.

Boundaries are a problem when a child struggles with a mental health issue. It is morally wrong to do nothing while someone drowns. It gets more complicated when someone is drowning in water that is only waist high. Particularly if that person won’t listen to shouts of “just stand up.” So I find myself soaking wet, not wearing my swim suit because I wasn’t planning on getting into the water today, helping my son to stand up. This has happened many times. Each time I wonder if maybe my rescues are part of the problem. Maybe I should just stand on the edge and let him flail until he figures out for himself that he can just put his feet down and stand. Except, people do drown in waist high water. People drown in bathtubs. Even adult people. It happens when something interferes with rational thought. A person who is drowning is not able to be completely rational. The drowning is real even if the water is not deep. I can’t let my child drown while I watch. Yet, a person who is always rescued learns to rely on rescue. That person can get very angry with people who try to get them to manage solo.

I don’t have any good answers. I just know that today I was dragged into the pool to perform a rescue that was not entirely of my choosing. I’m tired and wrung out. Again.

Cleaning House

By / December 15, 2014 / 1 Comment

I knew a freeze was coming, so I rescued some of the blooming flowers from my garden.
Bowl of flowers

They looked lovely there in the bowl, so I took a picture. Then I carefully pressed the flowers in the pages of a phone book so that I’ll have dried pressed flowers to play with in January. Phone books aren’t as easy to come by as they used to be. I’ll be hanging on to this one for a while.

This is the week for me to sort through stuff and clear out the accumulated mess that occurs because of book release and shipping. Kiki and I had the first of many warehouse clean up days. I got part way caught up on laundry. I had enough energy on Saturday to assign out house chores to the kids and to expect them to actually follow through. They did. Our house is cleaner.

My physical spaces are not the only things I’m attempting to tidy. Today I acquired the doctor’s letter which will allow me to do the final rearrangement of Link’s schedule at school. I’ve refilled all the prescriptions. I’ve paid the premium on our new healthcare plan which I hope will do a better job of helping us pay for all those prescriptions. There are a dozen other organizational tasks necessary to make the next month, and next year, run smoothly.

I also attended a therapy session. This one wasn’t for one of my kids (though I had one of those today as well) it was for me. Because, frankly, the inside of my head is as much a mess as my physical spaces were. I’ve got two years worth of insufficiently processed emotional baggage that needs sorting. Also, if I’m going to advocate therapy to my friends and loved ones, then I need to be willing to go myself. So I’m going. And I’m hoping that the shiny new healthcare plan will do a better job of helping to pay for that too. I researched and tried to make an informed decision, but I half expect to get some unpleasant surprises when I actually test the new system.

For this evening I’ll look at my bowl full of flowers photo and perhaps I’ll light a candle so that I can watch the wax melt. Small beautiful things are a good addition to any day.