I’m a bipolar woman raising a bipolar child. Sometimes our moods swing in opposite directions, sometimes our moods swing together and I depend on my husband, Henry, to keep things together. Not an easy task – to say the least.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know there was something wrong with me. I was in junior high school the first time I sought out a guidance counselor and the visits continued until I graduated high school. I would not have made it without help. I thought of suicide more than once, but somehow managed to stay on top of the earth instead of buried beneath it. After I graduated I continued therapy with a community agency and this is when I was given medication for the very first time.
My childhood was upside down. Back then I blamed my parents equally for the chaos and abuse. I have too many memories of my father’s wrath and my mother’s silence. I have too many memories of my brother’s poor judgment and painful choices. Seeing the purple marks on my body and remembering their violation of my core.
I would like to say I know why all these things happened, but I can’t. I’ve heard the denials and the lies – and received compassion from an unlikely sort. The one person I thought would lose control rallied around me instead. Try as I might, I am unable to think of the triumphs without a black cloud hanging over them. The darkness is buried deep in my soul, along with pain, hatred and betrayal.
I no longer feel the losses of my childhood as deeply as I once did. I have been able to pack them away in a corner, like winter clothes. Or maybe they packed themselves away over time, because I grew stronger and became wiser.
I stopped blaming my family a long time ago, simply because I no longer wanted to be a victim. They no longer controlled my life because my life belongs to me. They did the best they could with what they had.
I finally took responsibility for my actions and reactions. I try to admit when I’m wrong and take ownership of my mistakes (and there have been many).
For as wise as I have become over the years, suicide is still in my thoughts. I have tried to end my life more than once, and I’ve had my share of psychiatric hospitalizations.
I was clinically diagnosed as bipolar in my late teens, early twenties. I have been on and off medication and on and off – ever since. I am currently on medication but I really want to be off. I want to stop taking pills that control my brain and (try to) regulate my emotions. Sometimes I think I don’t feel deeply enough and other times I’m in over my head. I can’t find the middle – and I can’t cry. Literally, I cannot cry.
My head hums busy-ness and my thoughts are scattered. I am reaching out but I don’t know what I’m reaching for. Writing this is quite difficult because I am unable to write down what I am thinking at the time I’m thinking it. I have to keep backtracking, rewinding my brain, and I keep going round and round.
I feel lonely, but I am far from alone. I have an incredible husband and four sons that make me smile. There is a deep feeling of unsettled and I have no idea where it started.
I also see my parents in me, and their inability to connect with me. I see it in my inability to connect with my boys. I feel like I’m standing on the sidelines of their lives, but I truly want to be in their game.
Being bipolar clouds my focus on the people who need me most. I have missed the first steps and loose teeth of one son. I missed a kindergarten graduation and the first day of high school of another. My youngest son lost all of his baby teeth while hospitalized. They were given to me in bright orange biohazard bags. I have missed teacher conferences, soccer games and school pictures.
My youngest son has missed more than half of his life to the illness we share. He’s missed more school than he has attended.
I think sometimes I need him more than he needs me. He manages to bring clarity and distraction. He gives me the ability to see a different side of our illness.
Once we were hospitalized at the same time – 30 miles apart. I felt helpless and hopeless and wanted out of this life so I tried to sleep forever again.
I’m good at being an advocate and champion for my son, but I fail myself.
Right now I cannot put one foot in front of the other and I am on autopilot. I know this is no way to live but I cannot have the alternative. I want to run and hide but I cannot go where I want to go. I am shackled to a world I want to leave behind.
After a 68-day hospitalization, Hunter came home. I pray this is the last hospitalization for a long, long time. I know there will be more eventually but for now I will enjoy the present.
UPDATE: Three months after his release he was re-hospitalized. This time his stay was 206 days. He missed Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas – we celebrated at the hospital but it was not how it should have been.
Hunter has been home, this time, for 12 months. Things are going reasonably well. We no longer use daycare and I have had to use FMLA to care for him. We are currently waiting for staff to be hired through community mental health so I can resume working a full-time schedule; something I long to do.
Hunter has good days and bad days and we just roll with them the best we can. He has not threatened to kill me recently and the times he bangs his head on a hard surface are fewer and farther between. He is still easily frustrated and transitions throw him for a loop – but he’s home. Where he should be.
I can count the number of holidays Hunter has missed and it makes me undeniably sad. Will he look back at his childhood and bear a grudge against me for the choices I made for him? Will he become an enraged young man and lash out at me for keeping him locked up? There are so many questions I wish I knew the answer to, but only time will tell me what they are.
I admit I have always been apprehensive about him coming home – actually I have been downright terrified. We have been down this road before so what will make this time different? How long will the honeymoon last this time? It lasted ten days before his first aggressive behavior reared its ugly head. At least this time he didn’t start it. One more episode of his physically aggressive behavior and he will be discharged from yet another daycare center. Check.
I look at him and I wonder how he will ever make it to adulthood. His fury and rage scare me; his strength astounds me. The words that come flying out of his mouth always catch me off guard and I wonder how we’ll make it through the day.
Getting to this point has not been easy. In fact, it’s been downright difficult, frustrating and extremely painful. Although I am bipolar, it in no way prepared me for raising a bipolar child. The doors I’ve had to force open; the hoops I’ve had to jump through, never letting ‘no’ stop me. Sometimes I wish I had the same dedication to my own fight. There have been many times where I could not put one foot in front of the other but I have been blessed with a man who will step in and fight the fight for me. Relying on somebody to balance me out is a first for me. I have never, ever relied on anybody in this way and it took a very long time to accept it as a good thing.
Treatment of any sort has always been difficult for me. I continue to go through periods of time where I stop seeing my therapist and I try to wean myself off the medications and go it alone. I have found that I am able to go long periods of time without my therapist, but I cannot function without the drugs. I know, I KNOW, that stopping and starting medication sets me further back each time I do it, but I hold on to the hope that maybe I can give it up altogether. At least I think I can. I recently requested the different types of medication be reduced and they were. Now I’m not sure if it was such a good idea.
12 years ago I hit bottom so hard I wanted to die. I had recently left my second marriage – and my ten-month old son with it. I sent my five-year old to live with his dad because I knew exactly where I was headed. I knew I could not take care of myself and I had no choice but to admit that I could not take care of my kids either.
The crash took three months, and then I swallowed a bottle of pills. When I woke up the next morning I drove myself to the hospital. A nurse put me in a room where staff quickly removed everything that wasn’t bolted down. I learned later that this is standard procedure for someone trying to commit suicide – they want to eliminate anything that could be used as a tool for death. Several hours later I was escorted to the psychiatric unit where I stayed for two weeks. I walked into a completely different world and I shut down.
When I wasn’t in group therapy or recreational therapy I sat in my room or I worked on a jigsaw puzzle. I remember not talking much to anyone. I was utterly lost – and I was completely alone. The doctor adjusted my medication and when I proved to them I was no longer a danger to myself they let me go home. I took a leave of absence from my job and continued outpatient therapy, even though I hated the doctor and talking to a clinical social worker wasn’t working for me. I just wanted to be left alone.
I immediately fell into a relationship that I had no business being in and the next thing I knew, I was pregnant. At the same time I was given supervised visitation, every other weekend, with my boys but it wasn’t enough and I wasn’t strong enough to ask for more.
Eighteen weeks into the pregnancy I went in to pre-term labor and it was determined that I had passed the point of no return. I could allow the labor to continue on its own or I could have it induced to speed it up. How does one make a decision like that? It is inevitable that the outcome will be tragic and I have to decide how to do it? Fast or slow? Am I in a hurry to hold my dead son – which I truly thought he would be delivered that way? It was a shock to all of us that he was born alive with a strong heartbeat. Our little warrior we called him. Had the pregnancy continued for a few more weeks would we be in the same situation anyway?
After I made the decision to induce labor – and the doctor I had at the time I had known for several years so he knew my psychiatric condition and the one thing I always respected about him was that he told me like it was. He didn’t mince words or tiptoe – he gave me his honest, professional, and sometimes personal, opinion – I called my sister. I didn’t tell her exactly what was going on, just that things weren’t looking very good. In that short conversation, later, she said she knew something was terribly wrong and drove more than an hour to be at my side when everything fell apart.
I miscarried and fell apart all over again. My son lived in my arms for five minutes but the grief goes on and on. I was in such profound shock that when my boyfriend, standing next to the priest, turned to me and said “Alexander Lee. I named him Alexander Lee” all I could manage was a nod.
Never before had I hurt so deeply and completely than the day I lost my son. Losing him was another blow to me and I told myself it was my entire fault. I had already given up two of my sons to an illness I did not understand and now I had to bury a child. I truly believed my life was over. Twelve hours after giving birth I was discharged and because I had been driven to the hospital in an ambulance, wearing only a shirt, I asked a friend to bring me pants and shoes and another friend to drive me home. As I was getting dressed I realized I was given maternity pants – and no shoes. I remember standing outside an entrance to the hospital, waiting for my ride, holding on to pants that were too big and hospital socks on my feet. I was standing in sunshine underneath a bright blue sky. It was fall and all the leaves had changed – and I was leaving the hospital without my son. I was no longer pregnant and my arms were empty. This is not how it should have been.
I found out later that there had been a sign on my hospital room door. It was a picture of a leaf with a drop of water sliding from it. It was a symbol to the staff that a family was in grieving. I didn’t notice that there was absolutely no noise outside of my room, even though I was on the maternity ward.
One week after the death of my son I had an appointment with my psychiatrist. I could always count on at least a two-hour wait to be seen so I flipped through magazines. Halfway through the long wait my milk came in and soaked the front of my shirt. There I sat, in a waiting room full of people, with a milk-soaked shirt. Sobbing and hugging myself I left the office and never returned. How could life be so cruel? I went downstairs to where my boyfriend was waiting and no words had to be spoken. He took one look at my face and my shirt and wrapped his arms around me. I felt like my feet were in cement because I was trying to move past the grief but every time I turned around there was something else to knock me down.
In order for a funeral home to become involved we needed a death certificate. But you can’t have, we found out, a death certificate without a birth certificate. A fetus less than 20 weeks old is not issued a birth certificate. “But he survived for five minutes” I screamed at the records clerk. “He was a LIVE birth.” After several minutes of screaming at this poor woman on the other end of the phone she finally understood that Alexander should have a birth certificate and a death certificate. To add even more pain to the whole situation, because my divorce had not been final for more than six months, the records department was adamant about listing my ex-husband as the father. This started the screaming all over again. Once it occurred to her that the fetus was, by the way, less than twenty weeks old Alexander’s father was named.
We had my little boy cremated and two weeks after his death we held a memorial service. Two weeks after that we returned Alexander to the earth on a piece of private property and named it “Alexander’s Place”. In the eleven years since his death I have visited that spot less than a handful of times. Alexander’s paternal grandparents tend to it for me.
Somehow I managed to crawl through the days without medication, grieving unbelievably and trying desperately to make sense of everything. I hurt so dreadfully on the inside, and because there are no guidebooks on how to grieve, I hurt myself on the outside. I would sit for hours banging my head on the wall trying to turn everything right side up but everything stayed upside down and I soon found myself in the hospital again. I kept asking ‘how do I grieve?’ but there were no answers. Just blinding pain.
I had stopped taking my meds when I found out I was pregnant with Alexander and the first thing the doctor did when I entered the hospital was dope me up. I could not think or talk or function. The pain was deeper than ever.
I tried a second time to end my life and for the third time I was admitted to a different hospital. Even now I’m not sure how, but I somehow managed to check myself out within the first twenty-four hours. So much for the seventy-two hour hold.
Still in the relationship I had no business being in, I found myself pregnant again. I was put on bed-rest but the fear of losing again ran deep. My moods were still all over the map so I focused on having a healthy, full-term baby. Six months into the pregnancy I went into pre-term labor and spent several weeks in the hospital – alone.
It was a long wait, but we succeeded and I had a fourth son.
Hunter came into the world screaming – and he never stopped. I can look back now and pinpoint some of his behaviors that were clues of what was to come.
Hunter didn’t like to be held or put down and he was mostly inconsolable. And he could scream for long periods of time. He didn’t sleep like most newborns do. Although he walked and talked at the ages he should have, his endless amount of energy was exhausting. The fast-paced world of Hunter has never let up.
It wasn’t until Hunter was two that his behavior crossed over the ‘normal’ into the aggressive and hurtful. At first we were told ‘he’s just a boy’, ‘he’ll out grow it’. ‘He needs more structure and discipline’. I bought books about ‘difficult’ children. I bought books about positive disciplining. I read everything I could get my hands on. I researched the Internet and shared our story with anybody who stood still long enough to listen.
When Hunter was two, Connor, six and Matthew, 10, I met a man that would – and did – change my life and the lives of my children. He had a five-year-old son. I no longer had to have supervised visitation with Connor and Matthew so I visited with them frequently.
At this point Hunter had been dismissed from three different daycare centers for violent and aggressive behavior. Something was definitely wrong. I poked and prodded my way into the intermediate school district where they agreed to test Hunter for a learning disability and he failed. Oddly enough this was the test that propelled him into a special education preschool. His violent and aggressive behavior was escalating and he was consistent across the board. School saw the behavior; daycare saw the behavior and we lived the nightmare at home.
Hunter was given a variety of tests over the next few months. He was interviewed by a neuro-psychiatrist and diagnoses started to fly. None of the doctors or healthcare professionals wanted to ‘label’ him. We didn’t either. We just wanted to know what was wrong. The more professionals I talked to the more they started to look at me for possible answers. They knew bipolar was genetic – could this be it? I started researching and reading and everything I read pointed to Hunter being bipolar. He exhibited all the symptoms, the mania and depression. Self-injurious behavior and violent aggressive behavior toward other people and objects. Once he chased me around our apartment with a knife telling me – quite specifically – how he was going to kill me and chop me up.
We had always monitored television, video games, movies and the like. We didn’t want to add fuel to the fire. Where was this kid getting all this information?
Disturbed. Is that what we are? I hear that term directed toward mentally ill people and it makes my blood boil. We are NOT disturbed. Imbalanced maybe, but not disturbed. The chemicals in our brain do not ebb and flow as they should and that causes us deep inner turmoil. The chemical imbalance causes bizarre events in my body. There are certain things – emotions, for instance – that I am unable to regulate or control. Unfortunately this aspect of mental illness can cause an immense amount of pain. Not only to others, but also to myself. There are so many facets to this disease that I do not understand. In an instance a range of emotions so deep replaces mania and it’s so all consuming that I am not able to function. I am uncontainable and breathless and grasping for something solid to keep from drowning.
I have tried drowning myself three times so far. I say that as a statement because I know, I KNOW, that there is a possibility I will try again. Drowning. Suicide. Death. Peace. It is all the same to me. I decided long ago that I want to be in control of my own demise. I make it sound so simple – my fixation on ending my life on my terms.
As a pre-teen, I found lies to be the best defense against others and myself. If I lied or stretched the truth it caused a detour around me. They became layers and the more I piled on the deeper I was hidden and the deeper I was hidden the safer I felt because no one could get close to me and the secrets I kept. I sought acceptance on a level I should not have been competing on from people I should have never known. Unfortunately the layers I hid under did not protect me from an insatiable need to belong. Nor did the layers protect me from myself. I always say that Hunter is a square child trying to fit into a round world, but that is true for me, too. I have never felt like I belong here.
I look at my children in disbelief. They are literally a part of me, an extension of physical attributes, yet I do not know them. Then I ask myself how is it that I don’t know them? I try to view me as my mother may have and try to understand all the emotions that my children evoke from me and wonder if I am feeling what my mother and father felt. What was their perception of me? I feel the need to tell my children everything I feel about them – all the good stuff because it’s more than just love and pride and respect. I want them to know it really is okay to express emotion, good or bad. I want them to feel. More than anything I want them to feel like they belong.
Waking up from all the lies was a long process. I first had to shed all the layers and allow myself to become vulnerable, something I don’t do very well. I had to leave what had become a comfort zone. The lies had stopped long ago but the layers remained. The secrets were revealed but never discussed. I am not sure if the topics are deliberately sidestepped or if they are simply misunderstood. I had to stop the chaos – self-created and otherwise. Chaos was comfortable to me for so many reasons. For one it was something I had always known. From moving and changing jobs and marriage then divorce – chaos was my life. I wasn’t comfortable with silence or tolerance things had to be completely out of control for me to keep moving.
Hunter is so much like his father (my ex husband) it frightens me. Henry and I receive no support from him when Hunter spins out of control. It’s up to Henry and me to calm the rage boiling over in this child. Up to now I haven’t mentioned that Hunter is medicated and the medication seems to have leveled him off. For now. Growth and hormones will eventually throw him off balance again, but for now he’s stable. I wish I could say as much for me.
I feel like I’m walking through a mine field and that at any second I could lose my balance and explode. What will I do then?