What is the hardest thing about parenting children with mental illness? Some things are harder in the moment, while other things are harder to bear over time. For parents like myself whose struggling children do not respond to treatment and/or accommodations relatively quickly, ambiguous grief can be especially devastating. Precious childhoods are lost forever to endless medical appointments, therapy sessions, medication trials, family fights, special education meetings, sleepless nights, traumatic holidays, 911 calls and on and on and on. Lost as well are potential futures, paths that “should” been available to them, literally wiped away by the neurocognitive, emotional and social effects of too many formative years spent fighting a relentless and exhausting battle for normalcy. And yet my children are not gone. They are still here in the throes of life, still very much flesh and blood. They are terribly scarred (literally and figuratively) and still desperate for rescue. My own bereavement rips wide open and fresh almost every time I see or hear from them. Right now, the hardest thing for me as the mother of adult children with chronic anxiety and depression is accepting the possibility that they may never find permanent relief and that my grief may never resolve.
The last decade of my life is a blur. Somehow along the way I turned 50 and gained 50 pounds. But also somehow my marriage survived and all of my children are still alive. I am grateful for this. The sun comes up each day and I do my best to step into its light. I try to accept my reality just as it is, nothing more and nothing less. Now that my children no longer live at home, it is easier to see how the dynamics of unresolved grief get in my way. I have been trying to use Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s classic stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – to help break it down into smaller chunks.
The denial part is pretty straightforward. My husband and I, like so many well-intentioned but totally unprepared parents, regret how much time we spent early on dismissing the importance of mental health for our children. We were overconfident, even arrogant, about our parenting abilities. Denying that something might be systemically wrong with our kids was a reflex – this just wasn’t possible, wasn’t part of the life we planned and built for, wasn’t “supposed” to be. Even with the benefit of this hindsight, I still catch myself using denial as an escape to the life I thought I was going to have: pretending the phone didn’t ring at 2am, planning family events that have no chance of actually happening, overcommitting to superficial projects in my community. Denial feels great. It wipes away the profoundly sickening feeling that accompanies dangerous existential problems. It is just so easy to slip into, so instantly gratifying. Too bad it doesn’t last…
Anger is more complicated. Some people seem to really like the powerful drive of it, but it usually makes me feel out of control. I interpret most of the anger in my life as a convenient cover for fear, a way to motivate quickly and forcefully without disclosing vulnerability. Sometimes pure anger helps me get the full attention of my husband or a thoughtless medical professional, maybe it helps me vent to a therapist about my frustration with the human condition, but mostly I find it destructive. I would rather just deal head on with the fear. I get a lot of feedback from friends and family about how I should actually be more angry at my kids, that my parenting experience is so “unfair”, that I am a great mother and don’t “deserve” all the pain and chaos in my family life. To which I call bullshit and actually do get a little angry. These well-meaning people are just expressing a disguised form of their own fear of my reality, a reality they are afraid to incorporate into their own protected world view. The truth is that mental illness is not “fair” for anyone. No one “deserves” this kind of pain and chaos. The last people I am going to get angry at are my sick children.
The bargaining is tricky too. I don’t believe in an all-knowing force that has the power to change human life circumstances at will, so I don’t have an individual to bargain with per se. That said, I can see now that I have justified some of my big personal decisions in terms of “if I sacrifice this, then surely my kids will get better”. I gave up my job to pour all of my time and effort into mental health research, alternative therapies, vetting specialists and managing the absurdly large burden of health insurance claims and accounting. With each new framework that we tried (CBT, CPS, DBT, Therapeutic Schooling, Unschooling, PTSD, Sleep Disorders, just to name a few) I convinced myself that if I just put in enough effort, showed enough persistence and demonstrated enough unconditional love, then the universe would reward me with healthy children. Not so…
Enter depression, which most likely needs no explanation here. Or maybe it demands its own whole post. We’ll see. Suffice it to say that it looms, it lurks, and it lies. It can be very hard to resist, even strangely comforting in its early stages, like a swaddling blanket that feels cozy at first but then keeps getting tighter and tighter. I throw it off as often as I can, let it drag behind me. When I am relatively unbound by it I have stretches of clarity around how I continue to churn emotionally within and among denial, anger, bargaining and depression. And categorizing my thoughts and actions this way does help me feel less overwhelmed by it all. But as long as the maternal losses are ongoing and the grief remains ambiguous, the cycle will never break. I must learn how to manage within it. This is what I must accept.
By: Allison Kretzmeier, Anxiety In Teens Parent Contributor