An actual conversation

Scene: at breakfast

Boy (eating a bowl of Cocoa Puffs): These were a delicacy in the psych ward.

Me (unable to resist):  You mean they were koo-koo for Cocoa Puffs?  *Guffaws at own joke*

What Happens to Parents

So your kid has a mental illness.  Too bad, guys.  No support groups for you.  And you are the ones who need it most because there is a sneaking suspicion that it is all your fault.  Of course, rationally, you know you are doing just fine as a parent and it's certainly not your fault.  But that's where Mom's mind goes unbidden.  

Dad, of course, goes to "let's fix this,"  followed shortly by "why can't we fix this?"  This is very frustrating for Dad.  Dad has not had the advantages of therapy and SSRIs, so Dad is taking this hard. 

Dad and mom have spent lots of time and money taking the kid to therapists (he refuses to talk to them), trying different meds (the good ones are only moderately helpful and the bad ones have frightening side effects), and going to IEP staffings.  Nothing really seems to work.  He won't let anybody help him.

This latest setback is very frustrating for Dad, who expresses a wish to send the kid to a residential treatment center so he can stop ruining our family.  Mom gets mad at Dad, because families are supposed to stick together during rough times, not just give up.  Mom and Dad spend a tense weekend, but manage to have some make-up sex while the kids are at Hebrew School and things seem better now.

Going Grey

And now for something completely different: I'm going to talk about my hair. Just thought we needed a change of pace.  I've decided to stop coloring and let it go grey.  

My first grey hair appeared when I was 20 (can my skin clear up first, please?) and had achieved critical mass by my mid-twenties, so I started coloring it not long after getting married at 26. And other than two hiatuses during my pregnancies (which displayed my Lily-Munster-like white streak) I have been at it ever since.

All but one coloring was done by me at home, so it's not like it was costing me bunches -- about eight bucks every six weeks.  It's not like it took a lot of time -- only about 45 minutes all told. It's not even that I hated doing it -- I'd put leg shaving, eyebrow plucking and lip bleaching way ahead of hair coloring on the annoyance scale.

So why go grey? Well, I'm 45 now. I have a teenager and bifocals. And though the hubby always said he thought I would look nice with grey hair, I wasn't ready. Then I started noticing a lot of really cool women who didn't color (Barbara, Liz, Karen and Catherine come to mind) and I started wondering why I did. Was it vanity? Nah, if that was my thing I would have gotten contacts or Lasix instead of being a full-time four-eyes. Was it to appear younger? Maybe. In the fields of my work and interest (marketing, PR, journalism, performing) the outside package is more germane than if I were, say, a particle physicist.

My mom, age 71, still dyes her hair blonde (at a very expensive salon, I might add). I tease her and say "you know, you're a grandmother now -- it's OK to look like one." She says blonde hair doesn't grey as nicely as dark hair. She says she'll stop coloring when she loses weight. It's just silly. She doesn't work or even date. So maybe I can lead the way and show her it's safe.

My last home dye job was in July, and not coincidentally I gave up coloring when I gave up therapy.  Kind of a marker on the outside of my head to show the change inside my head. 

Now I have to be honest: earlier this month the demarcation line between the colored and not colored was looking very strange, so my hairdresser put in some dark streaks to help blend everything in as it grew out...I hope that's not cheating.

I'll post a picture when my 12-year-old blog teacher shows me how.

The Return

The boy is coming home tonight. He's been on the unit for six days. This strikes me as a very long time to be hospitalized, since when he has been at Children's for a shunt malfunction he is often home in 24-36 hours (I call it drive-thru brain surgery).

This has been a very pleasant respite, and of course I feel guilty admitting that even to myself. We got to visit him for 15-30 minutes each day (that was about all he wanted from us) and have a chat, a giggle, maybe a hug. He was allowed to call us each night but sometimes he got busy and didn't. He didn't miss us nearly as much as his computer -- but that's no surprise. We didn't miss all the daily struggles and screaming -- no surprise either.

Now he transitions into the "partial program," which means he attends school (and therapy I suppose) there during the day and he comes home at night.  In both places he'll be on a strict behavior program with points and rewards and all that jazz.  The Girl will be on it too.  Neither one has very good self-care skills.

The Loony Bin, Jr.

The Boy is an inpatient. He got in by being "a danger to himself and others," a surefire ticket to a locked ward. The injuries were very minor, but the rage was very real, and so scary and uncontrollable that I drove him to the ER yesterday instead of his social skills group. He really didn't want to go to this group, which set the whole thing off, but he has been volatile, irritable and depressed for the past several weeks.  

I wrote it off to hormones for a while. He's 14, and I know I was pretty tough to live with at that age. But I think he's in the right place now.  

Yesterday was surreal: Driving down the highway as he attempted to strangle himself with the seat belt, dragging him from the parking lot into the ER as he screamed to each passerby "she's not my mother!" (I'll second that, dude). Him telling the triage nurse that I abused him, then later taking him in a wheelchair with a security guard through the locked doors of the psych ward.

I was the picture of otherworldly calm during this whole thing.  

The Boy has been in the hospital before, but for physical, not psychiatric problems. In some ways this one is easier on me -- I don't have to sleep there with him. In other ways, it's harder. For one thing, there's almost no one I can tell. This is not information any middle school kid needs publicized.

We saw him today, and he seems to like it there. Of course, a cute girl in his peer group has a lot to do with this. We asked if he wanted us to visit again, and he said it didn't need to be every day.  We spoke with a social worker and tomorrow will meet with the psychiatrist. Perhaps they will get him on some new meds, since the old ones obviously weren't working.

I don't feel angry, sad, or anything much except for exhausted. 

Happy New Year

So it's 5769. We spent a good part of today and yesterday in temple. But it's not as bad as all that. For one thing, it was cold and nasty out, so I didn't have that sinking feeling of missing a beautiful fall day. Second, I got to sing on the bimah, always fun. Third, we went to an open house at my friend Allison's, where we schmoozed and noshed the afternoon away.

The High Holidays have been a kind of crazy time for me the last few years. Not crazy as in busy, crazy as in somewhat short of sane. The synagogue has been like a family to me -- a big, dysfunctional family. You love them, but boy, they can really mess with your head. 

This year, though, much better. The people there who had injured me in the past didn't get to me. Much. And I'm not what anyone calls a True Believer, but I do try to get some praying in. The sermon today was about how to "Make your life a blessing." According to our rabbi, I'm doing pretty much the right things. But somehow, it feels like I should be doing more.

I love crazy family novels

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all functional families are the same, but every dysfunctional family is crazy in a different way.  I love reading in general, novels in particular, and crazy family novels best of all.

Misery loves company, so perhaps that is why I enjoy reading about families who have a good wallow in weirdness.  This genre may be from many eras and cultures, but I tend to enjoy stories taking place in the good old here and now. 

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is my favorite.  The Lambert family is certifiable, but not so out there as to be unrealistic.  I loved The Condition by Jennifer Haigh, which attracted me because the title referred to a medical condition that affected one of the family's children (and by extension the rest of the family).  Any novel by Meg Wolitzer is going to have some zany family fun. The parents in The Position are sex therapists who write a best-selling marriage manual in the free-and-easy '70s.  You can imagine how their kids turn out.

Not a novel, but an incredible memoir of some way wacked-out parents is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.  Jeannette was one of four children who pretty much had to raise themselves because the parents, though creative and intelligent, refused to buy in to bourgeois society by having jobs or doing much of anything responsible.  The truth is truly stranger than fiction.

And compared to these characters, I'm not doing so badly after all.

A Little Background

Before we go much further, here's the quick rundown on where I've come from:

My dad was a psychiatrist.  People always used to ask me if I told my father all my problems.  I'd say, why yes, I tell him: "Dr. M., I hate my father."    In the "physician, heal thyself" department, my father suffered from bipolar disorder, or what we called manic depression at the time.  He was in the loony bin for about six weeks when I was 12.  My main concern was that my parents would divorce.  It was 1976, that was the deal in those days.

Dad died almost eight years ago.  Mom was a psychiatric nurse for a while, then became a nurse administrator and did some consulting before she retired.  She lives not too far from me, and after some years of tension we're starting to move back toward each other.  But of course, all my problems are her fault.

I have two kids.  The Boy will be 14 this month.  He has hydrocephalus and a host of strange social and emotional delays.  He is taking the medication commonly given for bipolar disorder and it seems to be helping him.  But his shrinks can't say for sure that he's bipolar.  It does, however, run in families.

The Girl is 10.  She is more or less "normal," but has some strange anxieties, like the fear of sleeping away from her own bed.  This makes vacations very trying, and it also makes the sweet respite of sleepovers at friends' and relatives' homes impossible.  She's in an anxiety group now, it hasn't helped much yet.

What's wrong with me, you may ask?  Too much to go into now.