Category: mental health and parenting

Doors, cont.

On By drwiebIn Alcoholism, Being a mom, mental health and parentingLeave a comment

When my daughter became a widow, I was shocked. I never expected to have so much in common with her so quickly. I lost my husband very unexpectedly after 23 years of marriage. She lost her husband after 3 months. Both passed in the same ward of the same hospital, ten years apart.

I started learning how much my daughter had hidden from me in the past decade, starting with her first husband and bleeding into her second. Her first husband was a high school sweetheart, and they’d been together for 13 years when he walked out. They started out young and in love, even if he was a little critical and never-wrong. They went off to college in another town together when he graduated a year after her, and she has never returned home. They lived together after two years of college, and she supported him for a year after she’d graduated and he went on to grad school. She had a terrible head for finance, and instead of helping her learn, as would any other dedicated partner, he simply walled “his” off from “hers.” He put off marriage for just over a decade, but finally caved when she  grew adamant. By this time, I was not his biggest fan or anywhere close. He was lazy and critical and cold towards her. She bent over backwards, then tucked and rolled when she fell over, and went right back to bending over backwards.

She was extremely jealous of any female presence in his life, which I didn’t really understand, because while he was a nice, funny guy to others, he wasn’t what I would consider “a catch.” I guess he just wasn’t “a catch” towards her. Seeing as how she’d inherited her jealous streak from me, I tried to counsel moderation. She didn’t listen. I wouldn’t have either while her dad was alive. I trusted him. I also thought he was pretty fantastic and just knew other women would figure that out and felt my jealousy would be justified. It never was.

I moved back to my home state just before they moved back here. Both found jobs quickly, his in marketing and hers in online writing. She bonded with one of his female coworkers over shared distaste and distrust of another of his women coworkers. Her new-found friend was newly married and fairly shy, and my daughter would consider it her duty to draw her out to a  more comfortable social presence. One December, my daughter and her husband drove up for Christmas dinner. She stayed the weekend; he went home the same day to work. When she got back that Sunday, he told her he was leaving. They were divorced in a matter of months, and he was in a public relationship with her “friend” from his work not long after. It’s anyone’s guess when the private relationship began. I now know her jealousy had some foundation.

It devastated her. He was her life. I was beyond furious on one hand at how he had hurt her. On the other hand, I was dancing a jig. She never would have left him…never. She needed to leave him years before, or he should have had the balls to admit he was no longer in love with her and at least forgone the wedding. He verbally corrected her constantly in public. He belittled her constantly in private. He ridiculed her writing, her job, her appearance. I was starting to see that my confident, outgoing high-schooler was now a self-conscious, anxiety-ridden woman with no self-esteem, a gigantic need for confirmation, and a habit for drinking.

As she could not live without male affection in her life, she immediately turned to a high school boyfriend who had moved back into town sometime in the year before all this happened. She had been head over heels for him; he had used her and then verbally put her down as he broke up with her to move on to his grand life in New York. He was off to be a great director; he was sure she would remain a small-town nobody for the rest of her life. I detested him then. I was no fonder of him now. They both knew it. It didn’t matter; she needed him to rebuild her heart and he needed her to rebuild his life. He came back just as pompous as ever, but with a cemented status as an active alcoholic. While he did appear to love her in his own way, it included a healthy dose of manipulation. She moved him into her house in January, regardless. I tried to bite my lip, and we grew even further apart.

She let me know they were getting married in September. I went, with my youngest and my sister. I was determined to be happy for her. They did seem so happy that day. She looked better than I had seen her in quite some time. Him, not so much. They came for Thanksgiving but didn’t stay long. I was surprised they even came.

Then came the late night phone call from the hospital in December. When I got up to the room, I was again in shock. He was in a coma. She was dirty and either drunk or hungover and babbling constantly. She was hearing music, at first, and then voices talking, and then voices saying terrible things to her. She had a seizure in his room and was taken to the ER. As she was coming back around, I had to explain why she was there, why her husband wasn’t, and why the hospital staff wouldn’t just let her get up and leave. She became very angry and said some very cruel things to me. Even the nurse was shocked and tried to steer her anger towards the hospital. I knew she had no idea what she was saying, and only got angry when she just wouldn’t shut up. I was still trying to process who this person was that used to be my daughter; the words coming out of her mouth were incidental.

He passed away the second morning, and I took her home. I actually bought her vodka on the way, as she said she really needed something to help her sleep. I wasn’t sure, but didn’t want to cause a scene in Walgreen’s. I’ll never forget her reasoning that “the 750 is a better deal here so let’s get that one, that way I won’t have to leave the house too soon.” Alarm bells that were already shrilling in my head just grew louder.  The mental and physical exhaustion just wanted to get her home so I could get some sleep.

Her house was a mess. The dog was a mess. She casually explained that she didn’t get around to cleaning because her husband wanted her to spend time with him when she was home, not working around the house. As we sat on the couch while she medicated herself towards sleep, the rest of the news started filtering out. He hadn’t worked for months. He’d been on house arrest for awhile. The car was wrecked. The key fob was broken. The staff at the ER knew them personally. It wasn’t unusual for the ambulance to be at their place to take him in. She drank right along with him so he wouldn’t have quite so much to drink. He’d gotten her to start smoking cigarettes a few months before. She didn’t have hot water. The boiler had stopped working that winter. The kitchen faucet was broken so no dishes were done. There were mice running anywhere they wanted. She hadn’t bathed in a while because she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to stay upright that long. I could barely stand to sit on the couch.

I called my youngest then, due to exhaustion and shock, and some well-hidden idea that maybe I should be better functioning before I opened my mouth about any of this. She stayed the night, and I’ll never forgive myself for putting my youngest in that situation. It was a nightmare of a night, with my oldest drinking steadily, falling steadily, and eventually trying to push her sister out the door at 3:00 am because “You’re not my sister; you’re wearing her face but you’re not my sister. Who are you?”

My animosity towards her late husband grew daily. I felt nothing but sympathy for his family, especially his parents. I tried to feel both sympathy and empathy for my daughter, but I could feel nothing but relief, personally, that he was out of her life. The funeral was a place for her friends to reveal more and more of the hole in which she was literally drowning. I gave my phone number to her neighbor in case something happened. It was used several times. I met her coworkers, which was  helpful when I talked her into going into rehab about a month later. She had stopped drinking only because I got to her house at 10:30 one night in January. By the time she was admitted to the hospital the next day around 12:30 pm, she still blew over the legal limit on the breathalyzer. She was sweating vodka out of her pores. She stayed a week, came home to a house I had cleaned from top to bottom, and stayed sober for almost ten days. Then she took right back up from where she’d left, and lost her job.

As I said before, she never had a head for finances. Her dad and I supported her financially throughout college, and I continued after his death, partially due to guilt at being the parent that lived. Also, I just couldn’t let her drown if I could help it. We, then I, paid for college. I paid the odd bill here and there. I paid the house rent now and then. After her divorce, I paid the rent more often. After her husband’s death, I paid it even more. I bought her a car right after her dad died, then the uninsured car they wrecked, and at least had the presence of mind to take it back within days of his death. I started getting tickets from around the area where she worked, as she had never transferred the plates from the first car to the second, over a year prior.  Both her sister and I had been getting calls from collection agencies for years. They had quieted for awhile, but they returned with a vengeance.

I started attending Al-Anon meetings, sporadically.

I knew this problem was bigger than me, and I knew I couldn’t fix it for her or even help her fix it because she simply refused to listen to me. I learned one of the worst parts of having children was when you were still the mother but no longer the parent. I tried to accept that this was completely out of my hands, and I tried to practice detachment. I failed spectacularly.

Oh, I cut off the flow of money. I refused to buy cigarettes or alcohol, but I would get groceries when she needed them. I’d given the car back to her at one point, when she’d gotten a new job, but that was faltering, she had not insured it or gotten it registered in her name, so I took it back. I’d opened a joint checking account with her so she could have her paycheck deposited, and ended up closing that when the balance went negative. I stopped paying her rent. We communicated almost exclusively via FB messenger or text. This way, I couldn’t hear if she was drunk or hungover, and she couldn’t hear my anger or disappointment. I tried not to talk to her when she was drunk; she was rambling and irrational and mean. I would try to stay calm, but one barb too many would send me into overdrive. It was better not to talk at all. I sunk into a great depression that summer, and spent days on the couch in the same pajamas, only moving when I absolutely had to. I was sure I would be burying my daughter before the year was out. While my heart screamed I could never survive that, my head knew I would have no choice. I’d already done it once before.

Even though I was really bad at it, the little detachment I could manage did help. While I did pull out of my depression, my adrenaline spiked every time my phone dinged. She would cycle between sobriety and binge drinking. We rarely saw each other. She started dating almost as soon as she had hot water again, once I’d paid the bill. We had lunch on her birthday, where she detailed the three guys she was currently dating. Two were exactly her type: fun-loving and out for themselves, due to no fault of their own other than youth. The third was way too nice to be someone she would usually have chosen. I’m not sure how they actually started, but there was some part of her that felt pulled toward him. I silently, or maybe not so silently, cheered for him from the sidelines. The more time they spent together, the more I heard from her.

My husband had been a recovered alcoholic for 13 years. It saved our marriage. He started drinking “a little” right before his death. While it would eventually have become a big problem again (I have no doubt), I’m glad he had the chance to try it again before he passed. I would never begrudge him that. Had he lived, I would have drawn the line in the sand one more time. I lived with active alcoholism for eight years before his drying out. I knew the signs and the excuses. I knew the sleight of hand maneuvers and the subterfuge and the outright lies. I also knew the absolute transformation that occurred when he stopped drinking.

I have discussed all this with my daughter over and over. She insisted she wasn’t an alcoholic, and she couldn’t stand the thought of never, ever having another drink. She didn’t see the oxymoron-status of those statements. She got better at controlling it, but I knew it was a cycle, at best, until she admitted there was a problem. She has yet to admit it.

They are now exclusive, and I am starting to see glimpses of my daughter reappear. By last winter, they were moving in together, and she was finally getting out of the house from hell. By this summer, they were buying a house and planning for their future.

I am happy for her; I am happy for her chance at her own happiness. I am thrilled she has found someone who loves her and respects her and supports her for who she is. She is learning that she deserves that kind of man. There are doors opening for her right and left. She has choices upon choices upon choices.

I also know that not all doors lead to good things. Bad things know how to hide themselves very well until the last possible second, slamming their own door shut with you on the wrong side.

I also know those doors don’t usually lock. If you can’t get that one open, you can always look for another one. There are any number of entrances and exits along the paths of our life, but you have to be willing to look.  While I am really hoping that my daughter understands the power of looking, I am well aware of the doors along my own path. I have opened many right ones, and many wrong ones. I think I have more right ones opened at this point, but who knows?

My lesson appears to be, at this moment, learning that if I’m watching too closely which doors my daughter is contemplating, I run the risk of slamming my own hand in the wrong door. On the other hand, if I completely ignore which door my daughter is wandering through, it can be exhausting to be pulling frantically on that wrong door that’s trying to shut her in. I’m still going to be pulling on it, until it either shuts completely or I can drag her through it backwards.

As a mother, I know I’ll never stop watching. As a parent, I’d prefer to take the damn doors off their hinges and be done with it.

 

Doors

On By drwiebIn Alcoholism, Being a mom, mental health and parentingLeave a comment

My oldest daughter  was once my only lifeline. When she was young, just before she turned four, she was the only reason I made any effort at all to remain sane. It seemed the older she got, the further away she went, until one day, she went away to college and never came back.

She was an almost-perfect baby. She slept when she was supposed to sleep and ate regularly and gurgled and babbled and smiled and giggled and was just the cutest thing most people had ever seen. We took her everywhere because she was so accommodating: to restaurants, to movie theaters, to motorcycle races. She saw it all.

The first seven years of my marriage were pretty volatile, and she was the solo observer for five of those years. She doesn’t remember much of that time, thank god, but I do. I still feel guilty about making her so much of the center of my life that she had to be the axle that kept us going. The months her dad and I were separated were hard, and I didn’t see him at all for that time. I was angry about that, but what made me absolutely livid was that he also didn’t see her during that time.  I have no poker face whatsoever, so everyone was very much aware of how I felt, including my daughter.

Somehow, we managed to somewhat reconcile our differences and add another daughter to our family at the same time.  It took another two years before our issues were completely laid to rest and we became a really solid family. She became her daddy’s princess and I think he spent years trying to make up for those four months of our separation and his voluntary silence.

She was razor smart and beautiful and creative and, luckily, had dad’s eye-hand coordination, so actually grew to like sports. She made friends easily and loved to play outside and had somehow started learning to keep her hurt inside where I couldn’t see. Her first 5-6 years of life had been so tightly entwined with mine, and everything we did was together. Now, she was creating a life separate from mine, and I was busy enough with her sister and just educated enough to know this was how it was supposed to happen, like it or not. We were still close, but suddenly there were doors that were shut to me.

We moved, and she had to learn to make new friends and find a new niche. She went into middle school, still smarter than most everyone else, and then learned what it meant to be smart at that age. Things started changing, and more doors started closing. Some things I could let go as a part of growing up. Others, not so much. Closed or not, I was going through those doors and we were going to deal with whatever was behind them. Sometimes, it worked, and she’d let go of that “friend” who did nothing but use her and make her miserable when I’d convinced her that she deserved better. Sometimes, it didn’t, and even though I opened that door, she’d immediately close the one behind it.

She was extremely, extremely, creative, and writing was her passion. When she discovered limited fame from blogging on the internet, she was hooked. It took many hours of me dogging her steps and censoring her writing to convince her that some things should remain private….or maybe just taught her how to be sneakier than I am crafty. For awhile, as soon as I found one TMI blog site and insisted she take it down, another went up before I even went to bed. The problem was, it was almost impossible to determine if what she was writing was truth or fiction. She was seamless in transition from one to the other. She was a phenomenal storyteller; I was just afraid of which parts of the stories were non-fiction.

At the same time in middle school, she discovered boys. It became imperative to her that she have a boyfriend. This emotional need, I am destroyed to say, has never abated in the two decades since its beginning. She cannot be without a male admirer in her life. I have been widowed for a decade and have yet to even attempt to date. Even married, her dad and I were still our separate individuals and that, I believe, is part of what has gotten me through the last twelve years. Her absolute emotional reliance on a man is foreign to me.

She met her first husband when she was seventeen and a senior in high school. They went to college together, and lived together, for the next 11 years. She wanted marriage in the worst way. He was content with their current arrangement. He was also an overbearing, never-wrong, critical, willing-to-let-her-support-him asshole, but that wasn’t how he started out. It really was love initially, but gradually devolved into a toxic environment where he destroyed her self-esteem piece by piece. They had a wedding when she finally insisted it happen, and I will never forgive him for that. He knew at that point he wasn’t sticking around for long, and it lasted two more years. He didn’t have enough of a backbone to tell her the truth before he lied over the vows. By the time he walked out, she was broken…and I didn’t know the extent yet.

She immediately turned to a high school boyfriend I had detested back then, and still didn’t like. He was freshly returned from New York, a place he’d run to after graduation, and after he’d raked her over the coals for being a small-town nobody who wouldn’t make anything of herself. He thought he was off to become a big-name producer. He came back a defeated alcoholic. He needed someone to take care of him, and she needed to take care of someone, because she refused to take care of herself. It was a match made in Hell, and the Devil moved into her rented house very quickly. 

He lost his job. He was arrested and wore an ankle bracelet. They wrecked the car. He was either drunk or in withdrawal. They became familiar to the staff at the emergency room and the ambulance drivers. They got married. She started smoking. They never stopped drinking. And I knew none of this until after he died.

My daughter had closed all doors to me about the time her first husband-to-be started nailing them shut on her. She never told me anything she endured, anything she mourned, anything she felt. She never told me anything. She used texting to keep the changes in her voice to herself. She instant-messaged so I couldn’t tell if she was drunk or hungover or tired or heartbroken. She only contacted me when she needed something, otherwise I was contacting her and she was replying via text.  I was dealing with my sudden widow-hood and a suicidal teen and I completely dropped the ball with her. I’ll never forgive myself, yet I still don’t know how I could have opened ANY of those doors. She had very good locks.

She finally opened one at 3:00 in the morning. When the phone rang in the middle of the night, I knew something was wrong. What other kinds of calls come at that time? When I got to the hospital, I was absolutely floored to see the state to which she had deteriorated, and to see her second husband in a coma in the same ward where her dad had died ten years earlier. It was a very long night into day into night into day. She was dirty, and scared, still somewhat drunk, and hearing voices. She had a seizure right in his room during the second night and ended up in the ER. It took almost an hour, me explaining why she was in the hospital to begin with and where her husband was, and her getting downright ugly with me before we were able to get back up to his room. He passed a few hours later, and all I felt was relief.

When I took her home, I started seeing what was behind all these doors she had closed on me. I was in shock. How had she gotten to this state without my knowing anything? I mean, I knew she was pulling away and not letting me in, but….this? She was an alcoholic. She chain-smoked. She didn’t eat. She didn’t clean. She didn’t bathe. She didn’t wash…anything. She didn’t throw out ANYTHING. I thought I walked into an episode of Hoarders for Beginners. I was appalled and sick and exhausted. I called my youngest to come sit with her and went home to sleep, and to process.

What happened next was the beginning of the worst living nightmare of my life. I had lived with an alcoholic for seven years. I had survived all the worry and pain and anger and fear that went with that relationship. We had worked it out, and laid our demons to rest. And here I was, opening a door to something worse than knowing your husband was an alcoholic. Something way, way worse. I wanted to slam that door shut and never go back, but when it’s your daughter…

I took a big breath and stepped inside. I have yet to find the door out on the other side. This nightmare is never-ending.

(To Be Continued)

I am still learning. -Michelangelo, age 87

On By drwiebIn mental health and parentingLeave a comment

In the 59 years I’ve been on this Earth, I’ve lived by myself for maybe almost a year, broken into two segments; nine months here, 3 months there. I went from home to college to marriage to children and finally, to widowhood…still with children.  At the end of this month, I will be on my own.

My youngest has been with me consistently, except for those two solo periods, which is when she moved out for college. She moved back in fairly quickly each time, and I didn’t object. She has had some mental health issues and I have had some personal issues and some maternal issues and neither of us has minded the company. My oldest moved out for college and never came back.

I watched my youngest go from an exuberant, engaging, extroverted little pixie to a withdrawn, fearful, frozen young woman. When she was young, she never knew a stranger, which was sometimes frightening. She talked to anyone and everyone, sang when she wasn’t talking, never stopped moving, and grabbed the world around her with both hands. She bounced and sashayed and hugged and rambled and you could almost see the energy just pouring out of her. Then, one day in middle school, she walked into her bedroom and never came out.

The change was jarring. She stopped making eye contact, and it was maddening to watch her eyes flit to every object behind me, instead of actually TO  me.  She developed a giggle that served as a buffer between asking her a question and having her actually answer it. She slumped. She slunk. She turned away or hid behind me. She let clothes and books and drawings and pencils pile up in her room so she had somewhere to burrow. Shrugging became her main communication tool. Where my daughter had once stood now stood her shadow.

I tried to attribute it to adolescence and hormones. The oldest had gotten moodier around this age, too.  The oldest hadn’t disappeared inside herself, though, and I knew it. I come from a long line of treating depression and any other mental health issue with a firm “snap out of it.” I knew there was more to it than that, as I was already on anti-depressants. I had been given them when I was in my forties, when I was sent to the doctor to figure out why I was so angry all the time. The doctor asked why I was there.

“Because I think people are so incredibly stupid and why they’re breathing my air is beyond me.” She nodded, made a note, and asked how long I’d been depressed.

“I’m not depressed. I’m pissed.” She explained how depression manifests in different symptoms with different people and handed me a prescription. “Fill it on your way home,” she insisted. I huffed my way out of her office, through the drug store, and all the way home. In a couple of weeks, I emerged from my pit of rage, and realized how far down the hole I’d fallen. I spent a while apologizing to people, especially my family.

So why didn’t I see that Hayley was suffering not from puberty, but from something much more serious? I know there’s a part of me that did see, but didn’t want to admit it. She had just started weaning down from her suitcase of allergy and asthma medications. We opted out of ADHD medications because if we had to choose between her breathing or her energy level, we chose oxygen each and every time. I didn’t want her to face a lifetime of SSRI medication and their side effects and the haughty looks from the “snap out of it” people. I’m amazed at the number of people who think people should just “stop being sad.” No one batted an eye when I started medication; maybe they were tired of the duck-and-cover routine they had to do whenever I approached. I can guarantee not one single person told me to “snap out of it” when I was on a rampage. They were too busy trying to save their own ass. 

When she hit high school, she started questioning her sexuality a little more blatantly. I suspected her truth and her dad turned a blind eye.  (I silently supported whatever she decided, while he was figuring out how to support his daughter when he didn’t exactly support her new category. He could be Catholic at the most inopportune times.) I assigned this traumatic, personal examination as the source of more of her moods. She was no longer extroverted, but who wouldn’t be introspective if they were juggling these types of questions?

I cringe when I think of how much I turned into my “just snap out of it” mother during some of her most trying moments. She was  as smart as her father, but couldn’t present her work in class without becoming physically ill. We spent many nights at the kitchen table or in the living room, her in tears and me in frustration because she KNEW this stuff forwards and backwards and why was this so hard?? I conveniently forgot how I went through freshman speech class in college with a script for Valium firmly in my hand. I forgot how I knew all the answers in high school but rarely raised my hand and spent most of my class time silently praying “please don’t call on me; please don’t call on me.” I forgot how I spoke to few people outside my inside circle of friends, at least until I discovered my first Happy Hour at the bar that allowed 18 year olds to buy alcohol. I forgot a lot of things because I didn’t want her to go through all those terrible memories. And so, I let her go through a lot of her own terrible memories because I just wanted both of us to “snap out of it.”

Then her dad died, and I stopped being a mother. At that time, my world had imploded and I had nothing to stand on. I could barely take care of myself, much less anyone else. Oh, I covered the basics: I went to work, I paid bills, I made sure there was money. I did see when she was visibly upset and shaking and could help through those times. It was all the other times that she silently suffered that I glaringly missed.  I, myself, was severely depressed and there weren’t enough anti-depressants in the world to mask my symptoms. Since I didn’t manifest depression like most people, I managed to use my anger to keep many  people at bay….including my daughter.

She hit bottom about a year after he died, and luckily, we had people around us who recognized when she landed and got us the help she needed. After that, it was a long, hard, exhausting climb back from where she had spiraled. I was determined to be a better mom from this point on, but hit my own bottom with this one afternoon, sitting behind the broken dishwasher with Youtube and some wrenches. We had  moved recently, and she had yet to find a new therapist. As she frantically waved a red flag under my nose, I snapped.

“I can’t be your mom AND your counselor. I can’t give you advice and watch your health and do all of this objectively for your own benefit because I AM NOT objective. I am your mom. You have to find a new counselor.” Then I gathered all her medications and locked them away, turned on the computer, and started compiling a list of therapists in the area. We both knew, from experience, we had to shop for the right one, and we knew it would be a process, one we should have started even before we unloaded our furniture from the moving van. Better late than never, I guess.

Thank god, she found the right one. Then we found a really good physician’s assistant to a psychiatrist who actually knew her medicines, and the uphill climb became slightly less vertical. It took years….years….but she made it completely out of that hole. My effervescent toddler who turned into a shadow-person has finally found herself. She’s not done with the hole, by any means. She stands at the edge every single damn day. She lives with the constant reminder that one slip and whoosh! It starts all over again.

The good news is that she’s also learning how to cope with this constant threat. She’s learning that a slip can be just that, a slip, and not a slide, if she’s ready for it. She’s learning that EVERYONE slips and it’s ok to be mad and it’s ok to be sad and it’s especially ok to be happy. She’s learning how to balance on that edge and I’m so incredibly proud of her, because I know how many times I failed her as she was learning. Maybe I was learning too, but the mom in me won’t let me off that easy. I should have known. I should have done more. I should have listened harder. I should have…I just should have. It’s ok, though….because she’s learning anyway.

And at the end of the month, we start a whole new learning process. We start learning how to live apart. She’s ready. I’m ready. She’s more ready than I am. I need to be on my own again. I need to figure out how much of my life I’ve actually rebuilt and how much I’ve hidden behind the guise of parenting. Then, I need to fill in the holes I’ve let her cover for me. She needs to be on her own, too. She needs to know she can be on her own, and how much she’s already learned and how far she’s come and how far there is left for her to yet explore.

I will miss her, but I’m so excited for her. I’m proud of her.  While I’m rediscovering my life, I want to watch as she builds her own. I will always be there for her, but I know she needs me less and less. I hope I need her less, too. Regardless, it’s time.

I wonder what we’ll learn next.