I have an almost 26 year old daughter with mental illness. Her life is a continual cycle of mild success, crisis,which may or may not include hospitalization, a re-entry, stabilization period and then another new direction until the cycle repeats itself all over again. It's been exhausting in just anout every way as her dad and I have tried to support her this past 12 years. I will never let her go in my heart but I'm not sure anymore how to successfully keep her in my life.
As I type this blog tonight, I am dealing with the reality that she doesn't want to talk to me. She made decisions to ignore the direction the last mental health team had determined would be best for her. This was the second time she's left agreeing to the plan and then chose to reject it. She knows that talking to me will only affirm that. So the silence invades my life and I struggle. Sometimes I feel so alone in my struggle. Many of the parents I met when she was in treatment for an eating disorder have moved on. Their daughters are healthy, have married and even have kids of their own. I wonder if I have the steam for meeting anyone with adult children with mental illness. I'm so weary of holding out hope that life will ever be different for her, for me, or our family.
I'm really entering a new phase of this journey. One I have yet to determine as a good one or not. Right now, my only goal is to recognize that it is here. In this phase I have realized that the stress from life on the edge 24/7 has taken a major toll on my body. It's been especially difficult having moved away from the therapeutic benefit I enjoyed living in the Cache Valley of Northern Utah. Mountain streams,a constant view of mountains out every window and a lot of sunshine made life bearable. Not just bearable, I was thriving in the midst of it. I can honestly say that leaving that spiritual place and entering small town life in Minnesota has been brutal.
I graduated with my Special Ed. Endorsement 2 years ago this Halloween. I got a job just 2 months later. It was an intense job working with kids with emotional/behavior disorders in a school setting. The kids I worked with we're a lot more ill than my training had prepared me for. It was exhausting in every way. Thankfully our daughter was relatively stable that year after moving out to MN with us after her brief marriage ended in crisis a few months before we moved. Everything changed abruptly,however,when in July of 2011, without any warning, notes were left on our fridge to let us know she had moved back to Utah. She managed to make it there for 8 months before another crisis brought her back into our home this April.
I know I am in a new place because when the crisis came a few weeks ago, we received a phone call from her therapist telling us she was suicidal and being sent by ambulance to the hospital. I felt this deadness inside like none I'd ever known. I was grateful she was safe but that was it. I had confronted her very directly earlier that day so I was not surprised. This phone call did not illicit guilt feelings for having done that. That was new for me. Instead, I just went on with the day. When it came time to visit, I chose not to go. I just couldn't bear the thought of giving them my things, putting them in a locker and going into another locked-down unit with the sound of the door closing and locking behind me. It felt really,really good NOT to go.
There is much more to say...more that I need to write about but it's late and time for me to hit the sack. More later.
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