Crazy Talk

Lately, I have noticed a lot of exciting information going out in movies, on television and through facebook and blogs that incorporate ideas on depression or mental illness. There seems to me to be a wave of good, honest depictions of what it is like for a person who lives with a disease that can be difficult for the people around him or her as well as for the person who struggles. People seem to be moving toward allowing more compassion for those whose lives are touched by these struggles both as those who are treated medically and those who love them. Makes me very happy. In what I have been reading lately, a lot of the focus has turned toward how much hope exists for people with mental illness to live lives that bring joy and meaning to themselves and those around them despite the struggles that can't be ignored.

I read the interview in Glamour featuring Sarah Silverman and her very honest and funny and thought provoking views on depression and anxiety as well as several other articles written after it was published with a nod back to ideas mentioned in the interview. I have not seen the movie she is starring in about a mother whose bipolar depression sends her through experiences that many of us (me included) would find very difficult to live through. It is called, "I Smile Back." Looking forward to seeing it because of the way that Silverman described it in the interviews that I have read.

At the same time, I have been thinking a lot about something that probably shouldn't take up so much rent in my brain. Sometimes, the way for me to get rid of these nagging thoughts is to completely indulge them and stretch them out and think them over until they stop nagging. So that is where I am going with this post. Just a warning...bloviations ahead. This is where it gets personal.

Last night, I tucked my daughter in to bed and she asked me to sleep next to her for a while. I waited until I thought she was asleep and tried to sneak back to my room. She caught me. I got back into bed by her side but couldn't sleep. So I flipped on the computer and started reading whatever was in my facebook feed.

Among the pictures of people smiling and fall leaves and puppies and babies was a post from "Humans of New York". Usually, these stories are inspiring and uplifting. This one was a real departure from the norm. I saw three parts, I believe of a story about a man who was married and divorced and trying to put his life back together. He described or more aptly, bashed his wife and mother of his son. He talked about how she fired three dentists and had her invisalign braces removed because they weren't invisible. He talked about how she argued with friends. He said he read her journal and discovered she had been through an abusive childhood. He said she was walking down the street and talking to a friend while his mother's friend was walking behind her and listening and that she said she was going to divorce her him. He said he called a divorce lawyer at this point and the lawyer advised him to stay in the home to keep leverage for negotiating. I typed out a response and then deleted it right away. I wanted to know...why was he listening to what his mother said her friend heard without asking his wife what this was about? How did he not know about her childhood if she was his wife? Why did he read her journal? Why didn't he talk to her about what was in the journal? Why run to a divorce lawyer before asking the wife about what was going on between them and what she was feeling? What if he did that instead of running to a lawyer?

I felt this pain in my heart about the whole matter because it feels like the discovery that she had been through an abusive childhood was in itself a condemnation of her. It was proof that she was bad. It felt to me that he was trying to say that this was his real reason for wanting a divorce and that everything after was just him trying to gain evidence that she was bad and he was a good guy who was unwittingly trapped by a bad woman. Worse yet, a mad woman. His lack of insight into his own weird behaviors and the lack of responses to that by the other readers took me by surprise. I had a tough childhood. I wouldn't expect my husband to read any journals I keep unless I asked him to talk with me about them. If his mom came to him and said I was saying unpleasant things to a friend on the street he would dismiss him mom and come talk to me. We would probably laugh together about how much his mom would rather have kept him all to herself forever. (Although, I am weird in that I keep almost nothing to myself. If I was angry enough to be saying I wanted a divorce with my friends, he would have already heard this before they did. I told him about my difficult childhood on our third date and I included everything I could come up with as a reason that he might want to run away because I didn't want him to get hurt. He only seemed to like and later love me more as a result.) The humans of NY writer talked about secretly recording his wife's conversations and how she behaved horribly as a response. His poor son was caught in the middle. It was disgusting. I'll just refer you to the facebook site if you wish to read it yourself, but it was just creepy. I thought it was a missing scene from the movie, "Gone Girl" or that it could have been. I wished I could rescue the little boy.

The bad woman who traps a good man idea just gives me the willies. If you have the strength to overcome or just survive a bad childhood...it feels like an unfair burden to have to shoulder a stigma about it once you are grown and trying to put together a new life for yourself. I realize how lucky and blessed I am that my husband doesn't see me as a bad woman who trapped him in my evil web of mental illness. He sees himself as flawed. His sees me as flawed. He sees us as working our best through life and giving all we have to our children. When I think of the times that my depression has caused pain, I cringe. He knows. He reminds me of all of the times that I have overcome my struggles.

My rages at my mother are probably more ugly than I want to believe even when I am being as honest with myself as I can possibly handle. When I was younger, I didn't know it was my illness fueling the intensity of my feelings. I didn't know that there was anything I could do to stop myself. I stay away from my mom now as much because I feel so weak in her presence as I do from shame. I don't trust myself to be at my best around her. I know my husband and my kids need me to be at my best. I know that when the lid comes off of the box that my mother and I try to stuff all of the resentments and disappointments into...nothing good can result.

When I was in high school, I raged at a friend one night for not being the friend I thought she was supposed to be to me. It was horrible. I am terribly embarrassed even now to think of it. In college, I raged at a roommate whose demands on me to keep our apartment exactly as she wanted it overwhelmed me. I raged at her for drinking too much and for her dating behaviors that felt careless to me and a little dangerous. I didn't realize then that I was doing anything wrong. I really didn't. The awareness came later and it led a to a severe bout with depression. I had to start from a place that I saw as ground zero and build a new set of skills for dealing with emotions. I realized I hadn't learned to cope with life in the ways that other people did and that my responses to anxiety and anger were toxic. I didn't want to be that way. I sought help. I gained strength from there.

Strangely, even then, people always told me that I was excellent with children. People at church who didn't think I was being Christian enough even told me that they would always trust me with their children. I was patient and very slow to anger and enjoyed being with children and caring for them. I was deeply protective of them. I made my way through college by earning money babysitting. I took time off to be a full time nanny. Then I returned and finished school. All the while, I watched how other people behaved and tried to model myself after the people I saw as having trustworthy and admirable behaviors. I love books and majored in English because I love stories and story telling and characters who start from nothing and bloom. I wanted to be Elizabeth Bennet when I found real love. I wanted to be Mary Poppins with children. It's unpopular to admit, but I didn't want anything else. I didn't care about a career because I was pretty sure that being a wife and mother would be the best and most fulfilling jobs I would have in my life. I wanted to serve Christ by creating a loving home.

It wasn't that I didn't read about feminism. I did. I read many books that my older sister suggested. She's an incredibly smart and accomplished scholar. I read, "The Second Sex" by Simone de Bouvior. I read, "The Mad Woman in the Attic". I read and studied some philosophy in school. Still, I wanted nothing more to become a person I could see as healthy and good as a wife and a mother. To me, that meant a Christian woman. I didn't want to be loved for anything but my sincere belief that I could be those things despite my difficult childhood and despite the fact that I had to work to learn how to be those things while others were raised to just be them and more. I wanted someone who would love me because I loved Jesus and trusted Him to make me the best person for the family my husband and I would create.

It would tear me apart to be married to someone who saw me like the man in the "Humans of New York" posts saw his wife. Marked. Damaged goods. Disposable. I don't know how people go on when they feel that alone and impossibly boxed in by stigma. I feel like the whole world might tell me I'm all of those things and that's fine. My husband and my children know how much I love them and how good I am for them. I don't know how life would be for me if this weren't true. I don't know how I would live if I hadn't struggled so hard to find ways to live with people that were different from the ways I knew to live when I was in my teens and twenties. I'm not boxed in anymore. Even when I sense the weight of the stigma of having a mental illness is there--I'm strong.

It isn't that I ever found a place in church that fit me. It isn't that I somehow won over my mother or siblings and proved to them how much I wanted to have a beautiful extended family life with them being huge figures in my children's lives as they developed. It isn't that I have achieved great things and can say, "Success has brought me past my failures." I'm not beautiful or rich or smarter than people. I don't have street cred. I am just loved. That's all I need. This may seem like a small goal to have reached. The mean girl in my head is singing the song from the "Popeye" movie where Olive Oil is telling her friends, "He's large. He's mine." and they are singing back to her..."And you can have him." That's fine. The mean girl is asking me if I remember the line from "When Harry Met Sally" at the wedding when the couple says to Harry and Sally..."If either of us had found either of you even remotely attractive we wouldn't be here today." and "It's like two wrongs make a right." Maybe my husband and I are two wrongs making a right. What's so bad about that? I honestly believe the idea that you can only improve if you are measuring yourself against yourself. I don't have to be good enough to fit in anywhere but with my own expectations of myself. I see how I'm growing. I have made a lot of mistakes. I take those mistakes to heart. I try to see them as clearly as I can without blaming others. I go on. That's all I'd ask of anyone else. Somehow, that works for me.

I wouldn't want to go through this life without having been loved by my husband. Everything good in my life started when he believed that I wanted to make a better life for myself, for him and for the kids we would have together. He has given me the greatest gifts available on Earth. He loves me like Jesus loves the Church. I love him right back. I think he was attracted to me because I was pretty, but he loved me because I am me. I was attracted to him because he was so smart, but I love him because he has a beautiful soul. I can respect him. Neither of us are all that pretty now and some days I'd swear we have no smarts between us at all. Still, things work. I can see an even better future ahead. We are doing the small things each day to get there.

So while mental illness stigma rises with movies like "Gone Girl"...it wanes with ideas brought out in interviews like the ones Sarah Silverman has been giving. My hubris comes out in thinking that maybe if I share what I have been through...maybe I'll get to add one drop to the river of good ideas that flow and bring hope to people that dream of bigger futures and healthier lives than those pictured for them by people who saw them experience difficult childhoods. I don't expect it, I don't feel I've earned or deserve any such thing...but I'd be very happy if somehow this were the path I started to travel toward with my degree in English, experience writing and most of all in raising my daughters. Maybe they will grow to have a sense that there is no border set in stone between good people and bad people. Maybe they will have a lot of compassion for the mentally ill because they saw their mother work so hard to be her best with them and for them. They have a dad who works at criminal and family law. He believes in people even when nobody else does. In fact, the people nobody else believes in seem to be the ones he most often clicks with somehow. He doesn't let the bad in people bring out the bad in him. He helps them see the good in themselves by drawing attention to it and nurturing it with them. He has a lot of flaws. He picks himself up and keeps going nonetheless.

Ok. So, now I feel like that nagging is gone. If you have come this far and read this--I wish I could give you a hug. Thank you. That's all I've got. I hope there is something good in there that was worth the trouble.

Grief

Not sure if everyone thinks of butterflies when they think of grief. I can't remember when I began to associate the two.

A little over a month ago, my husband's father passed away.

Grief seems to me to float in almost imperceptibly at first. It lands quietly. It waits for you to notice and then drifts off as quietly as it arrived.

My kids, my husband and I have felt it there when we talk about doing things we know he would have loved. I felt it when I saw his shoes sitting near the door. I feel it when I do math homework with my kids and they tell me, "Grandpa taught us how to do this all but in an easy way. We aren't allowed to do math Grandpa's way in school." At my daughter's parent-teacher conference, the teacher said that my daughter likes to do the math assignments her way and the teacher can't give her credit unless she learns the processes as they are taught. I felt grief quietly pass from my eyes to my daughter's and to my husband's. We didn't have to talk about what we felt. We all knew.

I know in time that I will see the beauty of the grief like I see the beauty in butterflies, but for now it feels like a frozen pond that I'm skating over. The cold keeps me from seeing. Just have to keep moving to stay warm.