Mental Health is a Bitch

Mental Health is a Bitch.

She smokes too much. She has long red finger nails that are chipped and jagged. Her words are raspy and cruel and cut like knives of ice. She calls when you don't want her to and she shows up on your couch when you least need her, dribbling ash on your cushions.

I understand why people who don't have this Bitch following them around don't understand. Just don't pick up the phone, just kick her off the couch. Just tell her to go away.

In every other health field there's a clear A to B connection. Have an infection, take an antibiotic. Break a leg, wear a cast, do some physio. Trust in your body to heal itself. Your white blood cells will fight the infection, your body's natural immune system will kick in. When it doesn't, we have this medicine to help it, to mimic what your body isn't strong enough to do. Ah, but mental health -- the anxiety, the depression, PTSD, bipolar, schizophrenia, psychosis -- that's a different beast. You actively can't trust your body to heal itself. Your body has turned rogue, your mind has defected and gone over to the enemy camp. The healing isn't physical, isn't physiotherapy with weights and tension bands and stretches. The healing is emotional, internal. It's walking the knife's edge of balancing brain chemicals we still don't accurately understand. The heavy lifting is done in a mirror reflected inwards, lifting and fighting internal voices and memories and emotions. Like fighting ghosts with a toothpick.

Trying to explain it makes very little sense. Of course it doesn't. When someone's entire life is spent trusting that their body will heal itself, trusting in the mechanics of nature to do their job, it seems unfathomable that the whole process can be suspect. No, it doesn't make sense that picking up a ringing telephone is terrifying, but it also doesn't make sense that my brain is actively trying to kill me from the inside. That's crazy. Why would your brain do that? If it kills you, it kills itself. It's the antithesis of the mechanics of nature, of survival.

Be that as it may, she's still on my couch. And she's still a Bitch.

Jagged Parents

There's no sense in rewriting the wheel, so go read 10 Dark Parenting Truths and then come back. I'll wait.

They're true. All true. Not all the time. The moments of screaming babies and lost friends pass relatively quickly to make way for babies who talk back with sass, and hopefully new friends who do the same.  But as I'm reading through them nodding quietly to myself, I'm momentarily struck dumb with tears at #10. Your heart might break, every day, forever.

When Squidge was born he shattered my heart and the pieces have never quite fit together again. A thousand small moments that he isn't aware of or won't ever remember ensure the jagged edges never fully mend, points of weakness put under continual stress.  The time he stopped breathing while he slept. The first time I lost him in a park. The nights when he woke up with a nightmare and I just held him and promised not to let go.  My own nightmares that wake me up sweating and shaking, terrified that something has happened to him, unable to sleep until I've crept into his room and made sure he's still okay. The countless hours I've lain awake long after everyone else is fast asleep and worried and wondered and second guessed. Each moment is a tiny scar on my soul that he won't remember but I will.

It's mind boggling that anyone chooses to parent, to willingly give up ever feeling whole again.  The truth is, those shattered pieces of you that children leave strewn in their wake won't ever fit together again. You'll shoehorn them into a new pattern, fitting the edges together in new ways, but there'll always be a piece missing that never completes the puzzle.  They take that one with them. And you'd never ask for it back.