I’ve Ruined a Rite of Passage for My Beautiful Daughter

Parenting with Depression and Anxiety

I’ve decided this will be a running theme for my page.  How can you be a good parent (or “good-enough” as my therapist keeps insisting as I forever beat myself up), when you are too depressed to be a good anything?  Maybe laying it down here for others to read will make it easier to heed the inner voice telling me not to say and do the crap to my kids that I am constantly hating myself afterwards for doing.   Just this week it happened again.  And lately it seems that it happens despite lengthy conversations with myself about how to handle a given situation properly because I do know how to do what’s right.  I’ve had enough therapy to know that much.  I go in with a plan and I manage to blow it up anyway.

Put simply I ruined my daughter’s “graduation” ceremony from Middle to High-School. She was sooooo excited the whole day and I’m afraid her “rational” exhuberance makes me edgy, to say the least.  It’s hard to be miserable in the face of such unabashed joyfulness.   It bugs me.  I KNOW…I’M AWFUL (apologies to my therapist, but this is some well-deserved self-flagellation).  The truth is, mostly thanks to her Dad, my daughter can be presumptive to say it nicely.  My parents would have called it demanding and self-centered and they were wrong to do so, my broken spirit as a child being the result.  My daughter is expecting that all her needs will be met on most days.  She’s 14!  I think all 14-year old girls are kind of like that, no?  But on the day of her 8th grade graduation, she was feeling particularly like the center of the universe.  And I, as usual, was feeling tired and grouchy and wanting to be left to wallow in my own dark mood.

When she started texting me at 2pm from school if we could go out to dinner for her special day I got annoyed because she wouldn’t take no for an answer.  It was a school night and by the time the ceremony was over it would be 8 or 8:30, I explained.  That was simply way to0 late to be going out for her younger brother and for Dad who has to get up at 5:30 am for work.  I was particularly annoyed because she just broke her iPhone for the 2nd time in three months and she was texting me and arguing with me about it from her friend’s phone.  So now, not only am I mean Mom but it’s all documented on her friend’s cell phone!  This is when I had the self-talk.  I knew she’d be a bit out of control this day and that she didn’t mean to embarrass me and that it was her special day.  I was going to remain cool.  Right. Great plan.

She comes in an hour or so later and starts for the 20th time that month to complain about what is for dinner.  No matter what I say or how much effort it’s taken, she asks if we can have pizza instead.  (Sometimes it’s even worse, that is, when the dreaded macaroni and cheese request is made).  Of course I know she doesn’t mean to hurt me by being dismissive, even though cooking when I’m depressed feels like the equivalent of having a tooth pulled. Then before 10 minutes has passed, she’s berating her brother and sister for not coming to the ceremony.  As if all these 2 young ones want to do is sit in the high school gym for 2 hours and listen to the teachers congratulate themselves and give enlightened speeches to a bunch of rowdy 8th graders who aren’t listening.  Then, moments later, she stopped speaking to her sister for taking the piece of bread that  she  wanted.  I said what I planned on saying earlier…”That’s enough now.  I know you’re excited, but you need to take it easy.”  The cliche “in one ear and out the other,” would certainly apply here.  But then the final straw came.

Twenty minutes before we were to leave I went to change.  I was told I needed to dress up. Had I known I’d have to sit in the bleachers (oh my God they are uncomfortable) I would have refused.  But I went along.  I was steaming from the ears a bit at that point and then she gets me good…she needs her outfit ironed.  Ok, I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal.  It isn’t.  What kind of mother, good, good-enough, not that great even, would complain about ironing her daughter’s outfit for a graduation ceremony.  It just came on the back of 10 other annoyances that hit me when I was in that mood.  And I lost it.  I remembered my self-chat, and I said screw that…it’s all about ME now.  I told her she needs to think about other people once in awhile and not ask me just as I’m about to get dressed to iron (God I hate ironing).  I told her if she asks me for pizza one more time instead of the of dinner I planned I will never buy pizza again.  I told her if she was rude to her younger brother and sister one more time that week, she’d be staying in all weekend.  And I got a million, “Okay’s” in repsonse.  She looked taken aback.  As if I was just completely insane to be mean to her on this day.  She looked hurt.  She, after all, was graduating from 8th grade.  A very huge deal to her and it should have been to me also.  She looked at me like I should have known all this and what the hell was wrong with Mom now….and she was 100% right.

Why is it so damned hard to do what’s right when you know what’s right?  Why does this depression have to make me be my mother?  Why, when you know these things does the illness get the better of you most of the time?  Why can’t I beat it?  If not for me, then for them?   All I can do now is apologize and try again.  I’m forever trying again.  Maybe when she’s my age grading my progress, I’ll get partial credit for effort.  It’s all I can hope for because if she feels about me when she’s my age as I do about my mother…I don’t think I’ll want to exist.  God help me.

 

 

Maybe Denial is the Way to Go

Parenting with Depression and Anxiety

I know it’s yet another sad posting and I want to write more about the positives of living with this illness.  But I am currently circling the proverbial drain here.  My depression is getting so bad I’m not sleeping and I’m becoming increasingly worse.  Sleeplessness is the thief of my peace and of my hope that tomorrow (damn it…TODAY) will be easier.  And it turns me into a snarling monster with the kids when they are acting up, which guess what?  It’s what kids do.  All kids.  I wish to hell I knew why some nights, no matter what meds I take, the sleep refuses to come.  I imagine it laughing at me.  It is the most stubborn opponent and my most vicious enemy in this illness.  I hate this feeling now…knowing it’s 4am, I have only a few hours of quiet and then my kids will be up and the day will begin and I will be dragging my sorry self through it.   And then just around time for me to make dinner and take them to their activities, I’ll be passing out on the couch.  So I’ll have to take more medecine to get up again.   What kind of special torture is this?

I wish I could say Memorial Day was a good break for this family but my mood infected the entire weekend.  The kids were especially troublesome and I can’t forget that it could be me and not them who is triggering the whole God-awful cycle. I find myself shouting and I hear my mother’s voice, her exact words even, coming from somewhere inside me…trying (G0d help me) to make my kids feel as bad as my mother made me feel.  What the hell is wrong with me?!?  I know better.  I understand my illness…yet I cannot stop myself and before I know it I’m weeping and apologizing to these young people who deserve so much more than me.  God, why is this happening?

I  used to (still) hate my mother (especially her even though my father was depressed too) for not getting help with her illness.  She was the primary care giver and she was a weepy doormat to my father most of the time. Other times she was bitchy and verbally abusive to him.  Emasculating him in every way she could.  But to us she was consistently horrible.  Nasty and yelling all the time.  Taking to her bed just to get away from us.  When she had to go back to work after a few years, she was even worse because she blamed us all for having to actually go out in the world and try to make a living.  I despise her to this day for not getting help.  Because she could have made it better.  She could have BEEN better.  She could have gotten well and treated us with kindess and a little compassion.  But no…she was in denial.  There was nothing wrong with her!  She’d never see a therapist or God forbid go on medication.  Screw us.  She was suffering, so by God, so would we all.

Now, decades later, here I sit at 4am, slamming coffee because all my meds and all my damned years of therapy ARE NOT HELPING.  All these damned doctors and opinions and weight gain and hair falling out from drugs…I am so freaking sick of it.  I want to break something! How could I be anything but sour and nasty?  All the things I said I would never do to my beautiful children, I’m doing.  I am not kind and compassionate to my kids all the time. Sometimes yes…but not enough.  And  so now the self-loathing kicks in.  The tears are coming faster and I don’t know how I’m going to drag my shit through another day like this.  I pray.  I meditate.  I beg my God to please make it stop. Let me just be normal.  The guilt is perpetuating this never-ending anxiety which leads to more depression and around and around we go.

Is it because I know what’s wrong and I’m doing something about it that I’m even angrier and more resentful that I cannot get well?  Maybe denial is the better path?  Maybe then I could continue on in some hazy ignorance that there was nothing wrong with me… and I could convince myself it is everyone else who’s screwed up.  Maybe I could just write it off to having rotten kids like my mother did.  Maybe her simple solution, and why I hate her so much, is why she’s survived this long (77 years) without changing a damned thing about herself.  Could this be true?  Could I have been so stupid for so long?  Maybe.  But I don’t think so.  Because then my kids, and especially my daughters, would have no chance of escaping this Hell.  I’d be dumping it on them same as it was dumped on me.  And I simply could not live with that.  I would end it first.  End myself first.  So I’ll keep trying.  But I am really starting to lose hope.  Days like the one I know today will be just really kill the spirit.