Minibabble: I can't say I failed

[00:00:00] This is a Minibabble, and I am your host, Suki Wessling.

[00:00:33] A couple of months ago, my fellow K Squid programmer, Debra Sloss, asked me to help with an episode of her show, State of Mind. She’d received some beautiful, thoughtful pieces from mothers of adult children with mental illness. Given my personal experience, raising a child with undiagnosed developmental issues, my professional experience writing about parenting, and my sound production experience, Deborah hoped that I’d be willing to create a collage of these mothers’ voices and stories. What follows is that collage.

[00:01:04] Every parent who has a difficult parenting experience wallows at least once in the despair that their child might never be able to move on to an independent, productive life. These moms give voice and soul to the experience.

[00:01:19] One of them expresses the attitude that kept me going through the hardest times. She says, I can’t say I failed, because I tried my best.

[00:01:28] Music by Chris Zabriskie and Lisa Taylor. You can learn more about State of Mind at ksqd. org. Thanks for listening.

[00:01:40] I’m 52 years old and have three children. My middle son is 21 years old with mental health problems. I’m a 63 year old mother of three. My difficult adult child is my son. He’s diagnosed with bipolar 1 with psychotic features. Since my son became ill at age 27 with a serious mental illness, the problems Practicalities of dealing with his illness and all the accompanying issues, jail, homelessness, um, agnosia, which is the inability to recognize that he’s ill, so therefore, you know, his medication non compliant, um, disappearing for months and even years at a time.

[00:02:29] I live in the UK and I was trying to find a support group for parents with adult children who’s struggling with mental health issues. I couldn’t find anything. Having a child with mental illness. His started at five and really peaked at seven years old, was very isolating, especially back then.

[00:02:54] He’s 22 now because there was a lot of judgment about him being in the hospital, about him being on medications, about him living in a residential school. He went missing. His roommate called us, concerned that he had not shown up for a shift, nor had he Before he returned home to the apartment that evening, I panicked and my husband flew out to find him, searched for a couple of days before he actually found him in an emergency room with no identification.

[00:03:34] One of the biggest impacts of my son’s illness is the impact it has had on my other relationships. I had kept so much of my family’s experience to myself that I just I did not realize the toll it was taking on my well being. If you add that with the feelings of guilt that I felt because of his illness, inadequacy, shame, you know, this started to really consume me over time.

[00:04:03] So I found it’s not really easy to share my experiences and feelings with family and friends. You know, they empathize, but I found myself wanting to actually protect them from the full extent of this, I don’t know what else to call it except horror, in a lot of ways, and my despair around it. I felt myself detaching from friends and family because I didn’t want the judgment, I didn’t want the questions, and it angered me as well because they weren’t in my shoes.

[00:04:37] I was mourning what I thought myself was. My son’s life would be as I watched other people’s children thrive and hit the milestones that I had hoped for from my son. He would have many ups and downs on a regular basis. Because he was living with me, I witnessed them all the time. I did everything, tiptoeing around, trying to quell the rage, trying to have hope that things were going to change, always having hope that things were going to change, but things never changed.

[00:05:12] It wasn’t. It wasn’t because they necessarily pushed me away or I pushed them away. It also too was just, he occupied so much of my time because I was so invested in his treatment that it just took such a large part of my life and it was exhausting. So I was just tired, plus trying to work a full time job.

[00:05:41] You know, someone had told me eight years ago that his condition was just I don’t know if I would have been able to really, you know, go on at that point with it. You know, it’s like when someone’s telling you that something’s going to last this long. And it is really a lifetime thing, so that’s why I think support is really, really important.

[00:06:11] I don’t like when people ask me, how is your son doing? They don’t realize, for me, how loaded that question is. You know, it might just be like, he’s okay. When actually, that’s just relatively speaking, right? Okay could just mean like, okay, he didn’t get the cops called on him today or, you know, he’s, you know, he’s not in the hospital or, you know, so forth and so on.

[00:06:37] That really was a risk to my mental health, to my sobriety. I’m in recovery for alcohol. To my relationships with my children and my husband. Not just mental health, but other health issues too. The stress would cause me incredibly, you know, high blood pressure, etc. They They worry about me and my emotional and physical health.

[00:07:04] They understand to an extent, like, that’s your son and you love him, but they also are just like, at what point are you just going to just keep trying at, you know, at the expense of your own life in hell? I’d never been in the presence of a group of women who had this very painful thing in common. I felt so emotional after the first group, a flood of relief.

[00:07:28] It’s given me a new perspective. I get hope from the other women. Some have been mothers for twice as long as I have. Some have been less than I have. And we all bring something to the table. We really help and support each other. We can talk openly and confidentially. And we all understand what we’re all going through because we’re all going through the same thing.

[00:07:56] My therapist had recommended that I join. And I’m so happy that I did. I did because I found other mothers that were going through the same struggles as far as just the guilt, the tug, the pull, this, the emotional drain, hearing what they were saying about their children and it sounded exactly like my son.

[00:08:23] I was like, Oh my goodness. It was so much relief, like, Oh my God. Don’t hesitate. You don’t have to suffer. During these difficult mothering experiences on your own. There was one particular woman in my group I found quite wise. So I would hang on to every word she said. Despite the hours she spent helping her adult son, she seemed to have a life.

[00:08:50] She was even taking dance lessons. Focusing on the parent, on the mother, and how we can improve our mental health. How we can improve our quality of life. Changing the situation in our favor. Because our adult children are always going to be difficult adult children. It’s almost more like a course or like a facilitated session in how to imagine and implement, too, like another way of being.

[00:09:19] Like sort of being able to see hope for myself that is separate from what my adult child is going through. Ironically, I do have hope for the future for myself. I don’t necessarily have any hope that my son will get any better. I don’t rule it out either. It’s just that at this point, I just don’t have any expectations.

[00:09:40] Because to have expectations means to be let down. I’m not really to blame for my son’s mental illness. You know, I was a good mom. I don’t have to keep sacrificing myself. You know, I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it. The best thing I can do for him is find some joy in my remaining years.

[00:10:00] And in whatever connection I can find with him and with others. There’s no human on this earth that I love more than him. But at the same time, there’s no human on this earth that has hurt me as much as he has. It’s just too painful to just keep being disappointed. No one knows how to raise a child with mental illness.

[00:10:24] And so I can’t say that I failed because I tried my best. I’m so sick of crying, but my hands are on my body so long. Can’t stop myself from thinking about the problems of the world, but what it’s like. Water on my hands helps a dollar counting in my head. If it sounds crazy, that’s cause it is.

[00:11:02] Breathe.

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Minibabble: I can’t say I failed

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