To say I grew up on the East Coast is an understatement. My mother, a creative free spirit with a fairy resting between her shoulder blades, and a bad habit of falling in love with everyone she meets, suffers from Bipolar Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The combination of these two illnesses clashed head-on with her desire for adventure and inspiration, setting the perfect stage for the question I’ve been asked most of my life – ‘so, are you a military kid or something?’
To answer that question, no, I’m not. My father is a musician, and has carved himself a home in the New England music scene. My mother has never been attached enough to places or people to stay still, so we moved. A lot. Most of our moves maintained our New England presence, but occasionally we dipped a little closer to the equator – Florida was her favorite escape route when too many people had too many opinions. The sunshine state became her calling during her longer stretches of mania, but when the depression hit she was always ready to run home.
Immediately after moving she was always at her happiest, but once threatened with stability her emotions became anything but, leading us to our twelve truths about growing up with a mentally ill parent:
- Sometimes it’s better to be invisible.
A lot of mental illnesses come with a common side effect: emotional instability. Fits of depression, anxiety, anger,
2. On occasion, you have to be the parent.
As anyone who has ever experienced depression knows sometimes it’s hard to convince yourself to get out of bed and take care of yourself – much less another person. When you add new medications to the equation these episodes can last more than a day or two. Sometimes this means coming home from school and having to cook your own dinner. Sometimes this means reminding your parent to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Sometimes this means making sure your parent takes their medication.
3. There will be unsavory people around you, no matter where you go.
When you have a mental illness like Bipolar Disorder or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder it’s easy to lose yourself under the weight of your symptoms, so you learn to accept people for who they are, as long as they’ll do the same for you. When your parent suffers from these kinds of illnesses you learn to expect some less than desirable company sleeping on your couch while you’re getting ready for school – or just getting home.
4. You don’t really invite people to your house.
Since you never know who’s going to be there you’re never sure when it’s safe to have people over. Telling your parent that you want to have friends over isn’t enough of a deterrent to stop them from inviting creepy strangers and random neighbors into the house, so your social life consists of sleepovers at other people’s houses, and hanging out at the library and local parks.
5. Your medicine cabinet can often outdo the pharmacy you go to.
Walking into your bathroom to grab an allergy pill or
6. You go to the pharmacy (or the doctor’s office) at least once a week.
Let’s just face facts here – you know the pharmacist. By name. You know what kind of dog she has, and how many teeth her youngest daughter has lost. You even know what kind of hair dye she uses – and why. That fifteen-minute waiting period between showing up at the pharmacy and actually getting the prescription filled is like a coffee break at the office, and you’re constantly trying to get your parent to stop oversharing unnecessary information with the same woman who’s going to be refilling your inhaler in three weeks.
7. You have a higher chance of developing mental illness – even if it’s just situational depression.
Sometimes the reason you can understand your parent's unexplainable behaviors is because you experience them too. Sometimes the sun’s rays feel like a punishment, and getting out of bed is too hard. Sometimes you’re just so angry you can’t stand to be home. Sometimes you look in the mirror and see your parent – mental illness and all – staring straight back at you, and spend the next two weeks over-analyzing your own behavior and reactions to things just to see how far the apple can fall from the tree.
8. Mental health days are as much for you as they are for them.
Every now and then you’ll hear the words that resonate inside of you, creating a deep level of understanding between you and your parent – “I need a mental health day.” Mental health days aren’t just skipping school or work to sit around at home watching television – at least not for your parent. While you hold down the fort with the biggest bowl of spaghetti you can find, your parent goes out with some friends and gives you both some room to breathe. When they come back, they’re happier, more stable, and generally recharged, and you feel like you’ve gotten the best nap of your life in, even if all you did was watch the first season of Charmed. Again.
9. Your parent really does love you.
This is the hardest one to hold onto when things get really bad. When medications stop working, stop being taken, or need a change in dosage or brand you’ll have days when you wonder just how far off you are from a real-life reenactment of Running with Scissors, and buying a one-way non-stop to literally anywhere sounds amazing. Then you’ll come down the stairs and see that your parent ordered dinner from your favorite restaurant, or they left you a few dollars for some snacks at the corner store along with a note telling you to have a good day at school, and you’ll remember.
10. Even when you move out, you still feel responsible for them.
I moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana for four months. During that time, she was scratched by a stray cat she was trying to rescue and developed Cat Scratch Fever. I had to call and speak to the ER doctors to make sure they knew about her medication allergies, her chronic illnesses, and her triggers before she could even be seen – because she was already making a scene. I’ve since moved home, but before I made it back she moved to Arizona. We still check in with one another as regularly as possible.
11. A bad day does not mean a bad life.
This will become your mantra on the days when you want to pack your bags and never look back. You will, inevitably, have days where you just can’t stand to be at home. You will stay at friends’ houses, you will
12. It’s not your fault.
Mental illness is not something you can control. Especially not someone else’s mental illness. This is one of the hardest lessons you will have to learn. Just because something was fine three days ago doesn’t mean it’s fine now, and that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. When your parent talks about impossible things – people that aren’t there, songs that don’t exist, conversations that never happened – remember that it isn’t your fault. You didn’t cause this, you can’t fix this, and you have to take care of yourself, too.
