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I’ve taken a few weeks off from this blog, but not for the more obvious reasons – the impending Thanksgiving visit by my in-laws! No, it’s been a time of reflection about whether I am up to continuing this.
I thought I had escaped unscathed from the emotional trauma of my daughter’s depression. I thought that I had neatly compartmentalized my feelings. I thought I was in control when I needed to be and falling apart when I had the chance. When your child is hurting, you rise to the occasion. I remember once when Amy’s sister was 5 and she cut open her finger. I was brave, I put my game face on and took her to the emergency room for stitches. No problem, no worries but I guess it’s different when it is a three year ordeal trying to keep your child from giving up and throwing herself into the abyss of despair.
Hank, my husband/Amy’s father and I learned how to hold it together when we needed to. We were brave for her, we were her advocates when we encountered problems in getting her help, we were partners in keeping her company so she was never alone. We leaned on each other at night, after she was asleep. We’d rant to each other, cry about our fears and worry over her future. We did learn a valuable lesson, though. We could not panic together – only one as allowed to panic at a time. If we panicked together, not only did we lose hope but we lost the focus on her treatment. As Hank said “This is one battle where failure is not an option”. That became our mantra during many a frightening time.
Anyway, back to my reason for taking time off. Amy is now participating in the speech team at her high school (pretty damn good considering where she’s been, huh?). As part of the deal, parents have to come to the meets and help judge. These meets are huge – 20 or so schools participating. They have about a dozen different events so parents never end up judging kids from their school let alone their own child.
I was signed up to judge three events, one of which was poetry. I’m going into this happy and content, enjoying watching Amy talk with her friends and thrilled by her confidence. I’m thinking that poetry is going to be about flowers and trees – you know, a Walt Whitman thing about choosing one of two paths. I should be so lucky. These kids chose tougher subject matter, in fact, two of the six decided to present poems about mental illness and suicide.
One was titled “How do you get so lonely?” , tackling the issue of depression. All I remember was something like, “how do you get so lonely that you choose to leave this life?”. Suddenly, it was as if I was back at home and Amy is begging me “Why won’t you let me kill myself?” The second one was about the sister of a girl who is in a mental institution. The description is so true to our experiences of Amy’s three stays in the hospital that it all comes flooding back.
Somehow, knowing that these kids at the speech team were just reciting words from poems without any knowledge of the real agony behind, made it even more surreal. You don’t “get” so lonely, it just happens to you. It creeps up on you like a thief and steals your life away from you. After the event, I went behind the high school and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
There are some things in this world you should never have to know, like how many children are hurting out there. To see an entire ward of kids battling mental illness is overwhelming. The sadness you feel looking at their faces – confused and lost in their own private hell and not being able to be reached. The thing is, they really want to be reached. Something primitive is still there, hoping someone will get them out of it. They really want to be better! I think that’s what makes it so hard for them – they try but it just doesn’t happen.
Since then, I’ve not been able to get back to the blog. I just never expected it to still affect me like this. Amy hasn’t been hospitalized for a year and a half and she’s been stable for over a year. I thought it was behind me. I was wrong. It may never be. I and Amy have lived to tell of it, though. Hank and I did win the battle but I think we’re all still paying the price of war.