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themanicallydepressedwarrio-blog · 8 years ago

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I’m just as confused as you.

I never thought I would be a mother. Growing up I would express severe disdain for motherhood. Mostly, because I was so terrified of it. I tend to want to excel in every aspect of my life, and motherhood seems like one of those things that no matter how well you do right somebody will think it’s wrong. “It’s not for me” I would say.

In addition to being terrified I spent the better half of my youth raising my severely depressed sister. When she tried to kill herself in the Winter of 2011 I vowed to never birth a child. She was in so much anguish and I understood exactly how she was feeling, and I couldn’t help her. By nature I am a people pleaser, I put those I love before me, and I thrive on making others happy. The fact that I couldn’t do anything for her at all hurt me to the core. It broke me. She was suffering, and I was grasping at straws. I vowed to never be so reckless as to give life to a person that could feel what we felt. With my medical background I know that bipolar disorder is hereditary. That I run the risk of passing this on to my children. My heart couldn’t take having my own children suffer like that. She was/is like my child. I love her as if she was my own. I have spent the last nearly 10 years caring for her as if she is my own. As a minor, in the eyes of the law, she was my child. But something about not being responsible for passing the depression onto her made me feel more at ease. The fact that I understood what she was going through but knew that I was not the cause settled my heart some.

The history of mental health disorders in my family goes back a few generations. My grandmother has schizophrenia, my mother has borderline personality disorder, my aunt has schizophrenia, and my sister, as you’ve gathered, has chronic severe depression. I am sure that the mental health disorders go back even further. I know that I run the risk of passing this horrible disease or something close to it onto my children.

Don’t take this as me disliking children. It is quite the contrary I love children...so much. I am good with them. A natural some would say. Kids love me. Everybody tells me that I would be a wonderful mother, and I do not doubt them. I believe I would handle motherhood well. But is it fair to knowingly have children should I have a child with mental health problems? Knowing that they’d feel as alone, at the peak of it, as my sister did in 2011. Or as alone and hopeless as I did in 2008 when I tried to take my own life.

However, over the past year something in me has began to change. Maybe, it’s my biological clock, or the fact that for the first time in my life I feel safe in a relationship. I have had a number of years of counseling, and have met somebody that couldn’t be more perfect for me. I want to raise a child of my own, now. With Him. I want to be a mother in the worst way. Yet, a part of me still feels selfish. I feel as if I am not allowed the right as a parent because of the Bipolar Disorder. “You’ll be a great mom” says...everybody I know, really. But what happens when I am not anymore? When I have a manic phase or a depression episode. What happens when my anxiety gets the better of me, and my kids get the same messed up chemical imbalance that I have?

I was diagnosed at just 12 with chronic anxiety and a mood disorder. By the time I was 14 it became full blown Bipolar Disorder. I have been through many many manic episodes, and my fair share of depression. I have suffered through OCD, and bulimia. It feels reckless, and selfish to have a baby. Yet, it is something I want so badly.

I was recently pregnant. It was terrifying, yet exciting. I was filled with new hope that I had never felt before. I was so happy. But I miscarried. I can’t help but feel like it’s the universe reminding me that I should not procreate. That it is selfish of me to have a baby. It is selfish of me to bring a child into this world knowing that I could very well pass on the difficulties that I had to endure. The difficulties that I still face, actually. But what if he/she is perfectly normal? What if I am meant to be a mom? After all, it is something that I believe I can be really wonderful at. That I did a great job at when I cared for my sister. That I just naturally and instinctively am good with children. Don’t I deserve to be happy, too?

This stigma that mental health problems have are still there. We with mental health problems are still seen as less than. Less of a mother, less of a friend, less than those that haven’t been diagnosed. But what if we all have problems? What if we all have some sort of anxiety, OCD, etc? Yet, some of us are more self aware...so we get diagnosis, and therapists and medications. Shouldn’t we then be allowed to procreate? To be happy? To have normalcy? These are the things that keep me up at night. That break my heart at 4AM. The things that I don’t think I can ever answer.

#bipolardisorder motherhood miscarriage ocd

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themanicallydepressedwarrio-blog · 8 years ago

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The beginning...my mother.

I should start from the beginning, right? To help you better understand why I am like this. To help those reading these f*cked up ramblings make excuses for me, feel sorry for me, relate to me, or maybe even be inspired by me. Who knows maybe I can make a difference.

Whatever the outcome I just need to get this stuff out there...even if it’s into the vast corners of the deep web, and nobody ever sees them. They just need to come out of me, off of my mind, off of my chest.

Just. Out.

I was born to an unwed 15 year old girl. A 15 year old girl who didn’t have a mom offering her advice about dating, sewing or mean girls. She didn’t have a dad that expected her home 5 minutes before curfew.

She had two parents drunk off of Budweiser, and Jack Daniels. Struggling to feed their four children, battling PTSD from years of childhood abuse, and pain, and the Vietnam war, and neglect.

She was never taught how to love or be loved, and for that I can never blame her. But sometimes I do. I admit that my relationship with Rationality is strained. We aren’t always on the same page. I can’t always reach into the part of my brain that makes sense.

Sometimes, I want to rage and scream and cry and ask why she didn’t love me more. Why she didn’t behave like the other moms. Why was she so f*cking young? Why did my soul choose this path this lifetime? What the f*ck am I supposed to learn from this? How will this help my soul evolve?

So, here she is 15 with a new baby, and no parents, no help, no love, and no clue what she is doing. She tried. She really did. She did what she could with what she had. The problem, you see, is she never really had much at all.

She had to drop out of school because she was 15 with a baby, and as I mentioned before, nobody in the world to help her. So, these milestone teenage things are suddenly all missed; no prom, no graduation, no college exams, no finals, no giddy school girl story telling about high school crushes. She had big girl responsibilities, now.

My brother was born shortly after me in the winter of 1993. Suddenly, she’s a high school drop out with two kids under the age of two. Next thing you know she is under 21 and has not two but three kids. My sister, born in the summer of 1995, almost killed my mother...who went into labor two months too early, and hemorrhaged and nearly died. At 35 she had her fourth and final child, a girl.

All four of us with different, yet, very much the same fathers. Absentee young men who also came from broken homes. My father, honestly; I don’t know much about him, died before I was 8 years old. Gang related activities are what lead to his demise. My brother’s father spent years abusing drugs and impregnating other young women, and my sister’s father, also a drug addict, spent a life of crime, and now will spend the rest of his life behind bars; for a crime he claims he did not commit. Yet, the evidence is there. My youngest sister’s father, also a drug abuser, vanished.

My mother went on to experience more relationships similar to the ones she had with mine, and my siblings fathers. Now, she is married to a man that I believe makes her happy; and raising my youngest sister and some dogs in another state away from Arizona and the pain she endured for over 20 years here.

Why are all of these things important about my mother? These facts? Why am I highlighting her struggles? Because my resilience had to come from somewhere. Even on days I resent her I know I have overcome defeat, and beat the odds because I saw her do it. Because without her struggles I wouldn’t have witnessed her triumphs. I wouldn’t know that life goes on. I would be content with lying down, and giving up. I would’ve let the poison I ingested in 2007 and 2008 take my life.

But I kept and keep fighting because she gave me all she could with what she had and she had STRENGTH.

#family #mother #strength

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