F%&* Childhood mental illness

                 F%&* Childhood mental illness 

Mental illness is stealing my daughter's childhood and it pisses me off. This was not what I was expecting when she was born nine years ago. This is not what I signed up for! I’m tired of people looking at her like the bad kid when I see so often the sweet, sensitive kid. I hate that people hear the outlandish shit she says rather than hearing the sadness in her cracking voice as she says it. I hate that people listen, but they don’t really hear anything at all. I loathe everything about childhood mental illness and will spend my life doing all I can to fight back against it.  

At the age of four, yes four, we knew something was off. We’d go to pick her up from pre-k and she was almost always the last out because the teacher had to speak to us. I started thinking maybe she had ADHD like her older sister. I mean we have ten kids so running, jumping, screaming just comes with the everyday craziness of our home. She was little though and I could handle it so I figured we’d wait until she was just a bit older to treat her. By first grade she was unable to read or write and only I could handle her behavior. That’s when we received her first diagnoses ADHD and ODD (Oppositional defiant disorder). Most recently Unspecified anxiety disorder was added. I know deep in my heart there are more diagnoses to come and I dread every one of them, but yet each one gives me hope. It’s one step closer to management because managing is all we can do there is no cure. She will never get fully better.  

The problem with mental illness is a person can’t see it. When they look at my daughter, they see a normal looking little girl with a bob cut and huge green eyes. She’ll flash them a bright smile and then say something that will make their mouths drop, usually inappropriate.  That’s when the judging eyes turn to me and I’m left there with a nervous smile trying to explain why. People rarely listen or they pretend to, but I can see in their eyes they think I’m making excuses for her. There have been many kids she has only played with once.  Then there are the times where I do my best to explain her illnesses before her going somewhere and she is a perfect angel and people then think I’m the crazy one. I mean maybe I am just a little bit. I do have ten kids after all.  

In just the past week things have exploded. My sweet little baby threatened a group of kids in her school. She is in the third grade! When she comes home and explains the situation (she was trying to get the group of girls to stop pushing each other) she looks me in the eyes and says “What else was I supposed to do to make them stop?” Like she really didn’t understand the whole reason we were all so mad. The following day she went to a local youth center hit a boy in the “parts” which resulted in her having a black and blue ear from the boy jumping off bleachers onto her. What scares me about that is I know that will likely not be the last time she is hurt because of her lack of impulse control. This week has been so bad it has pushed me to seek more intensive help for her. To search for more answers and think outside the box. Pray for me it’s going to be a long road soon.  

Another way these f^&*ing illness steal her childhood is she’s scared of her own shadow. It’s gotten a little better, but not much. My nine-year-old is so scared of the dark she wouldn’t go outside past sunset. She’d freak out if we were places and the street lights came on. If we were driving, we had to drive with the lights on in the van. Let me tell you my little girl will start to cry literally sounding like a newborn and it can go on for hours, like HOURS! When she does go to places like the youth center, she has to call us at least once in a three-hour period to make sure we are coming back for her and we didn’t forget about her. I tell her every day I would never forget her, yet the calls still come. I haven’t been able to watch the news with her home in like three years. If she does see or hear something scary, she obsesses over it. For example, we live in a place that can’t get hurricanes, but she’s still so scared of them that when it’s really windy her anxiety spikes. My baby is scared to live and that pisses me off!  

I think people also don’t realize what it does to our whole family. My child has not been able to sleep in her own bed in like a year. Refer back to that crying like a newborn thing because that’s what happens if she is forced to sleep alone. I have had to go back on anxiety meds. The anxiety demon I for sure passed onto her. I have started having panic attacks because I become so stressed out. More by trying to find the right help (That’s a whole other blog post). It makes me feel like an inadequate mother. Like what happened? Why can’t I just find what works for her. She is my child after all. I should know, right?  

I am glad I am not alone. One of the great things about social media is parents can find others who are going through the same thing and support them the best they can. Like I know now I am not the only parent who needs anxiety meds themselves from the stress and worry. I’m not the only parent who dreads a call from the school or looks from other parents. I’m not the only one who looks in my child eyes and sees how freakin hard they are trying. To those reading this that have never dealt with childhood mental illness please fight with us. Ask if your school district has good mental health services for parents. Are there clinics near you where parents can find help for their kids. If you see the mom of the bad kid don’t assume, she is just not parenting. Some of us are fighting harder than anyone can ever imagine. To the parents like me it’s okay to say f@#$ childhood mental illness. Scream it if you need to. Then go back to advocating before having to yell it again! Maybe one day we won’t have to fight as hard.