Dear Addie,
It's Mental Health Awareness month, and I thought I would touch base on this a bit, or at least from my perspective of being special needs parent anyway. This journey can cause your mental health to take a hit. I can go through feeling every emotion possible almost daily. The constant rise and fall are enough to want to make you sleep for a week when you have only had a series of naps in the last 18 years. It's exhausting.
But I digress.
The rise and fall of emotions are real. Last week alone, I washed your sheets five days in a row. Five days. I am pretty sure I had developed a twitch by day three, and by day five, I thought I was going to snap – insert anxiety. I started thinking this was all my fault because I could not potty train you – welcome heavy mom guilt, which spirals into who will do all this for you when I can no longer - say hello to fear. And let's not forget envy for those my age and well past this phase of life. All this before they even hit the washing machine. It can feel lonely, isolating, and somewhat defeating, and yes, that was about wet sheets.
Fast forward to the same afternoon after somewhere in the ballpark of seven loads of laundry had been done, and you are happily splashing around in the pool, repeatedly jumping up and down and submerging yourself underwater. There was a time, Addie, we thought you would never get your head wet, let alone go under! I mean, showers and tubbies were a battle for hair washing, but here you were, acting like the next Michael Phelps, and I could not have been more proud as I sat and watched with such joy and happiness—a far cry from the defeated feeling I had earlier in the day.
Addie, I went from feeling every negative emotion possible for your lack of progress with something to every positive emotion possible for your fantastic progress with something else. But not every day holds those joyous moments. Sometimes it is just a terrible day, and on those days, when we are seeking the rise from our fall, it feels lonely. It is on those days that we need connection the most. As humans, we all need each other and perhaps a little acknowledgment to help us up from the ground. Now I have had therapy and medication to help me manage, and I have zero shame in that, but sometimes just talking to a friend or daddy is a great help. Sometimes I need to vent and seek a listening ear. Sometimes I want to talk about anything else to feel more than my fall. Or sometimes, I need to sit in the presence of someone else and just exist together. A listening ear, a conversation, or just being with one another is a way for me to feel less alone. For me to start to rise.
"We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone." – Ronald Reagan.
We all have our rise and fall in life, Addie. Share a smile, hold the door, compliment someone's earrings because kindness will always matter, and it might actually be the acknowledgment that someone really needed.
I love you.
Love,
Mom
Yorumlar