At the beginning of the year I warn my
son's new teachers that they're going to think I'm insane for the first month
or two of school. During all the placement/iep/504 meetings they're going to
hear me go on and on about what my son needs to be successful in school. Together
we will develop strategies and set up restrictive seating, agree on
expectations and create goals, and generally use up an entire tree’s worth of
paperwork to make sure we get it right. Then school will start and they will compare
that to my sweet, compliant, well behaved boy who does above grade level work and
is always willing to help….and whether they admit it or not they will think I
am absolutely nuts. They’ll wonder what I seem to see that they do not, and
think to themselves what was all the fuss about? This kid is freaking FINE.
Lesson One of Raising a Bipolar Child:
People will think you’re nuts. A lot. No really, a lot. You might as well just
make your peace with it now and try not to agonize over it any more than you
have to. The whole world thinks you’re nuts, the end. Try to get over it. Also,
in a nice little twist of ‘damned if you do damned if you don’t,’ they’ll think
you’re nuts when your kid is nuts, and they’ll think you’re even nuttier when
your kid is not. You can’t win for
losing: if your kid is screaming like a banshee and licking the floor you’re an
ineffective, permissive parent raising a total hellion, if your kid is passing
for normal with a lot of support you’re either Munchausen-mom seeing shit that’s
not there or a helicopter mom accompanying Jr. to college just to change his
Pampers. There’s really no way around it; no matter what your kid is doing you’re
effectively screwed. Suck it up and soldier on.
So each year I tell my son’s teachers
all of these things, and every year I can read their disbelief in the curve of
their mouth, a little cock to their head that says “Really? Trist? Are we
talking about the same kid?” a certain tone of justification when reporting his
stellar behavior: “Tristan is such a sweetie, I was expecting a challenge but for
ME he’s amazing.”
I get it from my friends and family
too, the occasional puzzled look, an oddly crooked eyebrow or an awkward
silence in response to a discouraging health and welfare report. “Tristan?
Really? I don’t understand.” And what’s funny is I DO, I DO understand, I
understand completely why you would not believe. It’s hard enough for me as his
mother who knows her boy inside and out like her own second skin to believe the
full range of personalities this boy can contain. The child throws me for a
loop on a daily basis and I am his MOM, it doesn’t surprise me one bit that the
rest of the world finds it hard to understand. He is full of surprises, this
boy o’ mine.
I try to take the disbelief as a compliment;
it means I’m doing a good job. It’s something to celebrate, that the world has
cause to doubt that he battles a disorder every single day. I much prefer that
to times in the past when we left the world with no room for doubt that
something was seriously wrong, times when I’ve clutched at my *own* nebulous
doubt and used it as a buoy to hold us both up. So it's hard and it hurts a
little, but mostly I'm happy that he’s doing his best. This is the boy he wants
to be all the time and I’m passionately proud of him when he’s pulling it off. If the world doesn’t understand how hard he
tries when he’s trying his best then that’s their loss not mine, he’s a
freaking rock star and I’m proud to be his mom.
Despite all that fuzzy wuzzy goodness (which
I truly do mean from the bottom of my heart) a secret small and petty part of
me feels horribly vindicated when the planets align, everything goes wrong, and
they meet my *other* son for the first time. You know, the bipolar one? I’ll
get the call, note, or email from his teacher and the next morning when I troop
into class to discuss reparation, tweak strategies, and modify the IEP, there’s
a distinct difference in the way we interact. There’s a new sense of
understanding in their eyes, a new respect in their tone as they apologize in a
round about way for their prior disbelief. His teacher this year said it best when she announced
brightly “Hey guess what? I don’t think you’re nuts anymore, I believe you now!”
Her unequivocal affirmation of what I already know sparked a quick rush of
gratitude that made me want to hug her neck.
Thank you Mrs. Wilson, I’m so glad you
understand. I’m sorry for my son that he lost control and you saw it, but I’m
selfishly glad for myself that I’m no longer in this alone. You were already my
ally but now you’re my friend. Thank you for understanding.
Boldfaced validation like that is
harder to come by in the prickly forest of friends and family, and for the most
part I try not to ask. Tristan especially wants you to believe he’s just fine,
so he tries his absolute best to behave and when those moments of WTF happen we
try to escape somewhere private till he can recoup. Sometimes the pressure all
but ties him in knots and he has to exert enormous mental energy to keep his
shit together, but he never wants you guys to see him crack. When he does lose
his cool he’s so embarrassed and disappointed in himself any punishment I can
add is just insult to injury. I usually do it anyway, mostly on the principal
of the matter but also so you won’t think I’m spoiling him rotten. Most of you see him for short stretches of
time when he’s on his very best behavior and have only my unproven bitching and
moaning by which to judge the rest of the year, it doesn’t surprise me at all
if you think that I’m nuts. Thank you for being gentle enough with my feelings
not to say it to my face, I appreciate it more than you can know. And if you
simply withhold judgment and love us either way, thank you for giving us the
benefit of the doubt, your kindness is greatly appreciated. Sometimes I crave
your validation enough to gingerly open a discussion about the elephant in the
room and whether you see it too, but most of the time I’m just thankful for
your friendship and whatever understanding you can offer. Thank you for celebrating our successes and
listening to our failures no matter what you believe.
Raising my son has taught me to believe
in myself and my own perception of things more than anything else I’ve ever
done. It takes an astonishing amount of confidence and not a little hubris to
believe in your heart that you know your child best and no one else’s
observations can rival your own, then live your life accordingly in a thousand
little ways. And I am an incredibly fallible parent ya’ll, I screw this up
regularly and make absolutely no bones about it. Fuckup is my middle name so to
insist in the face of my own failures that I am doing what’s right for my son
requires an almost superhuman effort sometimes. If it’s a small betrayal that I’m
embarrassingly gratified when I get to say “I told you so” to a new convert to
the ‘ohnowIgeddit’ club, I’m sure he will forgive me. If not, that’s why we go
to therapy, riiiiiiight?
