Scent of Cedar *
Well-Known Member
difficult child saw the doctor today. All values from the last labs are better. She had an MRI, and is to learn this afternoon whether this might have been a gallstone plugging everything up over the course of time and causing the symptoms / blood values. I am not sure, but passing that stone (or trying to pass it?) through the bile duct may have been responsible for the pain difficult child experienced last week. She will be talking to the person who interpreted her MRI this afternoon, and he will be able to give us a definitive answer.
All values ~ kidney, liver, electrolytes, oxygen levels ~ better than the first test. She is still sick, her values are still way out of whack ~ but they are improving.
The experience, the certainty that we were going to lose her, has taught me another thing about detachment. I remember a male posting here about not judging our kids for who they are. Facing what might be happening to difficult child found me ferreting out those last judgments I was holding against her. I learned there is a huge difference between seeing clearly and harboring judgments and resentments and seeing clearly without attaching to it ~ without writing a storyline to justify either condemnation or pity. One of us is always posting that what we support, we will get more of. I think that would be the only judgment call we have a right to make: This is a good thing, a healthy thing. I will support it. This is not a healthy thing. I will not support it.
I will detach.
It's hard to do that selectively, when the kids lie like they do.
Holding faith with ourselves, with the good things we put into our children while we raised them ~ we parents need to remember the truth about how our children grew up. We need never to buy into drug or alcohol induced pseudo-memories because, while they are ill our kids don't know themselves what happened, why they are who they are, why they do what they do. They are addicted; they will compromise themselves at every level to get that thing they need. It was so strange that I should have talked to someone who had recently learned from a counselor that reformed addicts are ashamed and regretful at how they have treated their families, and at who they have become, themselves. Kids who are still using, or who are going back that way, do the same kind of blaming and justifying in their own causes that we parents do, in ours.
As MWM's 36 does, though he is not addicted. As Strength's 32 does, as my difficult child son does. I think they may believe what they believe about us. But that is the illness speaking.
We do need to realize that these behaviors are sypmtoms of the illness, whatever the scientists and doctors finally name it.
There is something not right with our difficult child kids. We have known that all their lives, if we really let ourselves begin looking through their infancies, through their childhoods, with that in mind.
We really do need to let all that self condemnation go. If the time should come when your difficult child is in imminent danger, those will be the things you regret. Not what the difficult child did, because they truly did choose those things against our will, and we probably don't know the half of it. It was like, all at once, I could see the waste of years and months and days spent condemning myself, spent blaming and second-guessing myself, making it all about myself. I was so happy I had let go and laughed with difficult child daughter over those past conversations, before we thought everything had changed.
Let all that go.
Condemning myself or the kids never changed a thing, except to create a vulnerability in me which one difficult child or another used to service his or her illness. In a way, other than that it is so hurtful, there is nothing personal in what our difficult child kids do to us. We are dealing with a thus far misunderstood illness. Maybe people are right about vaccines or mercury in the environment or some other something we just don't know enough about to treat correctly yet.
But it wasn't anything we did or did not do as parents, as mothers (or fathers).
There is something physically wrong with our difficult child kids. Maybe it's genetic, maybe environmental. One day, we will know what it was. Until then, the only thing we can do, the only hope any of us has, is to detach, is to stop enabling, to stop helping. Does anyone remember when autism and homosexuality was blamed on the mother's poor mothering? When PMS did not officially exist? When women were believed to have a tendency toward hysteria which could be cured by hysterectomy?
When no one understood that the killing fevers new mothers were developing were being spread by doctors too arrogant to wash their hands between patients?
This will turn out to be the same thing, I think.
The day will come when this is all figured out. There will be help for kids like ours. In the meantime, we need to refuse to waste our energy blaming ourselves, because that isn't going to help the kids. Turning away, not investing in the bad things, the bad behaviors, and not feeling bad about that, not allowing that to destroy us...that is what will help the kids.
A clear light, a way home, a place to come back to and a person to be ~ that is what will help the kids.
I still believe detaching is a right thing, and is probably the only way to survive what life devolves into when we love a difficult child child. It truly does come down to not supporting the harmful things they do. Each of us must try to remember that, were our difficult child kids to turn themselves around ~ or even, if our difficult children were making a sincere try at it ~ we would be right there, supporting and celebrating them. But here is the truth about that one: If the kids were doing well? They wouldn't need a thing from us but love and respect.
We are all in such hard places with our kids' paths, with their betrayals and downright meanness.
But I don't know what to say, about that.
I am grateful to have had you all to meet whatever this turned out to be with me.
It makes all the difference in the world not to be alone with it, not to have to pretty it up or pretend to be better than we are.
Thanks, guys.
:O)
Cedar
All values ~ kidney, liver, electrolytes, oxygen levels ~ better than the first test. She is still sick, her values are still way out of whack ~ but they are improving.
The experience, the certainty that we were going to lose her, has taught me another thing about detachment. I remember a male posting here about not judging our kids for who they are. Facing what might be happening to difficult child found me ferreting out those last judgments I was holding against her. I learned there is a huge difference between seeing clearly and harboring judgments and resentments and seeing clearly without attaching to it ~ without writing a storyline to justify either condemnation or pity. One of us is always posting that what we support, we will get more of. I think that would be the only judgment call we have a right to make: This is a good thing, a healthy thing. I will support it. This is not a healthy thing. I will not support it.
I will detach.
It's hard to do that selectively, when the kids lie like they do.
Holding faith with ourselves, with the good things we put into our children while we raised them ~ we parents need to remember the truth about how our children grew up. We need never to buy into drug or alcohol induced pseudo-memories because, while they are ill our kids don't know themselves what happened, why they are who they are, why they do what they do. They are addicted; they will compromise themselves at every level to get that thing they need. It was so strange that I should have talked to someone who had recently learned from a counselor that reformed addicts are ashamed and regretful at how they have treated their families, and at who they have become, themselves. Kids who are still using, or who are going back that way, do the same kind of blaming and justifying in their own causes that we parents do, in ours.
As MWM's 36 does, though he is not addicted. As Strength's 32 does, as my difficult child son does. I think they may believe what they believe about us. But that is the illness speaking.
We do need to realize that these behaviors are sypmtoms of the illness, whatever the scientists and doctors finally name it.
There is something not right with our difficult child kids. We have known that all their lives, if we really let ourselves begin looking through their infancies, through their childhoods, with that in mind.
We really do need to let all that self condemnation go. If the time should come when your difficult child is in imminent danger, those will be the things you regret. Not what the difficult child did, because they truly did choose those things against our will, and we probably don't know the half of it. It was like, all at once, I could see the waste of years and months and days spent condemning myself, spent blaming and second-guessing myself, making it all about myself. I was so happy I had let go and laughed with difficult child daughter over those past conversations, before we thought everything had changed.
Let all that go.
Condemning myself or the kids never changed a thing, except to create a vulnerability in me which one difficult child or another used to service his or her illness. In a way, other than that it is so hurtful, there is nothing personal in what our difficult child kids do to us. We are dealing with a thus far misunderstood illness. Maybe people are right about vaccines or mercury in the environment or some other something we just don't know enough about to treat correctly yet.
But it wasn't anything we did or did not do as parents, as mothers (or fathers).
There is something physically wrong with our difficult child kids. Maybe it's genetic, maybe environmental. One day, we will know what it was. Until then, the only thing we can do, the only hope any of us has, is to detach, is to stop enabling, to stop helping. Does anyone remember when autism and homosexuality was blamed on the mother's poor mothering? When PMS did not officially exist? When women were believed to have a tendency toward hysteria which could be cured by hysterectomy?
When no one understood that the killing fevers new mothers were developing were being spread by doctors too arrogant to wash their hands between patients?
This will turn out to be the same thing, I think.
The day will come when this is all figured out. There will be help for kids like ours. In the meantime, we need to refuse to waste our energy blaming ourselves, because that isn't going to help the kids. Turning away, not investing in the bad things, the bad behaviors, and not feeling bad about that, not allowing that to destroy us...that is what will help the kids.
A clear light, a way home, a place to come back to and a person to be ~ that is what will help the kids.
I still believe detaching is a right thing, and is probably the only way to survive what life devolves into when we love a difficult child child. It truly does come down to not supporting the harmful things they do. Each of us must try to remember that, were our difficult child kids to turn themselves around ~ or even, if our difficult children were making a sincere try at it ~ we would be right there, supporting and celebrating them. But here is the truth about that one: If the kids were doing well? They wouldn't need a thing from us but love and respect.
We are all in such hard places with our kids' paths, with their betrayals and downright meanness.
But I don't know what to say, about that.
I am grateful to have had you all to meet whatever this turned out to be with me.
It makes all the difference in the world not to be alone with it, not to have to pretty it up or pretend to be better than we are.
Thanks, guys.
:O)
Cedar