Tender Topics

For the month of May, Kindred Mom is covering the following topics: Feeling Inadequate, Sleep-Rest-and-Rejuvenation, and Mental Health Awareness Month. We hope you’ll return to read the wonderful essays we have to share with you and cheer on the courageous mamas who have shared them.

If you haven’t listened yet, we’d love for you to check out the new Kindred Mom Podcast! 

When I think about the topic of mental health, I’m reminded of that hilarious Bob Newhart clip in which a woman enters his office seeking psychological help. Bob initially responds in his typical deadpan humor then yells to his patient, “Stop it!” She is stunned by his calloused approach to her legitimate struggles and leaves his office more confused and discouraged than when she arrived.

Have you ever been given similar advice when you’ve sought counsel during an overwhelming season in your life? In your grief and stress, maybe you’ve turned to a friend for perspective and she flippantly replies, “Don’t worry. God has a reason for it. I’m sure it’ll all work out!” While those words may be true, they offer little more than a Band-Aid to our gaping wounds. Those oversimplified, cliché answers often leave us feeling unheard, devalued, and isolated.

In my nearly 40 years of life, I have battled depression (post-partum and depressive disorder) a handful of times. I didn’t want to feel like the world was caving in on me, crushing any hope of my circumstances improving but I felt powerless to move forward. I couldn’t just “stop it”, as if depression were some magical switch I could control on a whim. Something was broken in my ability to choose joy and find hope. Jesus seemed aloof, watching me struggle from a distance but with no real concern for the deep sadness that plagued me.

When life feels overwhelming and sad, these are 5 tools that have helped me through the shadows to a place where I can recognize truth and begin my journey toward a healthier way of being.

1. Be honest. I had to admit that I wasn’t “fine”. I needed help in addressing the negative thought patterns that ran circles in my mind. Those who knew and loved me could no longer provide the necessary help. Life felt inescapably sad and stifling. I struggled with ongoing hurt and guilt that required a new way of thinking. Owning my need for help meant risking further vulnerability but it also meant I was one step closer to freedom from the crushing dark.

2.  Call a (trusted) doctor. Sometimes a simple phone call can help with the chemical part of depression. I was at my son’s appointment when his pediatrician said, “So, when are you coming to see me? You aren’t the same vibrant person I met 10 months ago.” I was stunned by her direct approach but that’s exactly what I needed to finally address my overwhelming stress and grief. She encouraged me to consider an antidepressant to help with the probable chemical imbalance. I used to feel shame in taking an antidepressant; I felt like I was being judged for my lack of faith in God to heal me without medication. But that’s faulty thinking. While God’s grace is enough for our needs, He can and does use medication to help us on the road to healing.

3. Find a good counselor/therapist. My doctor referred me to a therapist who specializes in overachieving women who struggle with burnout. (Can you believe that’s an actual thing?) Counseling helped me to process my thoughts and experiences in a safe place, where a trusted guide pointed me to the truth. She gave me time and space to face the deeper issues and gain a better understanding of my life and heart and what God was doing in both. Counseling gave me practical strategies to accept the truths I already knew and to move forward in them.

4. Sleep. Sometimes sleep is the best anti-depressant. I’m learning to turn off the screens an hour before bedtime, read a good book, and go to bed earlier.

5. Focus on the truth. The truth is that God is with us, delights in us, and created us to thrive in using our gifts to serve Him. Daily journaling, intentional times of quiet, cultivating authentic friendships, and listening to good music have all encouraged me to focus on what is true.

I don’t know what you’re facing in this season of life but hope and help are possible. If you’re overwhelmed with sadness, paralyzed by stress or grief and unable to “stop it”, make time to address your pain and struggles. Maybe it’s time to be honest, call your doctor, find a good counselor, get some sleep, and focus on the truth.

Have you struggled with depression in motherhood? What tools have helped you to move through the shadows?

 Katie Carper is a recovering people-pleaser with a strong sense of justice and a deep desire to include the excluded. She’s grateful for coffee, laughter, and this adventurous life with her husband and 4 kiddos. You can find her at katiecarper.com where she blogs about community, faith, adoption, and special needs with hope, humor, and a good dose of snark. She also shares snippets of her life on Instagram. 

For the month of May, Kindred Mom is covering the following topics: Feeling Inadequate, Sleep-Rest-and-Rejuvenation, and Mental Health Awareness Month. We hope you’ll return to read the wonderful essays we have to share with you and cheer on the courageous mamas who have shared them.

***This week we are doing a fun giveaway in celebration of the Kindred Mom Podcast release (quick links to subscribe to the podcast are on the sidebar, and we have a podcast page in the navigation with show notes for each episode). From May 17-May 24, you can enter to win one of two Hospitality Bundles full of goodies that might help you head up a Summer Connection Group in your local area. There are some beautiful things from Magnolia Market included. Not to be missed! Enter on Instagram (beginning May 17) for the Backyard Coffee Hour Bundle or subscribe to our email newsletter to win the Evening Moms Gathering Bundle. Winners for both giveaways will be chosen on May 24th.***

The car pulled to a stop in front of my family’s apartment, and I looked up to see the shadowy figure of my mom standing at the sliding glass door. I knew that stance well. It meant she was angry. Again. What could I have done this time? It was 11 o’clock at night, which after  mom’s normal bedtime, but I was 21 and had been at a church event with my boyfriend and his godparents.

I entered the apartment to ringing accusations.

“Where have you been? I’ve called everyone including your previous pastor, the police, your boyfriend’s cell phone and his godparents’ house. You couldn’t have been at church the whole time!”

I seethed inside. Don’t I have the right to live my life? How embarrassing that she called the police on me because I wasn’t at home before 10pm. Why is she suspicious of everything I did. Can’t she trust me? I had never done anything to jeopardize her trust. I have never smoked, never drank, never got in with the wrong crowd. I’ve tried so hard to obey. 

I felt trapped in an endless nightmare of wondering what would upset her. She hadn’t always been like this. When I was a child, people sought her out for godly wisdom and frequently visited our home. She was active in church activities and held a good job. My dad passed away when I was 7. The first few years after his death were relatively uneventful but when I was 11 Mom became increasingly paranoid and was admitted to the psychiatric ward for several weeks. After that she was never the same. She was suspicious about everything and everyone. This prevented her from holding a job and she cut off contact with all my extended family. Her irrational anger reared up anytime someone appeared to be against her even when the perceived threat was completely unfounded.

I lived day to day, year to year, trying to hide myself away so that I wouldn’t be the target of her fury. Those years took a toll on my mind as well. Since everyone else had been cut off, Mom was the main influence on my life for a long period. At times, her break from reality was a slow fade which pulled me with it. She would talk frequently about how people were against us. I started to believe that she was right: everyone was against me and I shouldn’t trust anyone.

But I was angry. I saw my peers gaining increasingly more freedom with age, while my freedom was continually reigned-in the older I got. Anytime I voiced my resentment, Mom accused me of being rebellious and twisted my words. In the end, I would feel guilty for my reaction and convince myself that I was wrong for feeling that way.

When I was 17 I started working at a local convenience store to help support the family. While I was working one day, a local locksmith named Walt came in the store. He started a conversation with me and found out that I was a Christian. When he left the store that day, God told him that he needed to continue visiting me at the store to demonstrate to me the love of God the Father. Over the next several years, Walt continued visiting me at work. He encouraged me to write down my feelings about my situation, and gradually I began to trust him. Walt’s wife suffered from mental illness, so he was able to help me sort through many of my own issues stemming from my home life and my mom’s condition.

It took me years to understand that mom’s actions and behavior were and still are a result of a mental illness. She remains in denial of it and I was too, for a long time. As I came to terms with her condition, I grew to understand my past, and learned to be more realistic about the future. For so long I lived with a false expectation that she would one day be normal again. Every time she would have another episode, I found myself deeply disappointed.

Living in that environment for so many of my formative years made me realize that I had to learn how to break the cycle for myself and my children. I began a quest to understand my own mind.  I wanted to figure out why my pervasive emotions were overwhelming fear, shame, guilt, and insecurity. I began reading books by neuroscientist Dr. Caroline Leaf, and through her writing, I gained perspective about my own mental struggles. As I studied the statistics, I knew that if I didn’t work to retrain my destructive thinking patterns I would be passing these traits of mental instability on to my own children. As my fearful thoughts would bubble up to the surface, I began the tedious task of painstakingly separating them into two categories: is this a rational fear based on truth or is it something that Mom was afraid of?

I still have a relationship with my mom, but having struggled with anxiety and moodiness when I spend time with her, I’ve had to set boundaries. My husband’s godmother insisted that I had to find a way to separate my mom from her illness, encouraging me to enjoy her on the good days and recognize that on other days it was the illness talking.

Situations still arise when the illness takes me by surprise and I am frightened by its shadowy figure. In those times I learn to screen the phone calls, or turn the issue over to my husband. Denial would lead me to live subjected to the illness. Courage leads me to tough love in the form of boundaries or emotionally distancing myself for a period of time. I choose not to be a victim, and I live each day as it comes, endeavoring to love her despite the sickness.

Naomi Fata is a wife, a work from home, homeschooling mom of three amazing children, and author of Beyond Head Knowledge: Knowing Christ Who Satisfies Our Hearts. She says she is an ordinary person who has found victory in an extraordinary God. Weekly she writes about renewing our minds at Christian Resource Ministry. You can find her on Instagram  Twitter, and Facebook. 

For the month of May, Kindred Mom is covering the following topics: Feeling Inadequate, Sleep-Rest-and-Rejuvenation, and Mental Health Awareness Month. We hope you’ll return to read the wonderful essays we have to share with you and cheer on the courageous mamas who have shared them. Join us on the Kindred Mom Facebook Group to connect with our community. 

Anita’s note: Sarah has given me permission to share her story. We first shared her story in October of 2015 for the #write31days challenge series 31 Glimpses into the Unquiet Mind.  

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The hiss of the bus stopping at the United terminal at the Newark, NJ airport stabbed me. We grabbed our suitcases, in preparation from finishing our transfer from one terminal to another on the airport bus.Two years had passed since that fateful night when we almost lost Sarah, and I hadn’t expected my eyes to tear up as traveled through an airport we had never been to before.

Questions bounced around inside my head as I gripped the my suitcase handle. Had Sarah stumbled off this very bus the night she almost died? Had she listened to the swoosh of the automatic doors and smelled the jet fuel before collapsing on the tarmac? My mama-heart wanted to know the details of that night, even if they hurt. Even though two years had passed, I wanted to make sense of all that had happened during that dark period of her life.

Every momma wants to soothe, protect, and bring light into our children’s nightmares–whether our child is five, 15, or 25. I will probably never know exactly what happened that night, but I believe that praying for my daughter made a difference in the outcome of her story.

The very night that sirens wailed and flashing lights converged on the scene while paramedics knelt at Sarah’s side, I knelt beside my bed, 2000 miles away, clueless to her plight. I knew she was in danger, but I didn’t know how much. The urge to pray was so great that I did something I had never done before–I sent out requests to some of Sarah’s mentors and friends and asked them to pray with me.

We didn’t find out until over a week later that paramedics rushed Sarah to a hospital near the airport and eventually released her after 12 hours. It took months for the full story to emerge.

Our well-brought-up-Christian daughter, the one we strove to instill with the proper balance of caution and freedom, had accepted some drug-laced ‘candies’ from strangers. Without even stopping to think of all the lessons we’d taught her, she had popped the candies into her mouth and ended up passed out at the airport on the tarmac between terminals. While it wasn’t exactly an overdose, it did require hospital observation.

At almost 21, she seemed too old to accept and ingest candy of questionable origin from people she had never met before. After all, we taught her all about stranger danger from an early age.

Had we failed as parents? For the past two years, Sarah’s behavior had bewildered us. She started binge eating and gained weight. She went away to college and struggled to get good grades—despite her 4.0 high-school GPA. She lost confidence in her ability to reason and think and write.

When she couldn’t decide on a major, she went to Argentina for a year, where she seemed to suffer from the throes of first love as well as deep depression. When she returned, the first love was a thing of the past, but the depression remained.

We took her to counseling. She continued to gain weight. We took her to psychologists. She spoke of going for a walk at night and stepping in front of a car.  She came home to stay with us until we could figure things out. I spent hours on the phone trying to find a treatment center that our insurance would pay for.

After seven months, the depression loosed its grip upon her life and she returned to her cheery self again. She stayed up late at night, sketching and painting. What a relief that she had found interest in something—anything, again.

Sarah’s grandparents invited her to travel with them to Puerto Rico for a month.  After one week away she seemed to implode on the stage of social media before our very eyes. She met some guy online and fell in love again.

Sarah started bragging about her drug use.  Drug use?! Our daughter had safely navigated her early teen years without ever experimenting with drugs. The news devastated me. When I tried to talk to her about it, she unfriended me on Facebook.

She met more guys on line, gun-toting terrorist types. She wanted to meet them, so she planned a trip to Europe. She informed us that it was her life and she would live it the way she wanted to.

When I pointed out that she had only $125 in her bank account after purchasing a one-way ticket to London, she accused me of interfering in her life. She lost her ATM card, but continued with her plans of ditching her grandparents at the airport and catching a flight to London five days later.

Fear squeezed me breathless when she got arrested for shoplifting the last week of her stay in Puerto Rico. Shoplifting?! Our responsible daughter, who had held down a part-time job from the time she turned 15, had shoplifted?

We didn’t know Sarah any more. She had morphed into someone who did incomprehensible things and spouted vitriol all over social media. But we loved her and wanted to help.

Unfortunately, once a child turns 18, parents have minimal ways to help. We can’t just haul our 18-year-old off to a psychologist and demand to join the session. We can’t even talk to the psychologist without our adolescent’s permission.

All we could do was pray. Pray for understanding. Pray that she wouldn’t make it to London. Pray that she would come home. Pray that she wouldn’t die penniless and friendless in some dark alley.

It took another week and a few miracles to find out what ailed Sarah. Something we had only joked about a time or two but had no real knowledge of: Bipolar Disorder.

For months afterwards, I let guilt beat me up on a daily basis. If I had only known more, I could have spared Sarah the heartache and trauma of her manic experience. Once I read a few books about bipolar disorder, I couldn’t believe that we, her parents, and the entire medical community, had missed the diagnosis.

But unlike diabetes and pneumonia, bipolar disorder never presents itself in an orderly progression of symptoms and clues. And once an adolescent turns 18, he or she has the legal right to autonomy from concerned parents. The median age for a bipolar diagnosis is 25, which means that half of those diagnosed receive their diagnosis at an even younger age.

If we had been informed, we could have guided Sarah to find the help she needed before the drug-laced-candy-from-strangers incident and collapse at the airport. We could have sought treatment before she did drugs. We could have prevented so much heartache if we had only known a little more.

In the year leading up to her diagnosis, I spent hours and hours on the phone. I argued with insurance agents about accessing treatment. I discovered that the standard for coverage for mental illness differs greatly from medical coverage.

Insurance companies only want to pay for in-house treatment if a patient is in immediate risk of dying. In the case of an eating disorder, the patient must be almost dead (they actually asked how much weight Sarah had lost or gained, and whether or not a physician would attest to her imminent demise). For a mental illness, the patient needs to have expressed suicidal ideation within the last 12 hours.

As soon as a patient shows any sign of progress, the insurance company will no longer pay for treatment–even if the parent, caregiver, or spouse (who know the patient better than anyone else) has concerns about the patient’s health or safety. To make matters worse, one can only find in-patient mental health facilities and partial-hospitalization programs in larger cities. The closest facility to our hometown required a 90-minute drive each way.

Sarah spent ten days in a mental health hospital, and keeping her there that long took constant communication with the medical staff and the insurance company. We knew the real Sarah, and we knew she wasn’t ready to reenter society. But we had no choice. They discharged her to my husband’s care before she was ready to live on her own. The ten-day reprieve did give us time for a crash-course on her illness so that we could understand what she faced and continue to provide support for her.

It took almost three months after her hospitalization for her psychiatrist to fine-tune Sarah’s medications to the point that she could re-enter society and cope with the emotional trauma of her actions during her manic phase.

Supporting a family member who has experienced a mental health crisis is similar to supporting a cancer patient who has finished chemo. It takes awhile for things to return to normal. We got frustrated at times with Sarah’s lack of progress, until we remembered that trauma to the mind takes time to heal, too.

If only we had known more about mental health issues, we would have been able to distinguish between rebellious behavior and behavior that signals a possible mental health crisis. We would have kept track of her behavior and had data to present to her medical providers that might have helped them make a diagnosis sooner.

Sarah suffered from orthorexia* her sophomore year of high school, so I was convinced that help for her problems with depression and binge eating could be found in an eating disorders program. Because we had a good relationship with Sarah before the crisis, she willingly let us talk to her medical care providers–which was both good and bad.

Good because we could answer questions and give information (Sarah struggled to remember details during this time period). Bad because at times we felt as everyone assumed that WE were the problem. The medical professionals wouldn’t believe us when we explained that Sarah wasn’t acting normal.

A mama has to have persistence in order to advocate for her child (or other family member) when it comes to mental health issues. Standing up to insurance companies does not come naturally to me. I avoid conflict and I hate talking on the phone. But Sarah’s life depended on my willingness to advocate for her. Without that persistence, Sarah would not have received the help she needed.

We have learned as a family how to deal with Sarah’s diagnosis. For the first six months, Sarah asked me to call or text her each day at the specific times she needed to take her medicine. She ask me to be her accountability partner, and I periodically check up on her to see if she feels like she is taking good care of herself (regular sleep, exercise, and diet all play a part in regulating bipolar disorder).

I encouraged her to find a counselor near her school so that she has a disinterested third party who sees her on a regular basis to monitor her. Sarah chooses to disclose to her potential employers that she has bipolar disorder and gives them permission to contact her psychiatrist. In other words, she is building a safety net for herself. Her life belongs to her, but I’m thankful that she has invited me into her world.

*orthorexia is similar to anorexia, with an emphasis/obsession on right eating that results in weight loss and withdrawing from social situations where food (especially food that the orthorexic deems as ‘unhealthy’).

Anita Ojeda has a passion for educating people about the early signs of mental illness in adolescents. She writes about her caregiving journeys on her blog www.blessedbutstressed.com. When Anita’s not lurking outdoors looking for and photographing rare birds in odd places, you can find her hanging out with her husband, camping with her kids, or mountain biking with her students.