It is amazing what a being can do when the house is quiet and peaceful. I have even begun to think about writing again. The past few years, I have been so absorbed with my bipolar daughter that I have not had the wherewithal to have a regular creative routine. I used to write every day, I belonged to a writer's group. I got paid for writing. I had poems published. I sold some of my work. Last night I began to think that it would be good for me to be out and amongst my fellow artists. This, after years of needing all of my energy to deal with my out of control teenager-determined to go to any lengths to save her.
I remember Caroll O'Connor made a commercial after his son died of an overdose, and in it, he said,
"Do any thing that you can to get between your kid and drugs."
I remembered this when we had to hospitalize her three times last year, after we had exhausted all of our other options. Three times in one year. We put her in a place that specialized in teen agers and even there she was alot for them to handle. She was out of control even there. WIth a staff. If there had been street drugs there she would have found a way to use them. And so she went back a second time and it slowly began to dawn on her. She was running out of options and she knew it. Fortunately she did not want to die, she only wanted to feel better. If she had been bent on final destruction, can anyone have saved her? Finally after the second hospitalization-when she was finally given the meds that work to keep her stable and not zombified, and an out patient drug treatment program and continued therapy she began to feel good enough to want to live beyond the next smoke.or sniff. or line or drink or whatever.... she left it all behind, the drugs, the friends and the others who"loved" her.... She is even trying to give up cigarette smoking. She is thinking of her future-that she has options and wants to go to England and have kids and finish school.
Is this a miracle? Yes it is a miracle that healing can take place..That for the first time in years she feels hope and she has good days and she feels some control. I wept when she started to feel good and it was such a contrast. And so hard to comprehend that she had felt so bad for so long. Kids do not always have the verbal vocabulary to tell you how they are feeling. They cannot tell you that they are experiencing bone crushing emotional pain or having compulsions to hurt themselves. Theirs is a vocabulary of actions, and sometimes our job as parents is simply to keep them alive long enough for them to find the help they need.
So yes it does feel like a miracle and I am grateful for it. But it is also the result of years of work on my part. And years of work for her doctors and years of my husband supporting us while all this went on and it cost me my muse because I was too stressed and tired to listen to it and I was always waiting for the call from the school from the police, from her friends from the hospital...and it seemed like there always was one. Not one day went by where there was not a crisis. Not one day.
And muses, do they always come back? of course not. They are fickle and tempermental and need constant attention or they vaporize. I remember reading Maya Angelou saying that she felt sorry for her kids having a mother who was a writer because she was always secluded in her room, writing. It is so hard to find that solitude that you need to write-hours at a time every day when you have kids-and when you have a bi polar or any special needs kids or any other family member, well it is damn near impossible. I know that some do it, that they write or make art in the midst of chaos. Others, like me, a survivor in my own right, need some order, and time and quiet to be able to hear my muse, to take direction from my inner voice. And lately since dear daughter has gone to stay with her dad-just like that-it got so quiet and I read in a blog about someone resuming morning pages and I thought well maybe I would take that route and give myself that gift again and see where it leads and here I am writing about it and who knows I may just continue along this path, this benevolent way, and see where it takes me. We still have one daughter with us at home, but she is a quieter variety.
Mike has brought me coffee ( I am lost without him) and we will have breakfast together before we go our separate ways. I will go into my sewing room, find my journal and do my morning pages and he is going to build us a shelf to put in our hutch so that we can organized our dishes so that we don't have to take everything out to get to the ones behind them. O the joys of living in a shoe box, or as I call it, the Hut.
