For Parents of Mentally Ill Kids, Acceptance a Bitter Pill to Swallow

My name is Angela, and I am a control freak. If you read this blog with any regularity, this probably comes as no great shock to you. If you're new, however, you may not yet have noticed many of my posts contain the same underlying message:

How can I fix this?
Every parent has a bit of control freak in them when it comes to their children. We want them to be healthy, happy, well-adjusted and in the best possible place when we die so we can rest peacefully, knowing they will be okay. The means to this end often comes at the price of our own ability to think logically--we may know we can't control every aspect of our young children's lives, but by golly, we're going to give it the ol' college try.

It stands to reason, then, that nothing takes the wind out of a parent's sails like a child's illness--particularly one for which no cure exists.

The essence of "control freakdom" is to seek out that which threatens The Perfect Scenario and remove it. Find what is broken and fix it.

Guess what happens when you tell us, "you can't"?

More often than not, we don't listen.

Control freaks believe we can maintain complete control over our lives by simply finding out what the problems are and finding the appropriate solution. Illness, however (be it psychiatric or otherwise), doesn't always have a cut-and-dried solution.

True Acceptance of My Child's Mental Illness Elusive

I spent years making myself crazy (or crazier) trying to figure out what the Magic Combination was to make Bob's troubles vanish into thin air. Other parents had found it for their kids--that meant the answer for mine was out there somewhere, I just had to find it. I couldn't rely on psychiatrists or therapists to find it--they were only interested in Bob when they were being paid by the hour to be. No, the answer had to come from Me. Because even though it's not my life's work to research psych meds or theory, and I'm not a licensed practitioner, I'm the one who has to fix this, because I am Bob's parent.

Obviously, that strategy hasn't worked out so well.

Accepting the situation surrounding Bob's illness has come gradually, in spurts. I have accepted life for our family will not be what I originally planned. But that's about the extent of my acceptance to this point. I refuse to believe there isn't some solution somewhere--not a "fix," but at least a way to allow him to get as close to that end result I imagine for him every day.

I don't know that I will ever completely "accept" that things for Bob are as good as they're going to get, and I don't think I should. The world needs control freak parents to keep researchers and developers from resting on their laurels. And I don't doubt that's exactly what we'll do.

The rest of the world will just have to accept that.