The Long and Broken Road

It's been two and a half years since we lost my father in law to suicide.  

That sentence kinda needs a moment to hang in the air.  Because that's where his death remains.  In the air.  It's always there.  Always in the room.  Since my husband has began to process his father's death, I refer to the suicide as the third person in our marriage.  Of all of the things my husband and I have navigated in our 14 years together, this is the hardest.  It's unfix-able.  There's no way to make it go away.  It's just here.  In the air.

Yet as present as it is, the void that my husband feels is vast.  It's so big that he doesn't know how to fill it.  And here I stand, as his wife, tasked for eternity with ridding him of what hurts him, and I can't.  I can't fix this.  I can't explain or kiss it away.  I can't find the way out and I don't have the answers.  That is a helpless feeling when it's my job to make this man happy and heal what hurts him.

Since we met there has been this balance in our relationship.  I am the mouthy, moody, spirited one and he is the mellow one who pats me on the head and brings me back to level.  But since my father in law's death, the balance has shifted.  My husband is now left on the other side of the scale with the mood swings and the short temper and I am clinging to his side of the scale trying to figure out how to keep things mellow and pat him on the head.  It's a shift in balance I'll accept because when we said our vows, I meant them.  For better and for worse.  But I'll admit I'm struggling.

I want to make this better.  I want to get my husband back and sometimes I'm scared that I'll never know that same man.  I know that over the course of our lives together we will inevitably change.  We evolve and we grow.  I understand this.  I was 22 when I met my husband so we obviously have changed with each other over the last 14 years.  But this is different.  This is beyond change.  This is a change in who he is in his spirit.  He is hurt and wounded and I worry that it will stay with him.  That the very spirit of who he is won't be able to find it's way back.  And part of me worries that this change in spirit will lead him down the same road as his father.

Irrational? Maybe.  My husband has promised repeatedly to never hurt us like that.  But what I have learned in the last two and a half years is that people who hurt like this don't always plan an end for years.  They try their absolute hardest to hang on.  They push it down and force their smiles and they love and nurture the hell out of the people around them because they have so much love for them.  But in the end, they can't reconcile that deep down pain and it overwhelms them.

The first year we didn't get to process my father in law's death because we were in survival mode when I had to be on bed rest from 13 weeks pregnant to delivery at 39 weeks.  Then once we had the baby and it looked like things were okay, the baby and I were hit by a drunk driver when he was 4 weeks old.  Four weeks after that I had surgery to have my gall bladder removed.  So for a year I was the reason that my husband couldn't grieve.  I hate that.  So I will do everything that I am able to do to help him now.  I listen when he needs to talk, I give him space when he needs it, I take him to Survivors of Suicide meetings, I have even taken him to a medium so he could speak with his dad.  All of these things have helped.  But none have been the fix.  I don't think there is one.  And that is hard.

I miss my father in law.  I am sad that he won't be physically here to know my children.  I am sad that he missed my brother in law's wedding to his amazing wife last year.  I am sad that he left his wife when she thought they had the rest of their lives together.  I miss his phone calls.  I miss the bond that he had with our oldest son.  I miss his photographs.  I miss his smile.  I miss his hugs.

I am sad that my husband lost his best friend.

I love my husband in ways I can't even put to words.  I am committed to this man for eternity.  He is my heart and soul.  I won't give up on him.  But this is a long and broken road that I don't know how to pave.  I also don't know where this road leads.  But all I can do is trust in God to keep us on the path He has chosen.  We will make our way together.

Demons

I have three amazing boys.  I love them unconditionally regardless of what they do. 

My boys are 15, 4, and almost 10 months.  There is a reason the first two are 11 years apart.

My oldest is a good boy with an amazing heart.  He also has Absant Seizures and ADHD.  Absant Seizures are seizures of the brain.  Meaning that my son didn't have physical signs of the seizures since it was just his brain that was seizing for many, many years.  So for years, we had no idea that there were physical causes for my son's behavior.  He was impulsive, angry, energetic, and had trouble in social settings or while under the care of anyone outside of our house hold.  He required structure and if anything in his little world changed we braced ourselves for the fall out.

Over the years numerous day cares and schools worked closely with us to try and figure out what was driving these issues.  I am thankful to each of these places for not giving up on him.  My husband and I worked day and night to try to teach him the steps to making better decisions, control his impulsivity, and be a better self manager.  And he made great progress.  But when he had an episode it was horrible.  I remember sitting on the edge of my bed crying my eyes out and telling my husband "We can't have any more children because we fucked this one up so bad!".  That may sound irrational to many but when it's YOUR kid and you just can't figure it out, YOU take the blame.  YOU shoulder the guilt and burden of each thing he does.

I need to clarify that he wasn't a monster child.  I would say to people that 90% of the time he was the most amazing, funny, happy, loving kid you would meet.  It was just the 10% that people never forgot.  I think that's what caught people off guard when he'd act up.  They just couldn't understand where it was coming from.  This wasn't the sweet boy they knew.

Well many tears, lots of doctor's appointments, a couple of therapy sessions, and a whole lot of tests later we got closer to taming the beast when he was diagnosed with the seizures.  At the time of diagnosis he was enduring upwards of 20 seizures a day and who knows how many at night.  That must have been exhausting for him.  He got to the point, at about age 8, where when he had a seizure his eyes would slant shut and he'd just check out for a minute.  He'd been doing this for years, in a subtler form, and we just thought he was shooting us dirty looks.  We called them the snake eyes.  Once we got his seizures diagnosed and he was on steady medication for that, the behavior greatly improved and we exhaled thinking this was what was causing him to act up all those years!  But while the behavior got better, he still had a few severe episodes and was ultimately diagnosed with ADHD as well. 

The two conditions had been fighting each other for years.  For years I cried thinking I had done something wrong.  For years I carried the burden of believing I was a horrible mother. For years I felt the eyes of the people around me as they judged my child.  For years my poor son probably couldn't understand why he couldn't just act right.  So now that we had answers we could fix it. 

For several years now my son has been on the right medications to control both issues and is finally the kid he is meant to be.  I am happy for him.  But I still carry the demons.  I still feel the effects of the years of judgement and the feelings of inadequacy as a parent.  I still hold my breath and wait for that phone call that he's hurt someone or himself.  I wonder if our other two boys will suffer the same fate.  Most of the time I can talk myself down and know that we are great parents who trudged through the muck of parenthood and came out the other side.  That he is a good kid going through normal kid stuff now.  But then there are the other times.  When he has a bad day and gets angry or moody.  I question him, me, the meds, his hormones.  I go into that old problem solving mode where there's a reason for this and I need to fix it before it's too late and he ruins his life.  I have a hard time differentiating between an ADHD episode and a regular old teen mood swing. 

This is my scar.  I am a different kind of mother because of what we have gone through.  I don't have the luxury of saying "He's just a boy." or "You know teenagers." No.  I have to wonder if everyone around me is looking at me like I have failed him.  I have to hope and pray that he will be a good person and a successful adult despite the things he had gone through.  I carry the blame despite the cause.  This is what mothers do.  And until you have been in these shoes, you don't really know just how much it hurts. 

I don't know if I will carry these demons forever or just until he turns 18.  I don't know if these demons will continue to make me question myself until all of my children are grown.  But I know that they are here each day.