My Parents’ Bumpy Lives

I am not the only one with bumps in my path! Unfortunately, by default of my illness, I have given many of them to my parents. After displaying clear signs of anxiety as a child and then struggling with bipolar disorder at the mere age of fourteen, my mom had her hands full. That’s when her road got bumpy. It was the beginning of her journey in helping her sick child.

My bumps were pretty consistent and somewhat manageable for many years. There were no alarm bells just yet. But everything exploded the day that I was diagnosed with a profound case of mental illness. Thus it began!

Once I found myself in the throws of bipolar disorder, the amount of bumps that my parents faced was jarring. I should name a few. I have to begin by explaining my irritability since it is the biggest marker of bipolar disorder. People can’t understand the magnitude of having to deal with such a thing until they have been there themselves.

The most hurtful bump was that I constantly tried to push them out of my life. During my episodes I sometimes even screamed and used profanity as the means to do it. As I clearly felt tormented every day of my episodes and even after them, I seemed unreachable by my parents. How awful of a situation is that for a parent to go through? My mom even told me one day that she felt like “I had died and she didn’t know if she would ever get her daughter back.”

The end of my episodes was not the end of the bumps that they faced. There were doctor’s appointments to be scheduled, medications to sort out and decisions to be made. It seemed like I would never work my way out of my moods. Grief surfaced as another bump in my parents’ way as they knew how worthless I felt. As I blended into crowds of people who would never do anything with their lives, my parents couldn’t convince me that my life was filled with potential.

Spanning years ahead in my life, I wrote my memoir at the age of thirty-six. Oh boy, is it filled with bumps! After reading it, my dad was shocked to find out that there was so much that I have been through that he knew nothing about. He wants all parents of children with bipolar disorder to know that there is so much more under the surface than they even realize. He told me that my book humbled him.

But I don’t live this way anymore, so what is the difference? The difference is how my parents faced their bumps. It wasn’t just their relentless strength and wisdom. It is all elaborate, seemingly a dance that they perfected. I would love for you to know all about how my parents fought their own beasts of my bipolar disorder.