by Beth Ayers
February 15, 2024
While raising children with behavioral health challenges, many of my relationships became strained. Some due to stress, others to comparison and self-pity, and a lot from feeling alone and misunderstood. The most important relationships impacted were my marriage, my relationship with my child, and my support network.
My husband and I had been married for 9 years when mental health began to serious affect our child’s health and our family’s life. Parenting in general can cause tension between couples. Being on the same page as each other, having similar parenting styles and values, agreeing on consequences, communicating effectively, and supporting each other are all things I have found important in raising children with my husband. And all things I have had to learn and work on. Every family has their struggles and goes through ups and downs. Through trying times, I was able to turn to my parents, friends, and other moms for support. When my difficulty became more than common parenting challenges but parenting a child with behavioral health needs, those relationships shifted and the way I needed to be supported changed. My husband and I had been going to marriage counseling. I had been attending Al-Anon meetings. I had made friends with other moms with kids in the same grade as mine. I was part of a church community and Sunday school class. My loving and supportive parents lived close by.
When we discovered our child was self-harming, we had no clue who to turn to. I didn’t know anyone who had dealt with this with their children. We called our counselor, who had also been seeing our child for a short time after teachers expressed concern. He suggested talking in a safe environment, asking what was going on and how we could help. When that didn’t work, the counselor went with us to the ER to have our child evaluated. Behavioral health, mental illness, and psychiatric hospitals were not things I was familiar with. I didn’t know what decisions to make, what questions to ask, or how to help my child. My husband and I found ourselves on an emotional rollercoaster and didn’t know where it was taking us or how to make it stop. Our child was admitted into the youth in-patient psychiatric center, and we went home heartbroken, panicked, exhausted, and unsure if we had done the right thing.
I called my 3 closest friends. They were as shocked as I was. I remember one praying with me over the phone and how comforting that was. The next day we went for visiting time and met with the case worker. The whole process was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. I had to leave my coat, cell phone, keys, and purse in a locker. I signed in and was given a visitor’s badge, buzzed through the wide double doors, walked down the long hallway pass children in the day program, and buzzed into the ward. My parents also visited. This was all new to them, too. If our youngest child was with us, we would meet in the common area with supervision. Our child asked us to contact her friends’ parents and ask if the friends could call her. I called, explained the situation and the request, and none of the friends called. I don’t blame the parents or kids. I’m not sure I would have wanted my child to call a friend in the psychiatric hospital. Not knowing any better, I probably would have also discouraged their friendship. What I, and a lot of people, thought of as “bad behavior” was actually mental illness. And mental illness isn’t contagious. If our child had been in the hospital with cancer or a burst appendix, friends and parents and all who cared for us would have visited and called. We would have asked openly for prayers at church. Casseroles would have been delivered. The stigma of mental illness kept us quiet and friends away.
We continued raising our child through high school with many more hospital stays, challenges, and healing. During that time, it was hard for me to see the grade school friends, now distant, out with their parents, going to prom, working at their first job, and getting their learner’s permit. I saw other parents doing things with their kids that I had dreamed I would be doing with mine. I compared my life with others’ social media posts and felt alone, sad, and sorry for myself. We told very few people, even my grandparents and aunts and uncles didn’t know. Close friends who I could be honest with didn’t know how to respond. I often heard “I’m sure it’s only a phase.”, “Did you put them in enough activities when they were young?”, and “Maybe what you both need is a day to relax or a family vacation.” My well-meaning friends were also unfamiliar with mental illness and wanted to treat it like a bad mood or bad parenting. Their desire to fix or say the right thing to make me feel better left me feeling misunderstood and isolated. The chronic stress and constant battles of raising a child with any extra medical needs is exhausting and can affect parents’ mental health, physical health, work, and home life. I spent so much time making appointments, driving to appointments, waiting in waiting rooms, fighting for services, learning all I could about mental illness and how to be a better parent, researching treatments and resources, and trying to care for and not fight with my child, I had little time or energy for my marriage. Worrying about my child often came out as anger towards my husband or irritability at everything. It was hard to remember we were on the same team in a house at war. I felt overwhelmed and unsupported. My parents were always supportive in their own way and loved all of us. I found it hard to make different choices for my child than they made for me without defending myself or criticizing them. They loved me, their daughter. But they also fiercely loved their grandchild and would do anything they could to help, even if it meant going against me. I felt hurt and angry.
I have found relationships involve hard work, vulnerability, the risk of being hurt or let down, uncomfortable conversations, honest feelings, acceptance, forgiveness, and healing. They are ever evolving. They come and go depending on what season of life I’m in. They are important to me. Some of the relationships I had I no longer have. Some have grown for the better. Some are still strained. Some are stronger. Some are new. All have been changed by mental illness.