Week of the Young Child is a nationally recognized week to celebrate young children and those who care for them. The goal is to raise awareness of the importance of early childhood and the impact the early years have on future development. Montana has many people working on strengthening the early childhood network in our state.
Maintaining friendships while raising children with mental health challenges has been hard for me. I have narrowed down my list of “friends,” keeping those who could support me without judgement through extremely challenging times. I have also come to appreciate friends who are willing to say the hard things out of love that I need to hear. I deeply appreciate others who share in my lived experience and just “get it.” My own comparison and self-pity have caused me to keep some friends at a distance. The stigma associated with mental illness kept me silent about what my family was going through. And the stress of caring for my child, seeking out services, attending multiple appointments weekly, and emotional exhaustion left me little time to devote to my friendships.
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.
I am a mom of two, now adult, children with behavioral health challenges and I work as a Family Peer Supporter helping other parents currently raising children with special healthcare needs including behavioral health. As a Family Peer Supporter, I get to walk beside families and help lift their burden by listening and connecting through a shared lived experience. Parenting is stressful in and of itself. It’s a full-time job with no training manual. Parents don’t clock in and clock out. They don’t get to call in sick. And a literal life depends on how well you do! Like most moms, I envisioned the future for my children including friends, activities, school, summer camp, growing up, high school dances, graduation, college, marriage, children of their own, and so on.
I grew up between Helena and Great Falls, after my parents split, when I was around 3, and my brother was 9. I got the gift of seeing two very different parenting skills. My mom hovered and made sure I did what I was supposed to, and when I didn’t, there were consequences. My dad was very trusting and comforting, but very enabling. They both were amazing, and did the best with what they had, but I had one person in my life that gave me consistency, and that was my stepdad. My mom remarried when I was 7 years old. He was a teacher and coach in this community for over 50 years, and treated me and all my family, as if we were blood. What he was one day, was what he was the next, and when he said he would do something, he did it, and he did it with integrity.
The role of being a parent again, in recovery, has been such a blessing! I missed so much of my kids’ lives due to active addiction and I never thought I would have the opportunity to raise children again. I am so grateful I have a second chance at being a mom, of having the honor to help raise my partner’s now young teenagers. However, parenting teenagers isn’t particularly easy for anyone. Add to that us both being in recovery, my current mental health journey, both of our kids having behavioral health challenges, and us being a lesbian couple, and it makes the dynamics even more complex. As we navigate the path of parenthood and recovery together, it’s been crucial that we’ve established open communication, built trust, and continue to foster a supportive environment for our teenagers.
When I did this month’s webinar on the topic “Radical Acceptance”, one of the comments was on the word radical paired with acceptance. Radical commonly can be referred to a person who is an extremist in their advocacy on topics that are less than traditional. So, the thought was, I understand acceptance in life and as events happen that are less than acceptable, but how I am expected to radically accept these events as something I am putting an “I am ok with this happening to me” stamp on it?
We most often hear about radical acceptance in the context of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) but the concept can be applied with other therapies as well. Part of radical acceptance is acknowledging our thoughts about ourselves even if we aren’t in the right space to challenge those thoughts directly as with DBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
Mental Health Awareness month, what a beautiful way to bring awareness to a very important topic. Growing up I considered mental health to be very extreme mental health disorders. For example, depression/suicide, substance abuse/addiction, or diagnosis/personality disorders. Also, feeling statements that were commonly heard and used were simply happy, mad, and sad. Mental health is so much more complex than the ones I listed. I now believe those are the extremes, because mental health hasn’t/hadn’t ever been addressed. Navigating something within ourselves, without the knowledge and words, leads to a recipe for disaster.
Parents and children may be dealing with Behavioral Health Issues, Mental Health, and Special Healthcare Needs and we have a lot of plates spinning in the air at once. How do we cope with our children’s mental health? Some of our children have ADD, ADHD, Autism, Anxiety, PTSD, Panic Disorders or Bipolar disorder. There are so many diagnoses that I won’t name them all. People can’t physically see mental health issues, so they are often not talked about.
What an amazing subject to talk about. This will be my first time getting share with you on the topic of forgiveness. I would like to start off with saying if recovery is possible, so is forgiveness. I believe that it is hard to have one without the other. As I was growing up I had examples of forgiveness in my life.
I was ill-prepared for taking care of a child with behavioral health challenges. I didn’t understand mental illness and neurodiversity. I hadn’t heard of trauma-informed care. I had little tools in my parenting toolbox. I parented a lot of the time from a place of fear, control, embarrassment, fatigue, and ignorance. I also parented out of a deep and all-consuming love.
When I was first asked to write a blog geared to the topic “Beyond Recovery”, I tried to really think about how I could incorporate a memory that had just shown on Facebook that morning. This was the first public statement I had made about my son’s and my story regarding his struggles.
Family relationships can be challenging, complicated, wonderful, or any other positive or negative adjective you want to put there! Navigating family relationships becomes even harder when there are health challenges. Raising a child with a behavioral health challenge and/or special healthcare need can put added strain on family relationships.
