Occasionally…….. and I do mean occasionally….. I just hit my limit. And I don’t mean I hit the “I’m so over this shit……” Damn that’s at least once a day! But in the last month I have somehow let my walls down a tad, and they seem to have continued to crash to the ground. I feel naked and unprotected…. and the worst thing is I’m losing my firm grip on my reality. I have run a pretty tight ship when it comes to the emotional craziness in this household, with all of my spare time since just a couple of months after losing Trenton being crammed with every therapy available, and if they’ve invented it, my kids have done it. I’m pretty sure we may have even helped create some new styles….! Okay jokes aside, I am struggling a little to tackle it all this month. Pops has hit an almost “depressive like” state of mind…. I’m aware that she is showing signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and we are working on that with a team of six psychologists in the city every Thursday morning, who are wonderful…… but woah. Every morning when it’s still dark she’s in my bed telling me of her nightmares, and every night as I try and get her to sleep she is terrified by every shadow and noise….. but in the next breath will snap into anger and infuriation at the hospital, and swear and threaten to kill the people responsible. Then she will look up at her Daddy’s picture above her bed and cry like a baby……. and remind me that he had something special, that she felt no other Daddy had….. he was funny and kind, and gave the best hugs on Earth….. and was funny. Really funny. To say it breaks me a little more every day would be an understatement….. I feel helpless, because all these therapies I have forced on these kids may not be helping at all. How can I tell? Would it be worse if we weren’t going? Fuck knows. That’s what concerns me. The girls have both run their mental health plans out of session, going to a psychologist who I can now honestly say is a questionable character. I am still awaiting reports from her to pass onto the Lawyers in our case, which we NEED, and she has hidden herself away like a frightened mouse because she’s obviously realised that she may have been less than professional and is terrified of handing them over in case they come back to bite her in the arse. Thats 24 sessions I have sat through with those kids with my full trust in this person that she is following the right protocols to help my babies cope…….. and now I see they may have helped very little, and may not have even been approached in the right way. I am furious…… and exhausted at the thought of starting again. Ruby starts with a new psychologist today to treat her sever anxiety and OCD. It has hit an all time high (never thought it could get any higher) and her questions about whether or not certain things will kill her start from the crack of dawn and end at night with 36 different versions of the same kind of question when I get her to bed at night. She is now sure there are clots moving through her veins like Dad, and they will eventually kill her in her sleep. I have become so numb in my answering of these questions that I can only imagine from an outsider’s perspective that we sound totally crazy. Eg: “Mum, I inhaled something that was floating in the air, that may have come out of something poisonous and it’s moved through my nose and into my brain, will it kill me tonight while I’m sleeping?” “Mum, I can’t find a heart beat, and it’s been nearly five minutes, can’t we only survive for five minutes without one? I feel like my body’s preparing me for the fact that tonight’s the night I am going to die.” Ummm….. yeah…… I know this would freak just about anyone else out that hasn’t lived with severe anxiety…… but I have become the autopilot answering machine, that just says “No sweetie, you’re fine, that’s not possible…… everything’s fine….. you are going to be fine………” How many times can you tell someone they are going to be okay when you question it yourself!? My psych got me onto the old “keep a diary for every little appointment…….” thing. I downloaded Luminosity to start my brain games to help with the short term memory loss, but ironically I haven’t remembered to play them. My diary looks like a pack of derwent pencils vomited in it…… there are so many different colours (at the suggestion of my psychologist) and appointments and reminders written in there that it actually overwhelms me instead of helps me. I am starting to get shifts at work again finally, thanks to a certain boss that has not lost faith in me just yet…. and now I’m terrified to go and stuff everything up because of how little work I’ve had in the last two months. (I was dropped to one shift a week because of my short term memory loss, as I would screw at least one major thing up a day, and then need to be backed up by the other staff who have their own shit to sort….. creating more work for them.) So in the last few weeks we have been given just a tad more than we can cope with, and it’s starting to bring me down. Next week the girls and I have to face the Lawyers psychological panel to prove that Trenton’s death has had enough of an impact on our lives to warrant a case. WTF? We all have a two hour session….. even the kids. I am terrified for them, and of course I gave them the option not to do it….. but they both insisted. This doesn’t mean they’re not terrified though. They’ve had more psychological assessments than most adults I know…… but it never gets easier I assure you. This one HAS to be riddled with “Daddy” questions…… I can’t even fathom how they will cope. Since I sat in that office with my boss who was hesitant to tell me that I was not quite cutting it they way I needed to be at work (he also told me how well I did in other areas…… so it was certainly not a nasty meeting) I have really accepted that I may not be dealing with this shit as well as I had hoped that I still was. The hardest thing for me is to admit it. I can joke about it. But to actually say “I’m not really doing so well” is the hardest thing on Earth for me to admit. Two years have passed. Life is supposed to be less challenging for us…… everyone else has moved on with their lives (with the exception of his closest mates and his family of course……) so why can’t we now be in a better boat? Life is not being unkind to me……. generally I am really happy. I’m just over the parts that are out of my control. I am over the kids being so hurt, by something that really shouldn’t have happened. There are some things in this old life that I’ll never understand. xxx
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