Day 15: Let it go already!

I'm finally dealing with it. My second to last schema. It;s been haunting me, and I've been avoiding it, but tonight I'm going to talk about the Unrelenting Standard/ Hypercriticalness schema. Remember, Unrelenting Standards or Hypercriticalness refers to the belief that whatever you do is not good enough, that you must always strive harder. The motivation for this belief is the desire to meet extremely high internal demands for competence, usually to avoid internal criticism. People with this schema show impairments in important life areas, such as health, pleasure or self esteem. Usually these people's parent were never satisfied and gave their children love that was conditional on outstanding achievement.

Oh boy does this schema hit a chord with me. Maybe that's why I've struggled so hard to finally write about it and work through the issues surrounding it. I have exceptionally high standards for myself, and hold others to the same, which if they were actually able to meet, then it would mean the second Coming had occurred and we were all finally perfect. I'm so bad that I give myself a nervous breakdown over the state of the house. The laundry overwhelms me to the point of tears. The dishes overwhelm me into hysterics. My living room overwhelms me to where I'm hiding in my room under the covers crying. I can't start small, and so it is insurmountable. That's my black and white thinking problem., I can't even start to find a solution to a problem if I can't see an end to it at the end of the tunnel. It's taken months of therapy for me to slowly come to terms with the fact that this is not a black or white area of life. There is grey here. My house doesn't need to be absolutely spotless, but the cockroaches don't need to feel at home either..

And of course I'm my own worst critic. I've complained that I don't know enough people. I think if I could get a feel for what other people's houses looked like, I might be more okay with mine because I could gauge how close to the middle ground mine was. But since I have only Martha Stewart magazines and TV houses to go off of, I constantly think my house is falling entirely too short in how it should look. 

I could laugh this off as a horrid quirk of mine, but it extends to other aspects of my life as well that have more far reaching consequences. I have such high expectations for my children, and I don't know if they're reasonable (read: healthy) or not. My therapist has really worked with me on trying to see my children as they are, and not as mini adults, but it's taken a lot of time to even try to see some slight improvement in this area. Let's take my son for example. He's 3. And he makes Max from Where the Wild Things Are  look positively tame. I've been at my wits end more than a time or two because he just doesn't listen; He's run out in to a parking lot and roads more than once. He's gotten lost at the store more frequently than I'd like to admit. He's been disciplined so many times I'm ashamed to give a number there. I was convinced he's ADHD because of how wild he is, but I finally broke down and took a Positive Discipline class, which focuses on the Love and Logic curriculum, which other things added in. Between that class and therapy, our relationship has really started to improve.  Another thing I do to try and help my relationship with my son is to watch other mums who have sons that are my little boy's age. I watch what these boys do, how the parents react, and what they let go and what they don't. 

So that's just one example of where being hypercriticical is probably providing years of income for a therapist some years down the road from now. And then there's my oldest. She is the most amazing, sweetest, kindest, lovable, responsible, snarkiest, brattiest, empathetic, wondrous 12 year old you will ever meet. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder as a child, and again as a young adult and was very impressed by all that the Ingalls children did and were responsible for. I made the decision that my children were going to have real responsibilities and chores like that because I wanted them to grow up with a sense of pride, accomplishment, and lack of entitlement in their world. So my 12 year old is responsible for tending her younger siblings when need be, and has been responsible for them since she was 10, she is responsible for her own laundry, and she has the garbage and dishes are her two chores she does regularly, with mowing the lawn and other chores added in as needed. I hope I'm doing well by her and not creating a terrible monster who will need years of therapy by the time she's an adult.

So those are a few examples of how the unrelenting standards schema affects me. If you relate to it, what does it do to you? Do you see any of yourself in this schema? As usual, let me know in the comments! 

It's hard being a mom some days...it's hard being ME some days...

So I'm reading this book that my neighbor let me borrow, and it's triggered a lot of feelings and emotions in me. I'm only half of the way through, but so far it's been mostly guilt over how crappy of a mom I am some days.

I'm reading it, and the main character talks about how she watches her mom have peppy days, and then dark days, and I empathize with her, a lot. Mainly because my kids have to suffer through my up and down days, and it's only been the last few weeks that they've had any semblance of what a normal mum should be. My kids had to deal with a mum that couldn't get out of bed, and if she did, it was only to go downstairs and collapse on the couch and sleep some more. That's what they put up with for weeks upon weeks before I was admitted this last time. I'm seeing my therapist twice a week at the moment, and she's constantly inquiring if I've taken my meds that day or not, and chewing on me hard if I haven't because that's what did me in this last time...I'd been off my meds for 4 months prior to going inpatient.

So back to this book and the feelings it evokes...I've been told that I am entirely too analytic for my own good, and that side of me gets in the way of me tapping into my emotions. Well, I don't know if I was doing much analyzing today as I was reading, because I felt lots of things. I feel so strongly for both the mum and the daughter because I relate to them both. I remember being a teenager and being so out of control and not having any idea what was wrong with me and why I couldn't control my emotions. I most definitely relate to being inpatient in the psych ward. But I also relate to being a bipolar mum, and my kids suffering because I'm the one raising them. I get the terrified feelings of panic, the despisal of self because you're lashing out at your kids and you don't want to, and you don't mean it, but the words or actions come out anyway. I understand the seemingly unendurable weight of depression, and the fog you're in, where nothing can spark interest in your life, and there's no meaning to your existence, so why keep going?

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself, I've also been told that I'm entirely too overcritical of myself, but I feel like I'm constantly failing my children. There's no empirical proof of this, (I think)...I mean they are fed, bathed, clothed, and hugged and loved on, but I'm not taking them to the park everyday, or I'm not consistently taking them to story time at the library. I don't sit and read books with them for hours at a time. I feel like I'm not doing a good job teaching them about our religion or about the Bible and those stories. There are so many ways I feel like I'm letting them down, and I can't get over the crushing guilt of that.

I hate myself when I'm having a dark day, as this author puts it. I hate it when my dark days spread into weeks, then into months, and then me ending up in the hospital for weeks at a time. It's a vicious cycle that I fear will never end. I just want to be that 'Leave it to Beaver' mother who has fresh baked cookies waiting for her kids when they get home from school, who participates in the PTA meetings, who can honestly have dinner on the table when Dad gets home from work, AND have the house looking spotless 99% of the time. But that's just not me.

I'm lucky if 2 out of 3 of the main rooms are clean, and I try to keep the living room presentable at all times. I despise cleaning and am currently decluttering my house so it's easier to keep clean. I'm also a terrible cook, so many nights it's either my husband grilling something up, or else it's something out of the freezer for the kids. I struggle with keeping up with laundry, I can't ever stay on top of it because I get bored, or overwhelmed, and it will simply sit, in piles waiting for someone to get to it. The dishes are probably my biggest nemesis, and thankfully that's a chore that's been handed over to the oldest.

I just feel like such a failure because I have let my kids down so many times. For example, during my last depressive episode my oldest wanted to go to the pet store. Just to look around for a little while. I couldn't do it. Every day she would come home because I'd promised to take her, and I'd have to let her down and tell her mommy was too sick to go that day, maybe later. We still haven't made it to the pet shop. My middle two seem to be the least fazed by my episodes right now, my 5 year old can control the TV, and anything she or her brother need, she'll get without any assistance from me. As I stated in my earlier post, the one who I feel suffered the most was my baby.

I had an impossibly rough and traumatizing pregnancy with her, coupled with severe postpartum depression. I never really 'snapped out of it' with that, and I longed to give the baby up for adoption. I had a hard time bonding with her....for 13 months I couldn't bond with my youngest. I cried a lot over having that fourth baby, it felt like such a burden to our family, and I felt it was all my fault for getting pregnant. Maybe one day I'll post about the struggles my kids dealt with while I was pregnant with her because I was a zombie. I was on and off bedrest, I had gestational diabetes, and I was unmedicated for my bipolar disorder. It was a perfect storm of traumas to leave anyone spent and exhausted.

So she is born and becomes daddy's little girl. I had no interest in her. I tended to her basic needs, but I didn't interact with her like she needed because I just couldn't find it in me to get worked up about her. I wish I'd sought help for this sooner, maybe then I wouldn't feel so guilty now, but it wasn't until I was in the hospital and had time to process things that I was able to come to terms with my emotions and ambivalence towards her. Now, nearly a month later, you'd never have known we had a difficult relationship. Fortunately for me I have very forgiving children and when I opened my heart up to her, she welcomed me with open arms into her heart as well. I was truly blessed to have that occur.

Now that I'm stable, I am doing more of the things I like with my kids. We go to the park, we play outside, we read Scriptures and have story time. I'm better about keeping the house picked up, and I'm better about being more loving with my kids. That's the part I feel they miss out on most. Consistently having a mother that shows her love for them in so many tender ways. Because I can't be that mother when I'm not stable. No matter how hard I try and how hard I want to be, being a great mother does not come easily when I'm in a depressed state. My manias are generally very short lived, so I can't really comment on my parenting during those times.

So that's some of what I feel when I contemplate being bipolar as well as being a mum. It's so difficult, but when I'm doing well, it's one of the most rewarding jobs I've ever done.