Fighting the Stigma of Mental Illness: Your Language Means More Than You Think It Does

A Clue.

Personally, I don't deal with a lot of stigma around my mental illness. I will explain things the best I can to the sincere, but I just do not have the patience for the willfully ignorant-- and it is intentional dumbness since information about not only mental illness, but the myths and stigma around it is everywhere. However, I have had it long enough, and have known others with it long enough to not only know it exists, but to understand how the smallest seeds, such as everyday misuse of language, grow into the darkest, thorniest, and scariest forests. People suffer.

Dear Mama

Mama, 9 years old

It has been two months and one week since you left. I know you taught me everything I need to know, except how to live without you. I know you would frown upon that, considering your own fierce independence and that of which you expected of me.

I am sure somewhere within me, you have left all the tools I need to now be the matriarch, but right now, I feel like the bumbling fool. I tried on a pair of your shoes, and they were a bit too small. How funny, I overfill your shoes, but fill them not at all.

Some nights, your five year old grandson tells me he is sad. I ask why, and he tells me he misses his grandma. "I miss her, too."

And we snuggle a little closer.

There are so many things I would like to say, though I thought I had said everything once your health was clearly failing. Still, some things to tell you about hadn't happened yet. I've kept every voicemail. I listen to them sometimes, when I think I am strong enough to breathe through them. 

Daughter, Mother, Grandmother

I miss you every day. Sometimes, I think to call you --and not that I wish I could, but I think to pick up the phone and talk to my mom. Then I realize I cannot. A friend of mine, one you adored, one who adored you, and one who lost her mother long ago, said that never really goes away.

There is so much of you I will carry on, but I know more of you will spread through my daughter, your granddaughter most like you, once she grows into herself, and even a little now.

There is much of you I might not have gotten the chance to know, though I listened to and recorded and often retell your stories. Yet, it was not until toward the end that I think I might have caught a glimpse of you when you were younger, before you were married, before you were a mother. Once you were widowed and began to somewhat heal, it was so fascinating to watch you pursue new interests and embrace new experiences for all they were worth. It is such a shame your life was cut short before those things could fully form. I suppose I just wish I could have seen more of it.

I don't want to end this, Mama. Maybe someday, I will write more, and I think I probably will. However... 

Fun With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Don't be a simpleton and take this all wrong because that would be stupid, and you don't want to be stupid. You want to be kind and supportive. Or you want to fuck off, whichever keeps your underwears from a'creeping.

Derp Is A Choice.

The Decade That Got Real

Shortly after my 36th birthday, I was walking across my deck when I had a thought that literally stopped me in my tracks and took my breath.

"I'm getting to the age when people I know are going to start dying."

A few weeks later, my husband was killed when a driver made a left hand turn without looking, or looking twice.

It Was The Cost of Having It All, And I Don't Want to Pay

Only in the mirror, okay?

Understand that I am aware we are not all made the same. My experiences, my thoughts-- they imply nothing about any other woman or any other mother.

I have been a married, stay at home mother. I have also been a married working mom, a single working mom and student, a single working mom, and a widowed mom, working and not. I have lived paycheck-to-paycheck, paycheck-to-minor-miracle-to-paycheck, and I have had some disposable income. I grew up in an era when women could "have it all," and it was taken for granted that we all wanted it "all." I could never figure out what was "wrong" with me because I was never really happy. I was tired, and I had hit 40 before, looking back on my twenties and thirties, I saw a pattern, and following that pattern was an epiphany. Gasp! I never wanted "it all."