When it Feels Like Hell on Earth

This was the kind of day that made me want to just scream.  For a long time.  I haven't posted for a while because after the first post I felt too vulnerable, like maybe I don't really want to do this.  My daily life is so far from peaceful, or predictable, because I live with an emotional tornado.  "Caroline" was doing better, after recovering from being in a psych hospital for over a month, and then she got sick with strep.  Within a day or so of starting the antibiotic, she began to slide backwards into anger and depression with daily ugly explosionss.  We remembered that in the past we had to increase her mood stabilizers during a round of antibiotics,  so we did and she got better.  But then, after finishing the antibiotics, her other sisters came down with strep, and she got reinfected too, so she has been on yet another round of stronger antibiotics, so more mood swings.  Then to top it off, although I am usually careful when sorting her numerous pills into her weekly pill box, but I discovered, much to my horror, that I had accidently left out her 200 mgs of lamictal, only giving her 50. So you can imagine what this week has been like.  I couldn't just give her the 250 mg she had been taking because a sudden increase with this med can cause a horrible thing called Stevens-Johnson syndrome where your skin falls off.  So I have been slowly titrating it up, but she was truly suicidal tonight.  We didn't take her up to the hospital in Richmond because we felt that she will improve dramatically within a few days with the higher dose of lamictal.  If she doesn't we'll have to readmit her to be safe.

School.  What amount of school she has gotten this year has been so sporadic that she and I are both a little panicked.  We keep picking up and then she tanks and we lose a day, and then a sister has a doctor's appointment, or Caroline has one of her many, many doctor appointments etc.  Or like today when I slept so poorly last night that I was a complete zombie and had to take a nap, but couldn't sleep because I had to take lunches to my younger kids.  The whole afternoon  I just felt sick from the lack of sleep.  Then Caroline really took an emotional dive when her sisters got home.  The first blow was when my oldest declared that two boys were vying to take her to the senior prom.  Then she did something that Caroline viewed as a selfish snub. She began to  absolutely fall apart.  She kept saying her life was so awful, and she would never have friends, and she will fail in school again, and she just wants to live far away from her sisters because she feels so alone.  She was explosive and angry and just desperate, crying that she just wanted to go to heaven.   

I feel like everyday is a battle to keep her alive, not just getting her through sixth grade or these tumultuous middle school years.  I truly feel like I am constantly trying to keep her from killing herself before her life gets better.  Yes, she has had an awful six years of being asked to leave schools, losing friends, hospitalizations that gave her PTSD from the incompetency of the staff, the rejection of her sisters, the loss of a childhood from age 7 to almost 13 now.  

She stopped playing at the age of 10.  She just lost that ability to imagine and pretend and just relax and play.  Instead, she was driven to manufacture great "projects" that would have such a stranglehold on her she could do nothing else.  Our next door neighbor thought it was just brilliance, but I knew, from my mother's heart, that she was not free to play anymore.  Something had taken over her mind and now she could only perform missions.  I feel even sadder now as my 9 and 11 year old girls play for hours with their barns and horses, making  up wonderful adventures.  The contrast is stark and heartbreaking.  

I am so tired of being on this rescue mission day after day.  Rescuing her from scholastic failure, from failure to even keep one friend, from failure at home with her shattered relationships with her sisters, from the failure to live a full life and have hope that things will get better.  Everything about her is awkward, painfully so.  She has no fashion sense, so she will leave the house looking pretty odd, which doesn't help other girls to like her.  She doesn't know how to manage her curls, and so she looks disheveled and unkempt, even though I try to help her.  She doesn't carry herself with any sort of poise at all--in fact she kind of stomps and throws herself along in a way that sometimes reminds me of cerebral palsy.  I think it is the sensory integration disorder she has.  I have spent so much money on trying to help her look more "in" because she has so little going for her in terms of social skills, but nothing lasts long.  She just goes back to being sloppy and disheveled.  I love her so much.  She is the apple of our eye.  It is very painful to see her struggle with every aspect of her life.  Please pray for our struggler.