A Letter

While I was out running errands with my dad yesterday, my son called.  He was mad.  Well, I think he was more hurt than mad.  After his graduation, and he asked where his sister was, I told him and everyone else, that she was home with my dad.  No one seemed upset, just sorry she wasn't there.  After dinner, before the drive home, he was walking with me and asked me how she was doing--it was a general question.  I think he believed me when I said she decided to be home with grandpa.  When I told him the truth, he seemed a little sad.  Well, I guess during the four hour drive home, that sadness slowly simmered into full fledged anger.  He called me, Saturday, to vent. I let him.  He had every right.  Why did she do this?  This is so selfish. Is this for attention? Were some of his comments. Bottom line, he was hurt that she put the alcohol before him.  (That's the way of it, feeling hurt at a loved one because the person with the addiction chooses the addiction above them).  After listening to him, I tried to encourage him not to stay mad.  I told him that I have lost hope in her recovery.  I told him that if she would die from this today, in a week, in a year, he wouldn't be able to forgive himself for being so angry, so vent and let the anger go.  He sounded calmer.  I went home and wrote him a letter.  About five years ago, he started thinking in a way that was not normal for him.  Obsessive thoughts.  He knew it wasn't who he was.  To make a very long story short, he fought for himself.  It took him three years.  He found out that he had the beginnings of OCD.  Not the line up soup cans all in a row or can't walk on cracks type.  He was having excessive thinking-worrying.  I don't know what caused it, but he knew something wasn't right and like a man possessed, found help.  The one therapist told him that she expected him to recover fully because he caught it so early.  She was right.  I tell you this, because I mention it in his letter.  Here it is:

 

March 16, 2013

Dear J-

First, I want to tell you how proud I am of you.  It has been a long journey to get to this chapter of your life.  What an exciting trip it has been.  Get ready for a whole new adventure. I am praying God’s blessings on you and a hedge of angels to always protect you.  You are truly a remarkable man.

 Concerning your sister.  I know it is frustrating.  Dealing with mental illness can be frustrating for those not in the same mindset.  Remember when I didn’t believe you about your OCD?  I couldn’t understand what you were talking about. I got frustrated.  I wasn’t respectful of the feelings you were having or the way your thoughts were affecting you.  How disheartening it must have been for you to have me react like that.  I am so sorry for how I was in the beginning.  But, as I began to read what you told me to and research, I have come to appreciate what it must be like, though I will never truly understand since, and it would be disrespectful of me to say, “I know what you’re going through,” because I don’t.  Only you can understand that.  Most importantly, though, you fought for yourself.  You didn’t let my disbelief or anyone else’s, deter you from getting yourself healed.  You knew something wasn’t right, and you researched and read and listened until you overcame it.  You were bigger than the problem.  You were the St. Michael to your dragon.

Your sister is going though her own mental struggles.  I truly believe she is suffering from some form of mental illness that doesn’t allow her to feel that she deserves goodness.  What might have begun as silly thoughts, have morphed into extremely sick thinking.  Thinking  that makes her feel that nothing is ever good enough: The core, pulsating thought being that she is not good enough.  That is why all of the stuff she gets, doesn’t solve the problem.  It’s not good enough, because she feels she’s not good enough.  She doesn’t deserve it.  Why she thinks like this I’m not sure.  I do think it goes back to feeling abandoned.  Whether we think that is realistic or not, her mind does, and that is enough to keep her brain in constant torment.   There was a movie where a girl was suffering from bulimia and she made the comment to her sister, “My brain is eating me alive.”  Your sister has been brainwashed by sick thinking and those thoughts are eating her alive.  I don’t know what to do.  I am daily, preparing myself for losing her.

You can’t save someone from themselves.  They have to be their own savior.  It’s possible to be healed.  They have to want the healing.

I get angry, too.  Mostly at God, but also at her for not trying harder.  She says she does, but my thought then is, TRY HARDER.  I don’t get it, but then again, I’m not in her head.  So, I try to keep 1 Cor. 4 as my guide.  Here it is:

 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

I love you,

Mom