Ok, so I have gotten home for Thanksgiving break. i am currently sitting in my living room in Texas and thinking about my life as I try to finish a research paper that is 3 days overdue. I don’t know why I am having such a hard time with it.
It may be because the paper I am writing is about how family functioning and environmental factors of a family with a parent with Bipolar Disorder (a.k.a. Manic-Depressive illness) cause the offspring of the afflicted patient to be more at risk of developing psychiatric disorders….(ugh.. a mouthful, i know). And well, my dad is had BD and he sometimes scares me. He doesn’t scare me in the sense that he will physically hurt me or anything, but his mental stability is always in question. He often has violent episodes and I have lost count about how many times I have had to clean up glass from the floor, turn dressers upright and/or throw away broken stereo systems or whatever it is he has chosen to throw to the ground. There are multiple chips in the tiles in the kitchen, the living room, his room.
I’ve been woken up in the dead of night to make him coffee and a routine session of listening to how I am a horrible child, an ungrateful daughter, and piece of filth beneath his shoe and how my mom is a whore and a bitch and how we are nothing but women and he is the dog of the family and their can only be one “alpha.”
I never know when he will wake up in an episode and make our lives hell for a few days. There are only a few times, when I know he is going to switch over into angry, violent mode, and that is when he is being nice. I know that sounds weird, but when he actually starts being really sweet and happy and making me food at 1 in the morning, because we are both up and he “wants to talk”….I know that the next day… maybe even in the next 20 minutes (you never know with BD), my life is going to be hell. I never truly feel safe and I feel horrible that when I’m gone taking classes hundreds of miles away at Dartmouth I leave my mother her with him alone.
I’m not saying he is abusive (at least not physically, he sure is mentally abusive), and granted, according to mom, he is better when I’m gone (but that’s because my mom has learned to take all the other shit that comes with the disorder and it prolongs the time between episodes), but that doesn’t erase the fact that we are mentally scarred.
My mom has been married to him for going on 27 years and I don’t know how she does it. I feel bad to say this, but I fear that if he had been my husband, I would have left him a long time ago. I love my father, but I wouldn’t have been able to live with him. The sad thing is that if my mother leaves him, he will surely kill himself or end up in jail. He wouldn’t survive, I know that. BD patients are highly suicidal and without support… well you can get it.
He is a good man. he truly is, he has just had a really shitty life since he was a little kid living in Mexico. Although, it is well-accepted in the psych and medical communities that BD is largely biological, I am more prone to believing that the environment is a bigger factor. I won’t go into his life, because a lot for the shit is personal, but frankly, I am a bit surprised that is isn’t more affected then he is psychologically.
I know he says and does thing becasue of the disorder, but event hough I see the illness, it doesnt make it all that much easier to forget those things. I have forgiven him and I will continue to do so, but I will never forget all those times that I’ve cried or worse all of those times I had to watch my mother cry.
I feel that it is only a matter of time before she develops Unipolar depression or some other mood disorder. I know for a fact that she is starting to go into episodic depressions (Not BD thank goodness, but major depression is ideal either).
Now, my biggest fear is that he is going to die while I’m school. A few weeks ago, my mother called me while I was at school and told me that he started coughing so badly that he fell out of the car. i was so disturbed that I couldn’t write a paper I had to write for hours. I mean my dad had BD, diabetes, gastritis, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Anxiety issues, and lung damage from chain smoking for the better part of thirty some years I’d wager. His health is no where near ideal and he told me that he is really starting to feel scared that he won’t be here all that much longer. My father is really proud man and for him to say he is scared means he truly is terrified.
Just th other day, when I was flying in to my city, I tried caling my mom to tel her that I owuld be home soon. She didn’t answer, but then I noticed that the land line phone was off the hook too and i grew a bit apprehensive, but I let it go. when I got home and I still couldn’t get ahold of her or my dad i started to worry more. when my brother’s girlfriend called me and said that she and my brother were waiting outside to pick me up, i really started to get worried. I know this sounds like I am paranoid and maybe I am, but there are few things that would keep my mom from picking me up from the airport. I started thinking the worst. it was a relief when I saw my mom in the passenger seat of my brother’s car and she told me that she forgot her phone.
Now, just yesterday, my dad came into the lving room after taking a nap and starting talking nonsense. My mother and i kept tellinghim that he was not making sense, but he just continued anyway. Then, about 20-30 minutes into it, he finally relaized that what he was talking about didn’t make any sense. He had been hallucinating. Hallucinations are sometimes peresnt in bipolar disorder in the mania stage, but you really have to have severe bipolar for that and he has never hallucinated before.
So, now I realize that he is either just getting worse, he’s getting schizophrenia, or both.
I don’t know what I am going to do with myself…I don’t know what is going to happen to him or my mom.
I just don’t know about anything anymore.
