Perfectly Normal People Can Be Crazy

Daughter number one has bi-polar, we think. Personally, I think it is something else. But whatever it may be called, it causes problems for her, interferes with her life, and requires medication. We frequently have small crises and calls to schools. But she has changed, because now when we have these crises she is able to identify where she went off track and to profess a sincere intent to try and avoid the problem behavior in the future. Her therapy is successful in that she mostly understands what is going on and where she needs to change her behavior, even if she’s not yet able to successfully do those things all the time.

Daughter number two has no diagnosable mental illness, although she is a teenager. She is able to handle all of her many activities, her heavy school load, and always be on time without any prompting from me. She gets good grades and puts lots of effort into her chosen after school activities. She is mostly a happy, cheerful, talkative young lady. But every now and then, without any warning, the wind changes and suddenly everything I do annoys her, and request I make results in protests and deliberate indifference ( and I’m not talking about heavy duty requests here. I mean things like “go get your coat so we can leave” kinds of things). This morning I wanted her to brush her teeth before we left for school. “Momma!” she wailed. I stopped, unable to think of a good response, since she always brushes her teeth and she knew she was about to leave for school, so there wasn’t anything about the circumstances that tipped me off to the coming weirdness. After that, everything I did or said elicited a huff, eye roll, or contradiction. Even my statement in the car that it was cold today got a snippy response as to how it wasn’t really cold because it was above freezing.

So, daughter number one and daughter number two both have “issues” as we like to say. Is it better to have big issues by know you have them, or to have little issues that you completely deny? At this point, I’m not at all sure.