The Clouds are Gathering

Daughter number one has been doing well for a few months, keeping her schedule and maintaining a normal approach to life. But I think she's slipping. I see the signs beginning to show their slippery little heads.

For borderline personality disorder, these are the signs I see lining up in her behavior:
phases of mild mania
erratic sleep pattern
failure to do parts of her mandated routine
increasing inattention (taking the night meds in morning, or vice versa, or forgetting to take meds at all)
drop in grades
inadequately doing the parts of her routine she is still doing
asking really dumb questions (is it okay to sleep with hair spray in my hair? is it okay to use this plate instead of the other plate for my hot dog?)

All of these signs are small, but they are gathering up and increasing and coupled with the fact that she has started to stand right in front of me and make faces again, just to literally get me to look at her, I figure this all means that she is cycling and will start inventing ailments again or manufacturing a crisis.

Let's count the days - although her dad and I now have better recognition skills and an arsenal of mental restraints to use to try and contain her through this. Let's hope we're good enough to keep everything under control this time.

It's a Big Theme

I thought that writing things down and thinking them through on this blog would be helpful to me and to others who have serious medical and psychiatric issues to contend with in their loved ones. What I find is that writing these things down is hard. Knowing what I want to say is hard sometimes, but more often, finding the time and energy is hard. The last year and the last six months in particular have been harder than any other period in my life, and the parade of serious issues - any one of which should have taken all my time and attention - has been non-stop and stunningly severe. So much so that I hestitate to even write them for fear that readers will believe that I am the family member with borderline personality disorder. When I sit back and review from an observers vantage point the list of things we have dealt with in this house I cannot trust that anyone will believe the truth of what is written. I physically don't have the time in the day to gve attention to all the needs, let alone write about all of them. We won't get into the emotional resources necessary to handle all this, because I ran out. I had to pick one issue to throw completely under the bus. Which left me with no enough for the rest, but at least there was a little for the rest.

So tomorrow I will begin to write in concrete words, not the vague psychic spillage that has been this post.