I've decided to start this blog since my daughter's counselor suggested I keep notes and a timeline of everything. So today will begin with what I know so far. My oldest daughter Natasha was born in 1999. I was 19 years old, had been married for 6 months and clean and sober for 8 months after a 2 year drug binge that included meth, cocaine, crack and heroin among various other pills and drinking. When Jason and I found out I was pregnant I immediately quit that lifestyle but was really worried that my all too recent past would effect my unborn baby in some awful way.
Natasha was a difficult child from the beginning. She was incredibly hard to get down for naps and at bedtime. I would walk her around while she cried for hours every night before she would finally go to sleep. I was completely exhausted but at the time I figured she was just a fussy baby. As she grew she developed "ahead of the class", crawling, walking and talking well before the average age. She was a beautiful, smart and unhappy little girl. Somewhere between her 1st and 2nd birthdays I started noticing distinct patterns in her happy and fussy times. She would be calm and cheerful for weeks and then something would happen and she would spiral into tantrums and "fits" that would define her behavior for weeks and months at a time. Then as suddenly as the storm came, it would pass. We would always think it was some new parenting technique or discipline we were using.
When she was 2, I talked to her pediatrician about her patterns, worried that it had something to do with my drug use during the first four weeks of pregnancy and he told me (for the 100th time) that she showed no signs of any trouble related to maternal drug use and that it sounded like Pediatric Bipolar Disorder. I remember he had returned my call when I was in my car in a parking lot and for some reason I distinctly remember the light pole I was looking at as I tried to swallow what he had just told me. Our conversation frustrated me at the time because he didn't have much help to give and said to keep an eye on it. He did refer me to something called the Valley Intervention Program that he thought might be of help.
We entered the program which was intended to teach parents how to handle unruly and difficult children and use correct discipline. The basic idea of the class is to say something once and then completely disengage from your child until they complete the task you told them to do. For example, tell the kids it's story time and to sit on the carpet, legs crossed. Those who are sitting quietly get stickers or m&m's and those who are not get completely ignored. Sounds simple but it was definitely harder to follow through with than one might imagine. I think it was a good experience but even there they noticed something different about Natasha. They asked my permission to put us in a room with a one-way mirror and video tape our interactions. I had a microphone and earpiece and they would guide me through situations with her. I spent what felt like hours staring intently at the wall waiting for her to stop screaming about one thing or another. I remember one day during this observation time that she began hitting and scratching at me because I wouldn't answer her for the second time about something. The counselors running the class told me to stand with my face in the corner so she couldn't see me. That felt odd. She was freaking out and Mommy was in the corner.
We were in that class for a few months and Natasha really started to calm down again. We graduated, got a little certificate of achievement for all our hard work and as we went home from our last class, I felt good to know that I was now "trained" in awesome parenting, armed with all the knowledge I needed on how to discipline my lovely daughter in an effective way. We had a couple nice months of normalcy before the tantrums hit yet again.
I remember looking up information on Bipolar Disorder when her MD mentioned it and thinking that didn't fit what was going on. She was never really hyper or "manic" so to speak, and she never really had periods of what I would consider sadness really either. She would just go through periods of intense whining, anger, persistence and clinginess where she would cry all the time. She would get really super sensitive to heat and noise and her clothes would irritate her skin beyond belief. I remember my mom was taking care of her when I was a work and along with the extreme separation anxiety she would show when I left for work, (sobbing and trying to break down the door to follow me down the road as I drove away - kind of extreme), she would tell me horror stories of trying to get Natasha dressed. It was the same way at home. She'd have her clothes on for 30 seconds before ripping them off and melting into a screaming puddle of tears on the floor. Then if we tried to help her get dressed she would get as stiff as a board and shriek like we were skinning her alive. Leaving the house to go anywhere was often an insurmountable task.
Bedtime was still a nightmare too. She would refuse to go to bed and when I tried to carry her back to bed at night she would scream and rip chunks of my hair out. There were many many nights I spent sitting against her door, holding the door shut until she would finally pass out on the floor from exhaustion. She used to scream so loud and hard she would start throwing up. And potty training.... that was one of the hardest times I have ever lived through. Natasha would have night terrors every single night about toilets. Horrible dreams that she would wake up from screaming at the top of her lungs, covered in sweat and shaking like a leaf. We had to take her to the Dr. several times during the potty training months because she would refuse to go. The longest she ever went without using the toilet was 8 days. I remember my mom came over that evening to help me and and I was in tears on the phone with the pediatrician. He told me to go buy an suppository and then instructed me on how to use it with her and said if it didn't work, she would have to be hospitalized. My mother and I were both sobbing as we held my screaming daughter down and performed what felt like sodomy on my terrified baby girl.
All of these episodes would last for a couple months or so and then she would morph once again into a "normal" little girl. I remember during one such bad time that she refused to go to bed and I was so tired that I told her she could come to bed with me and watch t.v. if she would just let me sleep. She was still jumping on my bed, screaming, at 4a.m. and I finally called my mom and dad to come get her because I had to go to work the next day. We couldn't get her into any clothes so I remember my father wrapping her in a blanket and carrying her, screaming and fighting like a wild animal, down the apartment stairs to their car. I had giving her Benadryl earlier that day for a stuffy nose and I thought she must be having a weird reaction to the medication. That's how it was for years. Every time she would start to go through a hard time again I would wrack my brain thinking of all the possible causes. We tried eliminating sugar, dairy, wheat, I watched countless episodes of Supernanny and Nanny 911 to see if new techniques would work.
She was so beautiful and so intensely smart that I didn't really think it was any type of mental illness. But something, on some level, was clearly wrong and it was causing her to act like this. If you've ever seen a horse get spooked by something nobody else sees, that's the best way I can describe it. She would be find and calm until something unknown to the rest of the world set her off and she would buck, kick and transform into a frothy mess for a period of time until she settled down again. And every time we saw her start to calm down we thought we had finally figured it out. Whatever technique or thing we were doing at the time seemed to be working and we would continue with it until the next storm would hit.
It's so weird to write about this now because when we were living it, months at a time, I guess we somehow adjusted to this as normal. Looking back though, it reminds me of how much we've gone through and how hard it's been. I suppose over the years I just followed the ups and downs. Enjoying the good times and believing the worst was over until the next time came and then we would begin our search for answers yet again. I began to avoid talking to other parents about it, even my own husband because the seeming general consensus was that I was a very inconsistent mom who was exaggerating the turmoils of a spoiled child. Few people have ever seen or understood what I see. She hides the broken part from the world and has only ever revealed it to a handful of people. Those people know. My parents, my in-laws, two of my best friends... My husband has seen it all, of course but he's had a hard time accepting that this isn't fixable. Over the past few years though, he is coming to understand that the "something" that is wrong is bigger than even he can tame.
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