Archive for the ‘Surviving’ Category

I find myself sitting in muted silence.

No white noise, no static, no background music.

For someone who has always found comfort in words, the silence is sometimes deafening.

Have I disappeared from your life?

Most likely so, and I apologize.  I’m still here.  I still observe, listen, read.  But so often, I can’t find the words to join in the conversation.

It’s hard to explain the changes I’ve gone through.  Harder, still, to introduce people to the person I’ve become.  I’m still me, and yet I’m not.

For the most part, I’m somebody better than I was.

There’s this fluff that we carry around with us, over the top of who we are at our very core.  It shields us and gives us a buffer between our most bare, essential selves and the world around us.

I feel like I’ve lost mine.  Or, to be more precise, I’ve torn it off and set it ablaze.

I had a life that I loved, and it turned out that nothing about it was what I thought it was.  My carefully made plans, my hopes and dreams, all had to be released like balloons floating off into the distance.

It’s amazing to discover the person I’ve become, and to create a new life with new dreams, but I feel vulnerable.

I’m starting over as my truest, most authentic self.

And I have nothing to hide behind.

In five weeks, I’ll celebrate the passing of another year.

I’ll be thirty-four. 

This year, my birthday is also an anniversary of sorts, and it has me struggling.

In five weeks, Jeremy will be able to say he has been clean for a full year. 

In five weeks, it will have been a year since we separated.

A year. 

And I’m not over it, yet.  I’m nowhere near over it, and some naive part of me  thought that I would be. 

Nearly a year later, I’m only just starting to come to terms with everything that happened. 

Leading up to this point, my focus has been on trying to survive and rebuild and adjust.  I’ve been so intent on moving forward that I haven’t  allowed myself to look back.

People ask me all the time how I am, and I tell them, truthfully, that I am well.  I’m happy and I’m at peace.  I no longer live in fear and I have so much hope for the future. 

I feel strong and confident and alive.  I am more myself now than I have ever been in my life.

But I struggle, too.  Life is good in so many ways, but it is also hard.

I’m happy.  And I’m sad. 

On my birthday, I’ll celebrate.  And grieve. 

The passing of a year.

This weekend I’m in San Diego at BlogHer 2011.

In the weeks leading up to this trip, I thought about canceling.  A lot.

But here I am.  I’m here.  And I’m glad.

It was a year ago, at BlogHer 2010 in New York City, that I publicly talked about my life situation for the first time.  Surrounded by people who deeply cared about my well-being, who read between the lines and suspected that something wasn’t quite right, I finally lifted the veil.

It was a turning point in my life, and looking back to that weekend, one year ago, I am humbled.

Here I am.

Changed.

Surviving.

Living.

Happy.

This is very hard for me to say, but here I go.

My daughter is two different people.  Her self, and her other self.

One of them, the one I feel is the real Blythe, is sweet, loving, charismatic, smart and articulate.  She is so incredibly amazing, and when I see her, when I spend time with her… I just can’t get enough.  I am so in love with her.

The other one, though.  This is so hard for me to admit thinking about my own child.  The other one is a child I don’t like very much.  When I see the signs of her eminent arrival, I start to feel a little sick inside. 

The thing about it, is when that other child takes over, I know my baby girl is in there, somewhere, fighting to get out.  It’s for her that I have patience with the other child when she appears.  It’s for her that I don’t give up.  I fight for her as long as it takes, and when I see the real Blythe emerging, I know that everything I do is worth it.

Have you ever seen The Exorcist?  Well, it’s kind of like that, only without quite so much gore.

Over the past couple of years, doctors and various types of therapists have listed the different diagnoses they would have given Blythe, had they only seen her as her other self.

A few:

• Bipolar Disorder.  Autism.  ADHD.  ADD.  Early Onset Schizophrenia.  Psychosis.  And, yes, even Demonic Possession.

Since Blythe stopped being exposed to meth in early October, I’ve seen that other child a lot less often.  In fact, I haven’t seen her in over a month, and even then she stayed a very short time and wasn’t really all that awful. 

It was the marked improvement in her health as well as the decrease in visits from the other child that prompted me to look into whether or not meth exposure could be responsible for Blythe’s “issues”.

What I found, in doing that research, is that most children who are exposed to meth are like Blythe’s other self all the time, and I couldn’t find any information on how to help them to get better.  It’s so sad to think about those kids, who never get to be their real selves.  They are trapped inside those other personalities, fighting to get out, just like Blythe was.

They are the reason I’m committed to writing about our experience with meth exposure.  It’s for them that I’ll post everything I possibly can about what worked for Blythe, even though at the time I didn’t realize I was dealing with a meth exposed child.  If even one child benefits from her story, it will be worth the effort.

Every child deserves a chance to be who they are… not what meth exposure made them.

Thank you all so much for your support and encouragement on my last post, where I talked about learning of Blythe’s exposure to methamphetamines.

I realize that it’s not my fault for not knowing she was being exposed, but I can’t help but feel a lot of guilt, anyway.  I do feel as though I failed to protect her, but I also know that I did everything I could to keep her safe.

For the majority of Blythe’s life, the world at large has been a danger to her.  Every time we ventured out, we were taking a risk.  Everything she touched, away from home, had the potential to send her into anaphylaxis.  If she so much as leaned her cheek against the counter at the pharmacy, her face would swell within minutes.  That’s just a glimpse into what life was like for her.

I always did my best to keep my fear at bay, but I think I was able to do that, in large part, because our home was safe.  If the world was a battlefield, home was our neutral ground, where we could let down our guard and live like normal people.

I could spend hours telling you all the things I’ve done, over the years, to make sure our home was a place where Blythe could just be a kid, without worries.  All the research I’ve done, the ways we’ve altered our lives to provide the best possible environment for her to grow up in. 

So, to learn that she was being exposed to methampetamines, right here at home, the one place on this Earth that I thought was safe for her…  I can’t explain how it felt, other than to say it knocked me down in a way nothing in my life ever has before.

I worked so fucking hard, every day, to give her a place where she could be an innocent kid.  I did fail to provide that for her.  Through no fault of my own, obviously, but it’s a failure, all the same.

I was really, really angry.  My home didn’t feel like home anymore, it felt like a toxic waste dump.  And I place a lot of blame squarely on the shoulders of the person who was responsible for her exposure, where it belongs.

But I also know how much he loves our daughters, and if he had known it was his addiction that was making her sick, I like to believe he would have done something about it.  It’s hard to know, for sure, given the nature of addiction, but I have to try and believe that, for my sanity.

I’m trying to keep my focus on the now.  Since she has stopped being exposed to meth, her health has improved remarkably and dramatically.  It’s fantastic and amazing, and gives me so much hope for her future. 

For that, I am so incredibly happy.