Normal is not an Option

Some of you are already laughing at the title and shaking your head.  Some of you (especially those of you with extremely wounded children) are already finding yourself jealous of me.  Admit it, you know you are!  I actually had enough energy to go for an hour long walk on the treadmill and to call a friend to see how she was doing.

But, really.  I know that this may seem silly to some of you, but to a mother of three wounded children with RAD (reactive attachment disorder), having any kind of energy, emotional or otherwise, can be an incredibly rare thing indeed!  So rare that there are times you start to think that within a few years, people will be confusing you with a character from “Night of the Living Dead.”  It’s not pretty.  And neither are those bags under your eyes.  You could pack for vacation in those things.

About a month and 1/2 ago, I went to the doctor.  I had become so exhausted that I didn’t even want to get out of bed.  Basically, she told me that my stress levels had been so high for so long that I was starting to go into adrenal fatigue.  For those of you who don’t know what that means, basically it goes like this.  When you undergo a crisis, your body thinks, “I’m going to die.”  The brain sends out a message to your body to put it on high alert.  All sorts of chemicals are released in your body that enable you to do whatever you need to do in order to get through the stressful situation.  Wonderful process….keeps us safe in the middle of a crisis.  The only problem:  It doesn’t distinguish when that stress comes from a car accident or an angry little boy trying nonstop to sabotage fun or to get you to give up on him by whatever means necessary.  No difference.  And when your body has been thinking “I’m going to die,” for a very long time, the adrenal glands get overworked and start to shut down.   Note: You do not want this to happen.

So, enough of a science lesson for today….back to the doctor.  She basically told me that if I didn’t change something, I would kill myself.  The body can only handle being at high alert for so long, and my body had been there for way too long already.  I needed to make some changes, and I needed to make them fast.

One of the problems for me was that I wasn’t sleeping soundly.  Evidently, when cortizol has been released (one of the stress chemicals), it can prevent you from sleeping.  I suppose that’s good when you are in the middle of a real crisis, but not really appreciated when you really do need to sleep.  So, she put me on some sort of cortizol blocker so that I could actually get sleep and allow my body to heal (it’s called Seriphos…you can purchase it online).  She also gave me a list of vitamins to start on in order to heal my adrenal glands and to help my body deal with the stress. For those of you who are interested, they included just a regular multi-vitamin, higher doses of Vitamin C, B Stress complex, and Pantothenic Acid.  She also put me on St. John’s Wort, for the depression.  (Note: 95% of the moms who do this kind of parenting are on depression meds, FYI.)

I cannot tell you what a difference those vitamins have made.  Within a week, my sister in law asked me, “What have you done?  You look so pretty!”  After we had a good laugh over that one, she clarified, “No, really.  You actually have color in your face!”  After that I had person after person tell me how worried they had become for me.  I didn’t even realize how exhausted I had become until I actually wasn’t completely exhausted.  I read somewhere that when you are in adrenal fatigue, you literally don’t even have the energy to care.  That made me feel so much better, because there were so many times over the past few months with my kids that I felt like a bad mom.  I honestly did not even have the energy to care about ANYTHING.

When I first was reading about parenting RAD children, one of the pieces of advice I ignored was, “take your vitamins, especially your B vitamins.  Take good care of yourself.”  Yea, yea.  Whatever.  You know, like we do with most advice before we jump into something.  Nancy Thomas‘ book “When Love is Not Enough” encourages parents of RAD children to first of all take care of themselves, so that they can take care of their child.  I didn’t listen to her.  I jumped in with both feet, putting aside any and all of my own needs, thinking I was doing the best thing for my children.  I wasn’t.

As moms of extremely wounded children, we actually have to take BETTER care of ourselves than those moms of healthy children.  We MUST take breaks.  We MUST get rest, nourish our bodies, etc.  I heard Dr. Laura on the radio today send a message to all moms out there to TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF!  She talked about how easy it was for us to feel guilty about doing things for ourselves.  She challenged moms to think about it this way….WE ourselves are the tool through which our children are parented.  If we don’t take care of ourselves, we cannot be of any help to them.  Trust me, I learned that the hard way.