Hi all. I don’t know if anyone even remembers me but I’m still mostly lurking around. I have a long rant that’s been gurgling inside me and I need a place to dump it. Congrats on being that place 
The last three years have been tough. There was that pandemic thing which I think also inconvenienced a few others. Living in Victoria, Australia, we had one of the longest lockdowns in the world. My kids and I worked/studied from home for most of 2020.
2021 was far worse for us - me and the kids. Probably as a combo effect of world events/starting puberty/other factors my 13 year old woke up unable to walk one day and was diagnosed with functional neurological disorder/conversation disorder - essentially she lost the full use of her legs due to stress. It was terrifying because she started going downhill so quickly - within a couple of weeks she was not only fully reliant on a wheelchair but she had developed life altering verbal and motor tics, and an anxiety disorder so severe that she would scream at every sudden noise, injure herself trying to flee at every unexpected movement. It was like living with a terrified wild animal.
The medical system was overwhelmed andslow to react and I had to push every step of the way to get her into appropriate services. Navigating psych services was the absolute worst. I keep saying they’re trying to send me crazy too - two for one. Of all medical services I’ve had to deal with, psych has been the most disordered, insane, callous, negligent and incompetent. I have been gaslighted and criticized for being distraught when they broke (yet another) promise while I was at breaking point.
Following two hospital stays my child was under a multi-disciplinary rehabilitation program and I was attempting to hold down a full time job, attend up to 7 appointments a week and raise my son too. There are big gaps in my memory of a lot of that time because I was running on fight or flight.
Work was also changing rapidly. We were a small town business that was acquired by a larger organisation that was acquiring similar businesses across the country. It would have been a challenge at any time. It was something else against the backdrop of our personal health crisis.
My daughter recovered enough to be out of a wheelchair and through rehabilitation, therapy and medication managed to get the tics and anxiety disorder under enough control to return to school after missing a full year. 2022 was a bit better because it was the year she went back to school.
As my daughter got better, my son started to get worse. He was so good in the worst of it all, but he took an emotional battering and his mental health started to sharply decline. By late last year he was starting to have increasingly violent rages, but in December in Australia basically everything closes down and is shut for all of January. I was frantically calling all the mental health services in the area trying to get him in and all I could reach were answering machines telling me they’d be back in February when they wouldn’t be taking new patients.
By Feb he was entirely out of control. My 11 year old was throwing rages that had me barricading myself in my bedroom. Life ground to a halt as between the end of my workday and bedtime my son would lose control and terrorise me and my daughter. His rage initially lasted 1-2 hours, but by early Feb it was 3-4, and by late Feb it was 6+ hours, with him waking up still enraged most days. Every morning was a screaming fight. I was constantly late for work because I had to physically drag him out of the house. He loved school, enjoyed his days there, but when the rage took over he couldn’t function.
I had to call the police four times in two weeks. It came to a head one night when he managed to force open my locked bedroom door and I hit him, I had a panic attack, he kept tormenting me while I was lying on the floor gasping for air, the police came… It was intense. After that, I had to put him in his father’s care. My daughter is not yet over the setback in her mental health from that night, but she’s getting there.
Once again, it has taken a ridiculous amount of effort to get my son into psych services and it’s only because our repeated calls to the police got us flagged as a FDV situation that my son was able to see a psychiatrist. He has medication, he has an initial treatment plan and he’s probably going to be diagnosed with ADHD and autism in the next few weeks if the system can get itself organised and if his father follows through on appointments.
My son’s father is a workaholic and has always been unreliable and dumped everything on me, so he has been horrible about having our son. In the beginning he still kept sticking me with school drop off/pick up even though that was a constant point of conflict and I had to keep calling the school principal or the police station to get help getting my son in or out of the car. My son’s dad was very cold towards me from the time our son entered his care. One morning he called during my commute and pressured me to detour and take our son to school to help him out. I told him that would make me late for work - again - but he pressed for me to help him out so I thought it was an emergency. Afterward he called and thanked me for giving him time for a shower and coffee before his Zoom meeting. I was infuriated that he made me late for work and put me in a high conflict situation for something so frivolous.
The following week our son had an appointment with a paediatrician. To get this appointment I’d had to jump through hoops because the paediatrician isn’t taking new patients AND had a six month wait for appointments but I’d managed to get us in. My son’s dad and I were both given a screening sheet to complete for the appointment. Day of, I’m really sick and my son’s father is being cold and unhelpful on the phone. “So you want me to take him”, flat, angry, hostile. I remind him about the sheet. “I haven’t done it. I haven’t had time. I haven’t had 5 minutes to myself. And I’ve lost it, no idea where it is”. I lost my temper, yelled at him that I “wasn’t going to cover his ass all the time anymore. We are in crisis, and if he had to cancel and rebook meetings sometimes well welcome to my world. This has been my last two years.” He hung up on me and cut me out of his life - deleted shared accounts, stopped telling me what’s happening with our son, ghosted me.
I spoke to a lawyer who advised me to write him an email laying out the comms I want, because not knowing if my son is continuing to engage with his providers and receive treatment is filling me with anxiety. I want my son to be able to return to my home and that can only happen if the most selfish man in the world follows through on his care. I sent the email - polite, clear, short and bullet-pointed - and he replied “You don’t care anyway so f— off”. At this stage I guess I’m going to have to go to court with money I don’t have to fight a man who has enormous financial resources just to get a plan in place to ensure our son continues to receive the medical treatment I killed myself trying to organise.
So this is the spill-my-guts version that probably sounds like I’m in crisis, and I’m actually not. I’m still working, still pursuing my interests, still laughing and chatting with friends and taking pleasure in life. Every now and then I have a moment where I contemplate how much more of this is ahead of me and that can send me spiralling, but those days aren’t too frequent and I’m better at pulling myself back out of them. But… It’s been a lot. So much more than I can tell here and so much worse than I can say.
So how’s everyone else’s day?
