Nope, Not a Recovery Yet

Ok, I'm going to have to admit that, despite what I thought when I started this blog, I can't actually write down everything that happens to us.  Some things are just a bit too strong.  All I'm going to say is that my daughter came home for a home visit today and it didn't work out. It ended up with my poor partner having to make yet another trip to A&E.  So not (quite) a recovery yet.

So, I'm going to show you a picture of an insect I photographed in my garden today.  Maybe not the prettiest thing you ever saw, but you know, if you look really closely, even apparently ugly things can be amazing.  Just look at the patterns on those wings!

And I'm going to tell you that I spent some of this afternoon sitting in my garden finishing off "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett, which is one very good book. I would say that, if things are tough but you have a bit of time, a book like that is worth having to hand.  It's serious and funny at the same time, and above all it's got a good pace to it so it's hard to put down. I read it this afternoon and when it was finished all I could think about was what it was like to be an African-American woman in the 1960's in the state of Mississippi.  I was not thinking about what it was like to be an English mother of a seriously ill child in 2011.

Before my daughter became ill, about a year and a half ago, I probably would have said that her sort of disturbance only happened in families that had something wrong with them.  There's no smoke without fire: how can a daughter find it so difficult to come home and live with her own family if there's nothing funny going on?  I suspect there are plenty of people who think like that, and some of them may actually work in mental health. But we have no skeletons in the cupboard: we really are a normal family, with two parents, and two half-grown children.  There's noone drinking in a corner, noone with a drug habit, no child abuse, no violence.  The most traumatic thing that happened to my daughter in her first 5 years was when they told her about the 9/11 bombings at school assembly.  About the worst thing we've done to our kids is let them watch a bit too much TV and refuse to keep a dog.

So we're living proof that mental illness is just one of those things that happen to you in life.  I've had to change a lot of my views over the last year.  I could even be persuaded to see beauty in an insect.

I'm not going to write about absolutely everything that happens here - noone wants to read the lurid details.  And I've read through my last post and I'm not going to be writing every day about my endless wrangles with the hospital - noone wants to read that either.  I'm going to be writing about how we cope, and keep hope alive.