Should She Be Reading This?

The one person who doesn't read this blog is Julie herself.  It's not just that she doesn't want to read it - she doesn't know of its existence.  Is it wrong of me to blog about her without her knowledge?  I do think about this issue quite often, and have sometimes thought I would tell her.  Fortunately, common sense always stays my hand.

Would she be happier if she read it?  I doubt it.  Teenage gives you a lot of things - boundless energy, overwhelming enthusiasm and hope - but it does not give you a very measured perspective.  Every detail that I get wrong, every awkward choice of word, could be agony to her.  When I think back to my own teenage years, I can still remember the annoyance I felt whenever my mother failed to understand me.   That boy I worshipped who never knew I existed, how could she not see that he was the only person I would ever love?  That awful haircut, how dare she suggest it would grow out, when I knew for a fact that my life was now ruined?

Worse still, I am writing about Julie's illness, and I can never write about it from her viewpoint.  My relationship to her illness will always be that of an outsider, and it has to be so.  I cannot share her despair, or we would both sink.  I cannot share her psychosis, because she relies upon me to remain rooted in reality so that she can find her way back.  I know that my viewpoint is different from hers, and she knows it too.  I commit a little betrayal of her every time I speak to a psychiatrist or a nurse about what I know and see of her illness.  Time and again, her account differs from mine.  She may remember weeks of misery, where I have seen a mood that varied and was sometimes upbeat.  If asked to explain why she is self-harming, Julie may identify something that frightened her in a dream; I may be more concerned that she is short of sleep and worried about school.  Medical staff vary in the degree to which they can handle these varying accounts: some cannot tolerate anything but the point of view of the patient, some can create a safe place in which all voices are listened to, and from which they can draw a many-layered meaning.

What I don't write about, and I hope I don't inadvertently reveal, are her intimate thoughts and feelings.  I know far more of Julie's inner life than is usual even between mothers and daughters, and I know this is a responsibility.  Julie cannot afford the luxury of privacy at the moment.  The only way for her to cope outside the world of the hospital, has been to confide her fears and troubles and hopes in meticulous detail.  The only way for her to perform a reality check on some of her experiences has been to discuss them with me.  It is part of the process of dismantling the internal walls constructed by her illness.  I have to listen, and explore, but I also have to forget.  Julie will never want to hear these repeated, not even to herself - there is a future Julie who will have put all these thoughts behind her, and moved on.  Just as mothers shouldn't keep repeating those cute little stories about how you wet yourself in the nursery pagent, mothers should definitely keep their mouths shut on what you said while in the grip of psychosis.

But I still write; and I write for the simple reason that it gives voice to my own experience, not Julie's.  It gives me a chance to express the agonies and triumphs of my life caring for her.  It is not an experience I sought, and it's one I hope never to repeat, but it is one I think worth sharing.  Giving it to Julie to read would be beside the point - just as any mother's blog would mean little to their child until they were fully grown, and perhaps had children of their own.