Did you forgive your parents for how they responded to your depression? Do you still like them?
My mom and I were starting to get along pretty well in the few years before she died.
The relationship that my dad and I have is, let’s say “fraught.”
I think that in a lot of ways my parents did the best they could by me given what they knew at the time.
I think that given new information somethings probably would have been different and probably would have been better.
My dad has some shitty, SHITTY attitudes about health and disability and mental health and the way the world should work and that contributed to how a lot of things were mishandled and I don’t forgive him for those and I try to challenge him on those when I can.
But. Shit.
There was A LOT of stuff contributing to my depression that my parents wouldn’t have known to look for.
Like, the ADHD stuff is debatable because constantly feeling like a failure who wasn’t living up to expectations and being unable to maintain friendships because the other kids thought I was too fucking weird was definitely something that contributed to my depression as a kid but it was the 90s and I was high-performing enough in a structured school environment and people were still looking for one very specific ADHD presentation that I didn’t get a diagnosis until my 30s. That sucked! That caused problems! But I can’t blame my parents for missing that diagnosis.
I can blame them for an over-emphasis on intellect as a foundation for self-worth, though, because that combined with the fact that I kept failing things and kept fucking things up and I didn’t know why and it must have been that I was just stupid and a disappointment DID make my depression worse.
(Oh, also if you want to build an adult who needs constant reassurance that they’re doing things correctly and they’re doing a good job and not bothering everybody and who cannot handle criticism gracefully, this is how you do it)
And. Look. People say insensitive things they wish they hadn’t said all the time, but jesus PLEASE practice not saying shitty, thoughtless things to your kids.
My mom went to parent-teacher conferences with me in 2003, listened to my teachers, and when we got in the car told me that I was the worst part of her day.
That was SEVENTEEN years ago and I can’t stop hearing it.
But the thing is I know she didn’t even really mean it. She was tired and pissed and had just sat through an hour of every single one of my teachers saying “Alli is intelligent and passes all the in-class tests but is failing my class because she won’t turn in homework” and I get being frustrated by that.
God. It also did not help that I was a weird queer feral teenage goblin who dressed in funky garbage outfits and got in fistfights and my little sister was a social butterfly who got good grades and wasn’t interested in dating boys but liked wearing cute outfits and going on family Christmas outings. My sister didn’t get in fights with the school board, my sister didn’t participate in protests, my sister didn’t accidentally set the yearbook room on fire.
I don’t know. I was flailing for a long time and in retrospect it was kind of obvious but I was also a really, really weird kid and it’s possible that all of the symptoms of my Symptoms Syndrome got buried under me being really, really weird (then again being really, really weird is a symptom of Symptoms Syndrome, maybe they should have known?).
I legitimately think they tried their best in a lot of ways and the ways in which they failed to care for me as a child are the same kinds of things that also caused problems for them as adults in their work relationships and family relationships and friendships so it’s just kind of personality stuff so I don’t really need to forgive them for that, I can just be critical of these traits they have that make them into assholes?
I love both of my parents.
I was starting to get to really like my mom when she died.
I don’t like my dad very much and we don’t get along very well.
But I think that everything that happened with my depression and ADHD and other shit as a kid was genuinely mistakes instead of malice.
Also it is vitally important to find close relationships outside of family because family can be a complete fucking nightmare and you don’t have to be close to your family if being close to your family is bad for you.