Taking care

[muckefuck]

I slept remarkably well last night. Given my background level of anxiety, I thought I might need a Lorazepam to sleep through, so I was much relieved. I think talking helped. The boys let me go on about M. for an hour or so and it was cathartic to talk about his struggles without worrying any longer that I was violating his privacy.

I put some of them into a post to FB since I realised that a lot of what I have to say about him (and people are encouraging me to keep writing and posting) doesn't make sense without that background. The response was overwhelming. Several others shared their challenges with people close to them with schizophrenia and my sister asked to share the post because it expressed some of the things she's been wanting to communicate to her friends.

I ended it with a shout-out to my siblings:

Our parents always told us, “M. isn’t your responsibility; he isn’t your child.” We nodded, but secretly all three of us were conscious of the day when they’d be gone and we’d need to take up the slack. We shared intel and supported each other during his various relapses. Hardly a week went by in nearly thirty years that we weren’t all three in touch with him.

Because I really am proud of that. M. frustrated us all at times so beyond checking in with him, we tried to check in with each other and make sure if someone was getting fatigued, we'd work to give them a break. It still ended up falling too heavily on my sister as the one literally closest to him (being less than three kilometers away) but bunj and I tried.

For my next installment, I want to talk about some of the fun things about him. Because of the effects of illness on his social development, in some ways he stayed an adolescent his whole life. This was part of what made him difficult, but it had its endearing aspects.