She Is Not a Duck

A Mother’s Journey into the world of Mental Health and Spectrum Disorder Challenges

She walks like a duck, talks like a duck, but she is not a duck.

It felt a little creepy, the darkness outside with little to no breeze. Everything was eerie and quiet. Just the fountain light in the center of the lake was casting a calming flicker around the grounds. People were in for the night, probably doing dishes, homework, playing on the computer, and winding down from their day. I was not.

My 14-year-old, firmly planted in the middle of the narrow road, postured with her hands on her hips.

She had decided that she won’t come home, that I’m a bitch, she hates her life and wants to live anywhere else.

She exaggerated her words by drawing them out and resorted to full volume, just in case there may actually be a teenager within listening range. She thinks she’ll look cool, if so. She doesn’t realize that I’m not going to buy into it her ploy. I won’t be pulled into her web of disaster.

I went into my eerie calm place. My exterior belied the heart racing, blood pumping, heightened anxiety, coursing through my system.

This was a familiar road, well-traveled, and yet always slightly different any time she led me here.

I sat on the driveway of relative strangers. I had met them before, just once, when I was forced to clean up a different issue from the same daughter. I didn’t really have a game plan. I hardly ever did because it’s so hard to plan for the unknown behaviors of a child with mental illnesses. I sat.

I took my position so that she couldn’t go to their door easily and she would be forced into a decision of, hopefully, going back home. I waited.

That’s all I could ever do. She erupted with some loud, inappropriate comments and hoped I’ll bite. I didn’t dare.

The tricky part was always the same though the outcome never was. I always ended up questioning how long will it take until I watch her shoulders weaken, just a bit, to slowly creep my way into a method she’ll respond to?

She was insistent that she will never live with us again. I waited.

I offered a few tester comments and she was firmer than she’d been in the past. She wasn’t budging and neither was I. I did get a small glimpse of compliance when she attempted to strut off the opposite way to a friend’s house and I told her to stop. Surprisingly to me, she did, but once again rooted herself in a combative, defiant stance. I could almost see sparks of hatred and anger shooting from her eyes. Even on this darkest night, I knew her eyes were black, and that she was in that dark place that always scared me. I’ve seen those eyes too many times to count. The countdown began…this was taking so much longer than the other times and I was getting low in my bag of tricks.

Chapter One: The Doorway to Diagnosis

I had visions of being a mom with little ones that would simply adore me. They would be close in age and I’d probably have four of them.

They would look up to me and I would love them with all my heart — give them my everything. Turns out, I had three kids and they sucked the life out of me.

I did give them my everything. I just didn’t realize what my everything consisted of, nor what they would require.

My first borne was just under two when my second child was born. We recognized immediately how different babies were. Our first had zero issues of any kind and was born on the classically beautiful day to have a child.

Our second arrived with the hail storms, rain, and high winds to announce her presence. We named her Sarah. I know now that she controlled that weather and that I was naïve enough to dismiss it as a foreboding sign. She was jaundiced and required more attention from the get-go. Yet, she was beautiful, tiny, and as sweet as any baby could be. She would look at us with saucer-sized brown eyes and we knew we were in love with yet another child.

She had some bizarre form of reverse jealousy. As an infant, she would wail and carry on any time her older sister came to sit with me.

From day one she seemed pissed off that she wasn’t born first, or better yet, an only child.

Imagine her dismay when a new baby, a brother, came to us when she was three.

Life marched on and we all did relatively well in our roles. The only oddities in any of Sarah’s behaviors were simply written off to the middle child syndrome. Neither my husband nor I were middle kids but we had heard the horror stories strapped to a child simply because of their birth order. We started thinking the stories must be true after all.

I look back and wonder why the quirks didn’t carry more weight with me. Where were the alarm bells?

There, indeed, were alarm bells. I was slowly being forced through a door I had no idea even existed.

She stood in the hallway upstairs. Bellowing down through the banisters, a half moan, half battle cry, that she will NOT get in the shower. As she stomped her feet, the echoes reverberated her distress.

Every nerve ending in my body was on alert, once again.

And so, our journey into a life of mental illnesses and spectrum disorders began.

• Thank you for joining the first of my series. We will travel through the hallways of the psychiatric world, the school system, and our family dynamics. I look forward to sharing more and hope you will see that none of us are alone.