My daughter’s friend stayed the night last night. They have a semester break today—no school. And my wife and I have been trying to get our child to socialize more with people other than her boyfriend. In fact, she is currently grounded from seeing him outside of school until they both have broadened their social horizons. And I don’t care how long it takes.
We’ve been working with them on this for months, and I can’t even remember now what straw ended up breaking the camel’s back and resulted in her being grounded from him. But she seems to finally be getting it, even though it was her friend’s idea to spend the night and not hers.
It would not have been my idea, either, since I have a mini-Herx around the time of the new moon and the rage hit right on schedule last night as I was trying to cook dinner. Simple spaghetti; not labor intensive nor does it require me to stand in front of the stove for extended periods of time. My kind of meal these days.
All day I’d been fighting off the despair that comes to visit for three days twice a month. I have a new strategy where I remind myself that it isn’t my own death that fills my muscles to the point of stiffness and cramping; it is the dead spriochetes I sense. This works to a limited degree. As does reminding myself to just not get started at all, because once I do my control over my tongue evaporates in the white-hot flash of my anger.
Neither strategy is fool-proof, though, and I feel like a fool. My wife and I had caught our child acting like a teenager—asking me for permission to see her boyfriend yesterday because it was their anniversary, my reminding her she’s grounded and no exceptions would be made, and her asking my wife for permission just a couple of days later.
Nothing earth-shattering; just typical teenage behavior. Reassuring in an odd way, since until recently she’s been trying too hard to be perfect so she doesn’t upset me and make my condition worse. Bah. When she told me this, I was shocked and wanted to cry. Instead, I told her I needed her to do her job and be a teenager so I can do my job and be a mom and have some reason to stay here. Because otherwise, the afternoons spent crying from the pain will soon outweigh the strength of my familial ties, and I’ll begin contemplating my own demise. I didn’t tell her all of this—just that I needed to be a mom so she needed to be a kid, and part of that would be her getting caught breaking the rules, me yelling, and her hopefully learning a lesson.
The yelling hasn’t been a standard part of my parenting repertoire until the Lyme got a foothold and took over my life. I can see from the way her eyes bug out when I yell that my child has shut down and is just waiting for me to stop so she can run away and cry in her room. (I do the same—only I don’t actually run, just hobble upstairs to my room.) So it accomplishes very little in the way of conveying important parenting lessons.
It does, however, make quite an impact. With one sharp word, I brought my whole house to a stand-still last night. (The word was “enough” in case anyone is wondering. I’d quickly tired of my child’s backpedaling and excuses.) Her poor friend has known us for about four years now. So she knew me pre-Lyme invasion, and last night was her first glimpse at what it’s like now.
My wife got them both into the car and dropped them off at school for something our daughter needed to do for her leadership class. The friend was going to stay in and watch tv with my wife until I blew my top. Afterwards, my wife recapped the conversation in the car, about the friend worrying that our kid was in serious trouble, that she wouldn’t be allowed to stay the night, that the entire rest of the evening was ruined. My wife says she explained about the rage, that it would pass as quickly as it erupted, and that I couldn’t really help it.
I’m sorry, but even living in this broken-down body and going through treatment (which made the rage both more predictable and less manageable) for over a year, I don’t buy into that business about not being able to help it. As much as I struggle to maintain a cool temper, and as I lose the battle many times a month, it still feels like a cop out to say that I can’t help it. Though I can see why my wife and child would cling to this, for who wants to live with someone who would act the way I do if they could control it? I wouldn’t. I’m already tired of all of this, still waiting for the treatments to work and to start feeling better. Still waiting for peace of mind that allows me to stop the words of anger from flying from my mouth. Still looking for the right coping mechanism. Just coming to the conclusion that perhaps there isn’t one.
