Our Covid-19 Avoiding Journey: Mental Health

Being a parent with Bipolar Disorder isn't easy under the best of circumstances; between your own emotional swings and various triggers, and your child/children's desire to just be kids, not understanding what their parent is dealing with, it can be enough to make you go hide in the closet and cry from frustration. You love your children with every fiber of your being, but some days you'd give your left lung for them to be able to understand why you just need a few hours of peace and quiet and following the rules.

My kids are very challenging. My oldest is 10, then we have a 9 year old, my ASD 6 year old, and a very opinionated and clingy 16 month old. I love my children, I love my children, but sometimes all the sound and activity and natural sibling fighting is too much. It overwhelms me, whatever track my brain was on get derailed, and i have a mini break down. My blood pressure spikes and I get dizzy, and then I drop and start crying. It's not fun, I hate when it happens, but there's not much I can do.

During a normal school day, I get the luxury of 8 and 1/2 hours of my oldest 3 being at school. I know they're safe, their teachers are great, they're learning and having fun, and they're burning off a boat load of their energy. I have time to play with their baby sister and try to keep her on a nap schedule, and I have some quiet time for myself at least once a day to decompress and just chill out, and to try and get some housework done. Yes it goes right back to loud and stressful once they get home, but I've had my time alone and we get through ok. However now, all their usual structure and time schedule is gone. School has become some worksheets and the Chromebooks, and me trying to find educational tv shows and movies to hopefully distract them from fighting with each other. Can I tell you a secret? It doesn't work. All it takes is someone going to the bathroom, and someone else taking that seat, for a mini civil war to break out in my living room.

"He keeps looking at me", "She won't stay on her side", "I was using that pencil first" and many others are a repeated chorus adding to my daily headache. I'm scared to even ask how my friends are doing with their own school age kids, I'm sure it would quickly turn into all of us crying and begging for reprieve. The added stress of school being closed for at least another month in most school districts has a lot of previously judgemental parents realizing just how hard teaching really is. I'm personally struggling with trying to keep them each focused on their own work, and to stop the incessant under the kitchen table kicking. To any teachers reading this, you are a saint. Even if you're a yeller, you're a saint. How you get through a full school day with 20-30 of our crazy oblivious hyper kids is a mystery we'd need Scooby and the gang to solve.

Teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, office administration, playground monitors; all of these people take care of our kids for us when they're at school, they teach them how the world works and help us reinforce how to get along with others in it. After this crisis is over, I sincerely hope every parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, older cousin, EVERYONE starts pushing for teachers to be paid better by our government, and everyone encourages their kids to be better behaved for their teachers and to be kinder to them. Teachers already have a great deal of stress to shoulder every day, Covid-19 has transformed it from "How am I going to keep these amazing potential filled kids on track and excited about learning?" into "How am I going to be able to create a lesson plan that not only is fitting for my students and how each of them learns, but is also able to be taught by someone who hasn't been a student themselves for at least a half decade?" If you run into your child's teacher out in public, give them the finger guns and some words of gratitude and encouragement, and maybe buy them a box of tissues too.

Another group hit hard in the social distancing orders are animals. Many shelters are having to close, or at the least heavily restrict public access for potential adoptions. With this wave of shelter in place, animal shelters aren't getting their much needed donations. Many are asking for people to foster animals if they're able to, just until shelters can open up properly again and can accomodate everyone again. Fostering an animal can be very rewarding, especially in these stressful times. It's very therapeutic to have a living creature you can just spend time with; one who doesn't know what's going on across the world, and who can't start talking about it again and bringing the woes to the forefront of our minds. Also, for anyone who really feels a need to be outside, taking a dog for a walk is perfect. You can go alone or with anyone you live with, many people will avoid you purely because you have a dog, and you have an excuse to not stop and chat with anyone as you can give them the classic "Sorry, yeah, gotta get this energy burned off quick so the dog is tired and calm, maybe we can hang when it's over!"

We're all suffering this together. Some much more than others, for various reasons. Please, be compassionate during this time. Think of others and their needs when travelling or shopping. Try to speak with kindness to other people, regardless of their attitude, they could be struggling much more than they'll admit. Distract yourself when you can, escape into music or books, play games online with strangers, maybe foster a cat and get a laser pointer. Learning new ways to care for our mental health is vital as more areas enact their shelter-in-place laws.