Welcome to all of my fellow book club members or anyone coming here for the first time!  I am a chronically ill mom married to a chronically ill man and we are raising our five-year-old son, who also has some special needs. My blog focuses on the challenges parents with chronic illness face, but also speaks about being a mom and a woman in general. )

Lost Edens by Jamie Patterson is the true story of a woman who decides to take her husband back after he admits to having an affair.  She does this without the support of any of her family or friends, there is not one person behind her, but Jamie is determined to make it work.  Throughout the book there is evidence of her husband having some serious mental illnesses.  And that’s all I am going to say because I don’t want to ruin how this amazing book turns out.

I am married to someone with severe mental illness, so severe that he receives disability as he is no longer able to work.  If you don’t know much about the Social Security Disability process, you pretty much need to be near death or severely mentally ill to be able to get disability on a first time application.  My husband was a “yes”, on his first try.

Grant has had mental illness since he was a teenager.  He spent his teenage years (in the mid ’80s) suffering until he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  In college he drank and abused prescription drugs and marijuana in an effort to self-medicate.  He got the most help when the ground-breaking drug Prozac and others that would follow became available to the mentally ill population.

When we met he was pretty well balanced, mental health wise.  The drugs were working for him.  Ours was a long distance relationship for a year when we decided that he would move to New Jersey from Ohio and move in with me.  I was 31 and I knew this was something special.  Grant was loving, generous, sensitive.  I had never met another man like him and I felt truly loved and respected.

We married in 2002.  Grant had a good job working for an insurance company that was free or at low cost for poor families. Unfortunately he happened to have the boss from Hell, and it wasn’t just him who thought so.  Part of what I loved about him was his sensitivity but it did not serve him well when it came to this woman.  Eventually, despite asking for an accommodation, they were not able to work things out and it was a mutual decision that Grant leave his job.

In his next job he worked as a Consumer Advocate, helping parents of disabled children get the services they deserved in the public school system.  Grant has never had a job that did not benefit mankind, something I really admired and envied, as while I liked my job, I often felt unfulfilled.  What was I doing to benefit humanity?

Unfortunately, after a couple of years, Grant began having difficulty there too.  He had trouble getting out of bed to face the day.  He had trouble getting through the day, and due to his OCD he was unable to keep up with the huge amounts of paperwork that the job required.  He had never asked for an accommodation and was fired in May of 2007.  He has not worked since.

When our son was born in 2006…I don’t want to blame him because Grant and I don’t regret having Tyler for one second.  Having a child, being a first time parent is hard for anyone, but for Grant it was like difficult times ten and throughout Tyler’s life I have been watching Grant sink deeper and deeper into his illnesses.

Grant is now to the point where he spends a good deal of the day just sleeping, having to medicate himself (under doctors’ watchful eyes) because life is sometimes too painful. The stress of me being chronically ill and collecting diagnoses along with our son having Tourette’s Syndrome, OCD, Anxiety and probably more doesn’t help.  Again, any husband or father would struggle having a sick wife and a child with emotional problems but for Grant it is times ten.

It’s no surprise that Grant’s mental illness has put a strain on our marriage.  Sometimes his mental illnesses make him say things that he doesn’t mean.  He will come up to me and say, “I want a divorce” or “I can’t do this any more, I need to leave, I need to go away”, only within the hour to come back to me and say he didn’t mean it and he loves me and is sorry.

It has been hard on me but I have learned to harden my heart and, as difficult as it sounds, take these kinds of things he says with a grain of salt.  Of course these conversations are not without damage to me, I would have to be soulless to say they aren’t.

I once called his therapist, crying because I couldn’t take it any more, I just couldn’t keep going on this roller coaster!  His therapist told me, “Emily, Grant adores you!  He loves you and does not want to leave you and Tyler. It is just his mental illness talking, he does not mean it!”

But as I said, these conversations do do damage to my heart and soul.

So, why do I stay? 

Because Grant is doing the very best he can.  He takes his meds, he sees his psychiatrist, he sees his therapist. He doesn’t stop trying every day.

I stay because of the love and support he has given me.  Me, with my over a dozen diagnoses and counting.  I cannot tell you how many men leave their wives when they become chronically ill, how many men cheat on their sick wives.  Grant is my biggest cheerleader.  He is my best friend.

I stay because, although he is not a perfect one, he IS a good father and tries every day to keep being a better one.  He cares almost too much about Tyler and agonizes over trying to do right by his son.  Meanwhile, Tyler thinks that Grant is the best daddy, the funniest daddy in the whole world.  Tyler doesn’t care that Grant is mentally ill, he still thinks his daddy hung the moon.

I stay because I took marriage vows.  For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.

And the number one reason why I stay?

Because no matter how the mental illnesses are destroying him, Grant is still the most loving, generous and sensitive person I have ever met.  

That person I fell in love with is STILL there.

The post Why I Stay first appeared on Mama Sick.

When women have chronic illnesses, it often is very much out of our control what we weigh. Medications, our diseases, and not being able to exercise because of the pain and energy zapping we feel, all contribute to how much we weigh.

Now I am going to talk numbers, for me personally.  I am 5 feet 6 inches tall.  You may be envious of my current weight but the fact is that I am not happy about it.  Everything is relative, you know?  I weigh the most I have ever weighed, except for being pregnant, 157 pounds. Now, I know that some of it is swelling, but who knows how much weight that is, a couple of pounds? Less?  No one can answer that for me!  I seem to wear it well, and am currently wearing sizes 8s, 10s and 12s.  Sizes are crazy aren’t they?  How can I still wear my size 8s?  Why are some size 10s swimming on me?  I have what I would describe as a Rubenesque figure.  Only we don’t live in the 1600s:-(

For many years I was a solid size 10 with my weight being around 145 pounds, give or take. I got comfortable in my size 10 clothes, I accepted “size 10 me”, finally.  Some people would even praise the fact that my weight never wavered.

Then I had Tyler.  My pre-pregnancy weight was 146 pounds and I gained just 23 pounds as I had Gestational Diabetes and had to be careful.  When I came home from the hospital, my stomach had already shrunk considerably and I had already lost 13 pounds, which really is like the baby and the crap that you carry with the baby.

In one month or less I was down to my pre-pregnancy weight.  And then I just kept going.  I was not on a diet, I was not doing anything.  I had a stomach virus on top of that and so when Tyler was seven months old I weighed a horrendous 117 pounds!  I looked like a heroin chic model.  People at my new job were telling me, “YOU just had a baby?  You look amazing!”

But I hated myself.  This wasn’t ME.  I had gone from years of being a size 10 to a size 4! I would look at myself in the mirror and cry.  I was in shock over my skeletal frame.  While people were praising me for my weight loss and amazing will power, my doctors were flummoxed. My endocrinologist was telling me I was just plain crazy. He said it in a bit nicer way, he said I had post-partum issues and should be seeing a Psychiatrist and therapist, but I already was, the big dummy.  Is it even necessary to say I fired him?  I was being tested for every cancer there was since unexplained weight loss is a major symptom of cancer.  No cancer, thankfully.

I used to test the power of eating anything and everything I wanted.  I used to have half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, sometimes more, every night.  After the stomach virus and a return to a desk job I did stabilize into a comfortable size six.  I started to like being a size six, and who wouldn’t?  Being able to wear trendy or classic office clothes without looking like I was trying to stretch them just to fit into them.  I was always the kind of woman who made it a habit to go the next size up, rather than attempt to fit into the size they weren’t any more.  It was more flattering.

I realize now that Lupus was starting.  It had taken over my metabolism, my endocrine system. Lupus wanted me thin and so I was.  I was finally that willowy amazon that I had thought could only be found in my dreams.  The only thing that I didn’t have was I have always wished I was shorter. Oh, they have such cute things for petite women, don’t they? Well, that probably IS going to happen too since I have Osteoporosis and have already shrunk a few inches.  Be careful what you wish for, right?

Enough with the past, let’s get to how I ended up being 160 pounds.  My meds for my mental illnesses, and my mental illnesses themselves, make me want to eat.  My pain makes me want to eat. Sometimes it is so bad, I don’t want to feel it any more, I want to feel an Oreo cookie, you know? Someone told me that eating releases the same pleasurable endorphins as narcotics or exercise or being happy.  For me the only thing that works is the food as I cannot exercise, I do not get high from my drugs and happiness around here is short lived.  I only have the Oreos!

I also have this weird feeling that I cannot nap or sleep unless I feel full.  The food helps make me sleepy and it is easier to get to sleep.  Or then I have insomnia and I get hungry, being up for two to three hours in the middle of the night, who wouldn’t?

But what really convinced me that I had to do something was the amazing Christine Miserandino, The Spoon Lady, of the amazing But You Don’t Look Sick blog.  I saw pictures of her recently and she is already so beautiful but now she has lost the weight she was lamenting about and she looks fabulous!

I don’t know how Christine did it, but I have decided to go on the ShutMyMouth Diet.  I have decided that I am stronger than Lupus, Depression, or my meds and I DO have control over how much I weigh.  I will not let them have their “weigh” with me any longer.

So far I have lost a pound on the ShutMyMouth Diet but more so, I feel like I am once again the Master of my body, the Queen of my Temple, or whatever you would like to call it.  I am not advocating that YOU should go on the ShutMyMouth Diet, you should consult your doctor before beginning any diet, but for me, what harm could the ShutMyMouth Diet really do?

My goal is to lose a reasonable 20 pounds in how ever long it takes, as I will be eating my usual meals and a treat when I want it, as long as it is within reason.  Maybe I am on to something with this new ShutMyMouth Diet?

The post The ShutMyMouth Diet first appeared on Mama Sick.