Mental Health

My whole family suffers from mental health issues. Mostly depression. All undiagnosed, of course. I don't know about my mom, so much... She is one of the strongest, hardest working people I know. I haven't really asked her much about her mental health. But just from growing up, it seemed like my mom was definitely mentally healthy.
But my dad, he was a whole other kettle of fish. I'm sure it stems from a million different places, divorced parents, mother who plays favorites, too much exposure to sexual stuff too young. Nothing gross or horrific, just being too aware of stuff that was too old for him to truly understand. A father who withheld love. All in all my dad has turned out pretty amazing if you think about all the messed up things he went through growing up.
Regardless, he has struggled with rage, depression, anxiety, those kinds of things.
And he passed that on to us girls. My oldest sister struggles with an eating disorder, something rarely attributed to plus-sized women, but is more often the case than most people think. She struggles with co-dependance and constantly feeling like she's not good enough. I think every oldest child might struggle with that a little bit. All the parental experimentation is kind of taken out on the first child, and then they become the helper for all the other siblings. And my youngest sister struggles with feeling invisible, unloved... She was an extrovert from birth, raised by two introverts, and following my oldest sister around doing everything she did, and my oldest sister is more introverted than anyone I know. So my youngest sister always struggled with feeling unloved, having no friends, and feeling left out. Which gave her low self-esteem for a long time. But she's grown a lot and changed a lot, but constantly goes back to her youth, questioning it, and leaving her feeling as though her foundation is flawed... and when you feel like your foundation is flawed, it nearly impossible to move forward, which causes depression.
I have struggled with this sort of... Manic side and then this dark low side. I had no empathy growing up, very little impulse control, and would fly into a rage at the drop of a hat, then be totally fine in 10 minutes. Puberty was an especially hard time, with my mother at her whit's end, questioning me all the time about where I was coming from? Where this rage came from and why did it feel so uncontrollable.
I remember trying to take Midol on my period once and I felt insane. I felt shaky and outside of myself and like I couldn't keep still. It was as if my hormones were so imbalanced, I couldn't take a simple pill to ease my cramps without upsetting my whole body.
And when I got married and moved to Guam, anxiety pretty much crippled me. I couldn't DO anything. I felt like a child.
I tried to go see a therapist this year and it was horrible. She didn't understand what I was trying to say at all. I couldn't get her to see that a job and a pet weren't going to magically fix the spiraling darkness that sometimes overwhelms me.
My husband doesn't understand this crazy side of me. He is so even all the time, he's NEVER out of control. He laughs when he wants, cries when he's sad... None of his feelings ever are too big to handle. And it makes it hard to talk to him about. You would think that a man who works in mental health would be exactly the type of person to understand a crazy wife, but that is not the case.
And now I'm pregnant. This hasn't affected my hormones yet, I don't think. But I worry about what my child will pick up from me. I hope they are like my husband. I hope they can talk to me. I hope I can give them more tools than my family gave me.
At an OB class, we had to fill out a survey... and apparently if you scored a certain amount of points, it means you're "high risk". For some kind of mental something... Anyway. I did. Score high enough to get noticed. The woman who was in charge of the survey is a nice lady that I have wanted to invite over for dinner, a woman who works with my husband... But it was strange. She didn't call me about the results of my test. She went to my husband. I felt like that was kind of inappropriate. And he of course... explained away my answers. Because he doesn't really understand the extent of my crazy. So maybe she could have helped me somehow, and I'll never get that. Because she went to a co-worker who happened to know the "patient"... instead of coming to the "patient". I feel weird about the whole thing.