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the truth no one wants to see

crazyruthie

yesterday i found out that my stepmother had a stroke last week. my dear old dad decided to wait a week to tell me. she’s more like a mother to me than my biological mother. they’ve been married for over 20 years, so she really is close family, unlike some step family relationships.

it was a fairly minor stroke, or so my dad says. she’s in her early 70s and both she and my dad eat carefully, exercise, travel a lot, are still mentally sharp, really doing very well for their age, better than me, actually! that’s all true except “eat carefully” means not eating at all for her. the main thing the doctors said she needs to do to get healthy is to gain weight.

she’s anorexic, painfully thin and obsessed with things like, did i eat too much celery today. this all started when her first husband died. it was her way of taking control of the family and their lives.  in my eyes, this is mental illness, right? of course it is! but no one mentions it. ever.

it took them many many years and near misses for them to acknowledge and make efforts to understand my bipolar disorder. she collapsed last year and had to go to the hospital for a week or so. her weight was much too low. i tried to convince my dad that she needed to see a therapist and that he face the fact that she has a mental illness. he tried to be very reassuring, but i knew, and know even more now, that nothing changed.

i wonder to myself, is it too late? is she too old to try and tackle a huge problem and hope to recover? most of the family says no. but what else would they say if they weren’t trying to put it as far back in their minds as they can? all i know is that she’s going to die earlier than she should.

i guess i’ll keep my mouth shut, but i tell ya, it’s not easy.

Published by crazyruthie

i'm an abstract painter, abstract expressionist most of the time. i work in a large variety of mediums. i draw psychedelic pictures with sharpies from time to time. i take photographs from time to time. i love the arts; they inspire me and they are my therapy. i have fibromyalgia and and spinal stenosis along with diabetes and a variety of mental illnesses. the main one is bipolar disorder. i love rescue animals, the interwebz, my husband, my dog, my dad, the arts, rocknroll, coffee, tattoos, diet coke, and going to the movies alone!

9 thoughts on “the truth no one wants to see”

    1. Awesome, thanks! I’m not sure what the root of her illness is, but I can tell she has anxiety. She’s British, they live part of the time in england and part of the time. I think she’s lonely and wants to live in England all the time. She and my dad are very repressed emotionally. Lots of reasons, I guess.

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    2. looking at the link you gave me, i can see a very clear reason for why she has the eating disorder. about 10 years before she married my dad, her husband died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. thank you for sharing that! 🙂

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    1. Thanks, me too.

      I think they both consider mental illness isn’t the kind of thing the can accept as a “respectable” person would have. I od’d once and my father said, “people in our family do not do this.’ Ugh.

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      2. Absolutely. I think that one thing that would make people more tolerant of mental illness is to make them understand that it really is illness. People often have trouble, even now, that nothing you can’t see is real. We don’t look I’ll so they think we’re making it up.

        Oops sorry for the rant!

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