I’m tired. I’m not sure if it’s the weather changing or the days getting shorter, or the seemingly endless IEP triennial meetings lately, but I am flat out exhausted. What’s worse is I’m irritated and guilty about being exhausted, which is making me weepy and giddy and surly. It’s like I’m having my first hypomanic episode – 10 minutes ago I wanted to call up my friends and get them all together to go out to dinner tonight, and now I feel like crawling into my bed with a glass of milk and a book.

I wouldn’t say it’s depression, which I suffered for over a year some time back. I think it might the hangover of having all kinds of decisions to make coming up very soon and being fearful about making the wrong choices. See, my son Tim, who has a diagnosis of Schizoaffective Disorder, turns 18 in eight months, and he will age out of his current RTC placement. He won’t be graduating high school (read here about the Super Senior program), but we will have to decide whether he should come home or we should find another residential placement for him.

I vacillate constantly on this topic. He came home for a visit last weekend and he was stubborn about having to go back when the weekend was over. In that moment, all of the feelings I have churn in the pit of my stomach. I feel the hole in my heart that opens up when I allow myself to miss him. I feel the guilt over his desire to be where he should be; home with his family. I feel the fear my daughter still harbors to some degree over the years of rage she had to witness when he was at home. I feel the failure and self-loathing I felt when we first sent him to residential care. Other times, I am methodical in my resolve that he needs more time in an intensive therapeutic setting. He’s only been stable for about eight months, with one period of particularly stubborn psychosis just five or six short weeks ago. He’s not ready to be integrated back in to the family, we don’t have the resources at home to continue with the level of care he is getting now, and he needs some more time in a program that works on his coping skills, vocational skills, and occupational skills round the clock. I spend those moments on the phone with our caseworker and young adult residential programs in the area. I’m a woman on a mission, with an objective to complete it ahead of schedule. In the pauses I allow in between those two poles, I am lost in the indecision over which is right. Or more right. All I know for sure at this moment is that I don’t know yet.  

And how is any parent supposed to make this decision? I feel like we’re back to where we were two and a half years ago, when we first made the decision to put Tim in a residential treatment center. That was the hardest choice we’ve ever had to make about any of our children, and I don’t relish having to make it again. I’ve said before trying to get him through his youth alive and moving towards stability is like a death of a thousand cuts, but I swear I’m way over the thousand count by now. I’m starting to see it’s closer to the death of a million cuts and the mere realization of that is wearing me out.