Context: I’m trying to put myself in my parents perspective.

By “kids”, this includes those that have already reached the age of majority (i.e. adult children)

  • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    TL;DR mental illness.

    My son used to have panic attacks. Every time he got in a car, he was convinced they were an undiagnosed heart condition. We spent a couple of hours every single day trying to convince him to go to work, not to call 911, and that he wasn’t going to die. For at least a year to eighteen months, every trip to work or the store or on his way home, we had to be on the phone with him for every mile of the trip.

    Sometimes he’d go nonverbal and we’d just have to listen to him hyperventilating. Other times he’d be ranting about how no one took his symptoms seriously, despite getting maybe as many as 3 scans in the emergency room with no finding of anything physically wrong.

    We couldn’t go to bed until he got home. We had to wake up for his trip to work. Two hours out of almost every single day. He’d call my wife at work. If she wasn’t available he’d call me. And he would get pissed and tell at my wife if we weren’t available.

    Anyway, between therapy and meds, we managed to get over that, but that was so fucking exhausting and frustrating. And the sheer presumption that we had to accommodate him regardless of anything else going on.

    • TerrabyteMarx@quokk.auEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      That sounds rough but isn’t that what the standard should be though? Accommodation for a panic disorder. Isn’t that the whole point of having a kid, that there’s an implied possibility you may be taking care of them for the rest of your lives?

      I wouldn’t have been able to push through panic attacks that bad, phone call or not, it’s likely I wouldn’t be driving again.

      • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        My first response is yes but it sucked.

        But there is a more nuanced response that goes something like we have an obligation to all of our kids and to the point that his dysfunction made us unable to take care of our other kids either directly through time demands or by extension through exhausting us to the point where we couldn’t care for ourselves and thus for them, you have to do a bit of triage.

        Who do we have the greater obligation to, a 25 year old man or a 10 and 12 year old? Also he could have spread it around a bit, but he couldn’t be honest with his dad or grandpa what he was going through. He expected us to all but kill ourselves so he could conceal what he was going through from people who wouldn’t understand or would lose respect for him. He expected us to forsake obligations such as work and siblings, which could lead to loss of job and all the itinerant complications of that. That’s all kinda bullshit, right?

        Hell he was on our insurance, so losing our jobs would’ve directly harmed him in any event.