Do What You Can Do

Chaos was what I was born into, I was born from two creative 60’s parents, both amazing artists and musicians. They were barely out of their teens when Vietnam hit. Their parents were WWII pilots and heros that had lived through the depression before there was maternity leave, birth control, or anything related to mental health care. After Vietnam the short love affair they had was gone and the reality of the harsh world set in. My mother and I lived alone for a few years as she worked at anything she could, leaving her amazing talents to the curb for practicality and I secretly loved every moment we had alone together. She soon married her best friend who had a career and a soon a home. My two sweet sisters were born ten years after me and I learned the care taking role. Addiction though plagued my family tree, and friction was a part of every day.

I joined the military at 18 and left the minute I graduated. The lesson I am focused on today, is the one I have been fighting against my entire life. You can only control your choices in life but you cannot control all the other factors of your choice or other people’s choices. I chose the military, for opportunity, and a sense of control over my life. Just months after I finished basic training, I was shipped off to a war torn country. (Excuse me, that’s not what I signed up for!). In that situation all I could control were my choices for that day, who I would spend my time with, the words that would come out of my mouth, the way I would act, my attitude. For some reason at 19, I had less of a problem with that in 1991 than I do now. I was not anxious, I was not overly sad. I think because I knew all I could do was what I could do. Why has that been so hard since then?

I tried to finish college but I lacked support in all ways. I married a few years later and had two kids back to back, a four year gap and another set of Irish twins making a busy house of 6. I finished school and went on to go to nursing school, able to do so with the support and stability I needed. But life still had a lot of curveballs and line drives to the forehead awaiting me.

I remember the first one being an ADHD diagnosis with one of my daughters, and another curveball with another daughter having an extremely high IQ. I thought ok, I’ll learn all about this and do all the things I need to do. I moved the kids to a school more equipped to deal with both. I even helped start the talented and gifted program at the new school. A few years later another child was diagnosed with a very rare learning disability, that affects anything spatial. I threw myself into years of research, IEP meetings and honestly still I am trying to learn and teach people about it. It took years, but I finally learned that I had to teach my daughter about her disability and how to advocate for herself because I couldn’t be in her pocket for ever.

In 2014 we hit the wall with depression and eating disorder behavior with one child and my husband and I threw everything we had at. I never could wrap my head around what we could have done wrong. Our children had everything they needed, they had love, and education, activities, pets, faith. (Ah, but you cannot outrun genetics, and depression is genetically linked to addiction, eating disorders, OCD, ADHD. They are all cut from the same cloth). In remission, she came out the other side but her sister soon followed and in 2018 she lost the battle with her depression before we could even get a handle on what was going on.

The loss rippled through my family like a grenade. It left shrapnel inside the rest of us that we have been adapting to for over two years. My remaining three girls each fighting their own battle that I could not fight for them. The part of the story most outsiders are unknowing, the devastation didn’t stop with the loss of my daughter. My oldest a year later, December 2019, lost the person she planned to start her life with, to untreated bipolar depression and moved home a couple months later the pandemic hit. All I could do then and still do, is to hold her and remind her of all the talent and beauty that still lives inside of her. I remind her daily.

My middle child, broke-up with her three year boyfriend that spiraled her into facing her the loss of her sister also, the realization that people you love can leave without warning and again I couldn’t fix it, she had to fight her way through it, learn to control her own actions and claw her way out of the pit she was in while loosing every friend around her. Going from the most popular, to being ridiculed, her property vandalized, being cyber bullied and deserted my friends instead of supported by those around her. From my observation, people just back away from anything they don’t understand and look for the easiest explanation instead of taking a closer look and sitting down in the mess with someone. I can honestly say I am so proud of her for literally putting a crown on her head at her senior parade and managing to still keep her scholarship. She is day by day moving forward in this Covid world at college. All I could do during those darker days was make accommodations for her the last few months of school, encourage her to talk and to keep moving forward one day at a time.

Today my youngest battles her own major depression, with learning challenges she has always battled some, but in a similar fashion to her sister, the recent loss of her year-long relationship with the one person she trusted more than anything, knocked her depression into turbo gear and brought the loss of her sister even more to the forefront. Learning that you have no control over people leaving, can bring everything you know to a complete halt. I wish I could fix it, but the words of my mother come to mind. “People do only what people can do.”

She told me this on the day of my wedding, when the turmoil of having my husband’s west coast family members and my Ohio family member all together in one building had me stressed and crying. Basically she was trying to tell me to not focus on things out of my control, you do what you can. People do only what they can. Focus on those things. As my youngest works through her depression currently in militant-like therapy center all I can do is be her cheer-leader. I can advocate for her and support her in any way I can through it, but the up-hill battle is hers and I am proud of her because she has always had to work twice as hard as anyone else in the room, though she rarely gives up. I am proud of all my girls for pulling themself up, without a lot of outside support to cheer them on.

I sit this morning with fires raging in my county ten miles away, with a pandemic still silently threatening, smoke filling the city streets making the sky like a scene from Twilight. I debate if airing my family struggles in my blog is helpful or damaging, but ultimately I believe talking about mental health is more important than any negative opinion lobbed my way. It is therapeutic for me to write and maybe someone will read it this and see they are not alone.

I can only control, what I can control. Today I can slowly work on cleaning up my office space, organize some of my non-profit, http://www.mikennavanekproject.org paperwork and maybe brainstorm ways our non-profit could help those affected by the fires or pandemic. I can try and figure out how to use my new air fryer and make something new or different in it, I can open up one of the games I love to play tonight and play a game with my husband and daughters. Instead of focusing on the fact I can’t breathe outside, and that I can’t socialize or travel, I will focus on what I can do and that’s all I can do.