Perspective and Choice

Perspective and Choice

 

 

I have come to believe that so much of what makes for a mentally healthy outlook is down to perspective and choice.  So much of how we see things and how we deal with things affects our lives – it can really make or break us.

Take the trials that we face.  You can look at a trial and tell yourself it is unfair and wallow in anger and bitterness about it, or you can look at it as a lesson.  It is a choice to change your perspective.  For example, after I came out of my first rehab I signed up to voluntarily be monitored by random urine tests.  I did this for a year.  I had to call into a phone number every week day morning and I would find out if I had been called for a test that day.  It was an inconvenience, but it was a check and balance for me and a way to allay some of Frank’s fears.  The year of monitoring ended and then I relapsed and went back to rehab.

I again signed up for the volunteer monitoring program but for an even more intense level of monitoring.  While in rehab I had admitted that I had cheated the test the last time I went because I knew I would not pass and just wanted to keep drinking for a few more days before I got caught – because at that point I knew I would.  This is the depth you fall to in addictive thinking.

In any case, since I admitted this in rehab, I was to be monitored for a year by random urine tests each week and once every two months by a blood test that can look back over the past three months to see if you have used.  Not only that, but now the random urine tests would be observed.  I can’t tell you just how humbling it is to have to pee in front of someone once, let alone every week for a year.  I could have been very bitter about this but I made a choice to learn from it.  I made a choice to carry myself with dignity.

I was fortunate in that the woman at the lab who had to accompany me and observe me during the tests each week was a consummate professional and one of the most respectful and most kind women I have met.  She did not judge and treated me with the dignity I was attempting to harness.  I appreciated her treatment of me so much, that at Christmas time I baked her some goodies and wrote her a card.  Nothing like thanking someone for watching you pee for a year!  Perspective and choice personified…

I look back on the hardest time of my life, that being the birth, life and death of Liam, and I know that perspective and choice brought Frank and I both through that biggest of trials with bottomless grace. 

I did not have the easiest of childhoods, as so many of us have not, and did not have the best role model in a mother being that she was so mentally ill and so utterly untreated.  When I got pregnant with Liam, I was secretly terrified that I would not be a good mother.  I was afraid that I would harm them emotionally and frankly that I would simply not know what to do.  The moment that he was born something shifted in me and my heart expanded exponentially.  I could not imagine anything that I would not do to make him better, to keep him safe, to hold him close, to care and love him with all my being and I knew instantly that I could be a mother, that I could be a good mother and I was capable of doing all that I needed to in order to care for him.  I am not saying that it was easy, because it wasn’t, and I am not saying that I did not have doubts and fears, but I knew.  Liam taught me that and perhaps God taught me that, I am an unsure.  What I am sure of still to this day, is that I am a good mother when I am not in active addiction.

After his death we went to a grief support group for parents who have had miscarriages, still births and infant deaths.  So many of the parents there were angry about the death of their babies, and understandably so.  I was fortunate enough to feel so differently.  I was grateful, so very grateful that I got to meet Liam, hold him, love him and be his mother.  I was, in fact, honored to hold him as he died.  I could have been angry, I could have lashed out and I could have strayed away from other babies in my grief, but I didn’t and neither did Frank.  Perspective and choice.

During this latest trial: the separation and divorce that Frank and I have been going through and are still going through, I could easily harbor resentment and bewail any injustices that I might perceive.  I could easily curl into a ball and wallow in sadness and distress, but I choose not to.  I choose to accept the situation, allow myself to feel sadness but to look at this as the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another.  I am only 42, I am still young and there is so much of life ahead of me and so much I want to learn and explore.  There is so much to be grateful for and so many people that care.  I have sadness but I also have joy and I choose to allow that to balance my life.  You can either learn from trials or you can let them bury you.  Perspective and choice.