Hi everyone. I found this site tonight and thought I’d post. I’m a little overwhelmed and have been looking for a safe/non-judgmental place to share, so I’m glad to have found this forum.

I’m currently struggling with bi-polar 2 (depression especially), and chronic pain. I’m also caring for my elderly father at the same time, and while he’s gotten better in a lot of ways (which takes some of the pressure off) living with him is hard for me because he can be really difficult to deal with. None of us know if he has depression (which I believe he does) or may be going into dementia because he refuses to go to a neurologist to find out, but whatever the cause, he can be really angry, complains ALOT, and is so negative it’s hard for me to maintain my positivity. I love him, but God, I had NO idea it would be so hard to live with him. And the hardest part is that the whole situation is really dysfunctional.  Long story short—-I moved back to my home state in 2013 after my husband and I split up. After I’d been here for two months, my Mom (my beautiful, best friend, troubled but loving Mom)  passed away. My dear 21 year old cat died, my 16 year old cat died, and my beautiful Golden Retriever died as well. After all of that, I developed serious health problems and severe depression which I only started to come out of last year.

It was incredibly hard to deal with all that happened, and although I love my family, they are not warm, emotional people and what you “do” as a person means more to them than who you are. Needless to say, I didn’t get the support I needed from them, and now in hindsight I can see that they weren’t the right people to turn to. But I was devastated, and barely functioning, and it seemed like even the counselor and grief support place I found just did not have what I needed back then. It’s been a lonely road for the past few years, but I have found good Al-Anon meetings to go to (my late Mom was an alcoholic) and am volunteering at the library and have started meeting people for the first time in years.  But , I am still a woman with depression, a woman who is still grieving, a woman who misses her Mom more than anyone understands and who misses her husband and pets.

I feel like no one (literally) understands how I feel and it is so lonely sometimes. I feel like I’m from one planet and they are all from another, and it’s really odd and uncomfortable. And given that my Dad was always distant and unemotional, having him here with me is bringing up a lot of childhood memories for me—-things that I can’t even discuss with him because he just won’t “go there”.  : (     I’m trying to learn to accept the way he is, but God it’s not easy. One time when I was very upset about my Mom and really emotional, he’d asked me what was wrong and I told him, barelyl able to keep from crying. Well, that was a good lesson learned because he basically said, “What the hell is the big deal? I lost my parents too, you get over it.”  And I was like, “Youv’e been sick for two years and we’ve almost lost YOU several times. How do you think that felt for me given that I’ve already lost my Mother?”  And I don’t remember his exact words but it was something like, “Every body dies, you have to get used to it.”

I know intellectually that this man cannot and will not ever be the Dad I want him to be. But the little girl in me remembers her Daddy when he was young and handsome and maybe a little strict, but also kind and smiling. I don’t know what happened to him along the way (everyone seems to blame living with my Mom as part of it, and maybe it was, but he has now lived with my step mother for 33 years compared to 18 with my Mom and although my step mother doesn’t drink, I’d rather live with my Mother in one of her drinking moments than my stepmother any day of the week), But, whatever his issues are, I’m tired of dealing with them.

What makes everything so hard for me is that because of my bipolar and chronic pain, I haven’t worked in like 7 years, and since I moved home my Dad has helped me with money, even buying a modular home for me. So, I’m living in the home he bought, and am still supported partially by him (and partly by my alimony while I try to get on SS disability) plus he is now living here with me, and although he would love to go back to the family home, it’s well over 120 years old and is having so many problems that we can’t afford to fix that it’s not a safe place anymore. sigh….

I guess the other part of the backstory is that my Dad and stepmom have never gotten along and the only reason they stayed together is she got pregnant with my sister. A few years ago after my sister’s divorce my stepmother moved in with her, supposedly to “support her”, but it’s obvious that she just wanted to get away from my Dad. They’ve always had a weird marriage (imo) but when Dad got sick the first time in 2016, he fell and was on the floor alone for five hours before he was able to reach the phone and call 911. It’s always made me angry that she wasn’t there for him when he went through that, and now fast forward two years and two more serious surgeries, Dad is here with me, and she is still down the road living with my sister in the house he had built for her and her first husband. She wasn’t a wife imo in any capacity for decades, and although I CHOSE to have Dad come here, it still irks me that she doesn’t have to care for her own husband.

I guess all of this stuff is just bubbling around under the surface, and I feel like my life is passing me by while I’m living in this dysfunctional situation. I am very overwhelmed, and my health issues are surfacing again, and since NO ONE in this family talks to each other about anything “real”, no one knows just how miserable I am. I tried a few times over the last few years to share or explain what I go through with family members, but they don’t get it. Even now, my stepmother will say stupid things like “Well I have depression too but I get out of bed every day and I worked for 20 years too.”  I feel like saying, “Um….MY depression is very different than yours and you know nothing about it. Plus, you haven’t worked in 33 years and have lived off of my Dad the entire time. Hello?”   sigh…

Anyway, this is all the stuff that’s going on around me now, which is truly making everything I”m already dealing with worse. I am lonely, I’m sad, I want my Mom and I miss curling up with my husband at night. I feel so blocked off emotionally from the people around me, it’s like being encased in saran wrap or something. I can’t reach them and they can’t or don’t know how to reach me (or just don’t want to) and so I am feeling lost all of the time lately. I actually feel closer to my cat and dog than to any of the people around me, and that’s kind of sad. Thank God for them though, because they are the most wonderful, loving little companions in the world.

Anyway, I’ve needed to vent for a long time, and granted I need to do that in a journal or something, but somehow tonight it feels good to do it this way, knowing that someone out there will read what I’m saying and perhaps empathize.

I don’t want to be alone at night watching tv, overeating, feeling miserable anymore. I guess that’s why I’m here.

Thank you all for listening.

Sarawyn