Marilyn Munster

"Cleaning the bathroom relaxes me" my youngest daughter tells me.

She was the only baby in the hospital when she was born and this is the only way I know she wasn't switched at birth. She slept through the night the very day she was born. She knows when to stop eating when she is full, she likes to clean, and she makes friends easily. She is a grade ahead and reading and doing math 2 years ahead.

More significantly, in a house where 75% of us are being treated for some sort of mental illness, and belonging to a family that is plagued by it, she is normal.

To me, it is like watching a documentary on a different culture, being in awe of a societies practices and customs. Watching her is watching what could have been.

What is most amazing about her is the way she accepts the craziness around her and finds a way to help, instead of deciding to resent. I tell my children that it feels like there is sandpaper in my brain, or my mind is on fire when I am not doing well. I tell them that even though I appear angry at them, that it is not their fault, it is mine. I will not know for sure if these words mean anything to them until they are adults, but I feel that most of my words are making it to her. Now if she is fully tattooed, dropped out of high school and living with her crack dealing boyfriend at sixteen I supposed that will be a sign that I hurt her more than helped her, but for now, she is doing well.

At eight she can make a meal, do a full load of laundry, and go to the store for me. And yes, she cleans the bathroom to relax.

I find notebooks around the house where she has an itinerary for her day. She has scheduled playtime, showers, and snack time. What is really great, is she is keeping up on it. She is in a home where some days I am lucky if I show up to work wearing pants because my mind is pounding so hard I cannot remember my name. The breakdowns I have had where my mind has become separated from me has for a period of time stopped me from remembering the year she was born. She writes notes on the fridge for me to remind me of things.

I have to be careful with this blessing, a daughter who has the potential to take care of me instead of me taking care of her. It would be easy for me to put a huge amount of responsibility on her to ease my parental load. It would be easy for me to take her childhood away in my selfishness in not taking care of myself.

Every task I give her, I rethink, is this helping her, or helping me? Is this helping her grow into an adult, or is it helping me not be one?

I need to help her grow, but she is driven, and without me regulating what she takes on she will grow to be a unhappy adult. She has in the past taken on too much, and gone without sleeping because she was worrying too much. She was afraid she was going to miss the school bus on her first day of school, and laid awake for days, not wanting to bother me with her troubles. I finally got it out of her one night while she cried on my lap. Turns out she wasn't even going to take a bus to school, she was walking with her sister. She was worried about me more than her and I have to take that seriously. I am the adult and I am supposed to take care of her.

So at night when we all line up to take our meds, our Marilyn Munster puts on lotion. When we go to the doctor for our refills she comes up with a dire disease she may have just to be included.

She is lovely. I am blessed to have her.