New Doctor

I have decided that enough is enough! I got up my courage and searched for a new doctor for Molly. I read up and found one that is close to my office and called him up. He actually called me back and sounds knowledgeable and he didn't yell at me over the phone! I made an appointment with this new guy and Molly on this Thursday. I don't want to get my hopes up, but i really hope he can help my poor daughter get to a place of peace and contentment!

Despair

I feel as though i am sinking further and further into the abyss. Molly is becoming almost impossible to care for anymore. Her mood swings and behavior are unbelievably disturbing. My husband is mad at me, i think because he is fed up with our home life situation. I feel that i am in a constant mood of depression with no possible bright spot around. We have put out a call for a referral to a new doctor. It is obvious that Molly needs extreme help and our doctor seems to have lost ideas. I just hope tomorrow is better.

Baby Molly

When i think back the many years it was that Molly was a baby, i think my memory has been kind to me and suppressed a lot of the awfullness! Molly use to scream all the time. The only way to get her to be quiet was to nurse her. My husband and i use to get into fights about when we should start counting the 3 hours since she last nursed time! of course, he wasn't the one doing the act, so to him, the sooner i could start again the better to keep her quiet! We were first time parents, so we just thought that we had won the luck of the draw and had a very colicky baby. Therefore, i eliminated pretty much everything from my diet to see if it would help Molly. No chocolate, dairy, wheat, shellfish, coffee.. you name it, i didn't eat it! It was great for losing the baby weight, but Molly continued to scream. I had not slept in many weeks when my sister finally came to my rescue and took me to the pediatrician. My sister was convinced that something was wrong with Molly. She had had two babies and felt that Molly's constant state of duress was not normal. The doctor completely dismissed our observations and wrote everything off to the fact that i was a new mother and i should just relax. That should have been my sign to leave, but i guess i was just too exhausted to see it. So the one thing i want to pass on to others, follow your instincts, or if you are too tired to have any instincts, follow those of a trusted friend/ relative. I probably would have gotten Molly on the road to treatment earlier if i had pursued my sister's observation that something was off with my baby.

Pregnant with Molly

I finally got the news that i was pregnant about 3 years after we had first started trying. I was elated and scared to death. I was working as an attorney at the time and would very often have to go to court feeling extremely sick and not in the mood to dress up and act professional! Once the morning sickness eased, the pregnancy progressed without any problems. Towards the end, I was going to the doctor's weekly to get checked. All of a sudden, at my last visit, the doctor determined that Molly was in a breach position and scheduled me for a c-section the next morning. I have no idea how she changed position in one week's time without me knowing it, but maybe it was a hint as to her determined personality. When i was having the c-section, i swear that Molly started screaming before they even had her out of me! She was screaming like crazy and continued to do so from that point on. She was a beautiful little baby and she was my little girl that i so desperately wanted. I had no idea at that point the emotional toll Paul and I were about to begin. All we knew at that point was that we had a daughter and we were finally a family.

My Husband

I met Paul on the second day of law school back in the late '70's. He asked me out for coffee and being the super cool girl that i am, i blurted out that i don't drink coffee. Bless his heart, he didn't drop me at that point, but continued his effort to get to know me. Needless to say, we married in 1980. We both finished law school, took the bar exam and got jobs as "real" attorneys. I worked for a big defense firm who happened to represent Ford Motor Company. I had clerked for the senior partner while in law school, so when i passed the bar, he decided to make me do a lot of the traveling that was necessary to prepare cases for trial. At that point in our marriage, we knew we wanted children, but we also knew we had to start paying our gigantic student loans. So we worked. About 3 years into the marriage, i started wanting to see if children would be in our future. It took quite a while before i actually became pregnant with Molly. Thinking back, I am so glad that Paul and I had the foundation of 5 years in our marriage before we had Molly because we sure needed a solid foundation between the two of us when Hurricane Molly entered our world! So my advice to all young couples out there; don't rush into parenthood. Even the birth of a normal child can rock your entire way of living. The last thing you need is the stress of silly arguments when you are living on little sleep and painful boobs (for those of us who breast fed, you know what i am talking about!)

My Blog

I have started this blog as a source of therapy and maybe as a source of help for other mothers (and fathers) who find themselves graced with a child who has special needs. I do not plan to spend every second of this blog on Molly (the aforementioned child) because my life is filled with numerous characters who all deserve their place in the spotlight. I have found that many times i feel very alone in my struggle to remain sane when living day in and day out with my daughter. She is 24 years old and has lived at home since birth. Her full diagnosis is mental retardation, bipolar disorder, ADHD, OCD, and others, (you get my drift.) Many times i feel extremely jealous of other mothers who have young adult daughters and get to share those very special mother-daughter moments with them. But then i hear of stories of daughters who don't speak with their mothers, or cut them out of their lives and i am grateful that to Molly, i am the most important person in her life and probably always will be. I have to remind myself of that quite often and feel that maybe this is my silver lining.