A Loving Mother

I’m a girl with bipolar disorder. That’s when your moods go up or down way too far. Sometimes with bipolar, you feel so happy that you get kind of hyperactive, bouncing off the walls and jumping for joy. Then, within minutes, bipolar can make you feel really sad or so mad that you start throwing stuff around, screaming and stomping.

With bipolar, when a person gets either really, really happy or really, really sad or mad, they have no idea why they feel that way. They can think of nothing that caused their mood to be so extreme one way or the other.


When I was seven years old, I got mad at my mom for no reason. We got into a fight over nothing, and I got so mad that I threw my glass piggy bank at her. Pretty bad, huh?

Maybe some of my anger was due to the fact that my parents had recently divorced and my mom and dad were not getting along well. My dad had been following my mom around. Then one night, he came into our house and attempted to hurt her, and she ran outside to call the police. At that point, he started to go up the stairs to find me. I was asleep and my stepdad kept him from getting to me. He ran away before the police got there, but the next day, the police arrested him for harassing our family.

That next day, I was supposed be with my dad but, of course, he didn’t show up. That’s when I knew something was wrong. My mom tried to protect me from finding out why he didn’t come. She just told me that he had done something wrong and couldn’t be with me. I cried every night because I missed him, and I became really depressed. Finally, I bugged my mom enough that she told me what had happened that night. In a way, it just made me more upset because everyone had kept the truth from me.

Around that time, I also began experiencing these extreme mood shifts. First I’d be really, really happy and then the next minute I’d be really, really mad. Then I couldn’t stop myself from crying. It was very confusing, and I felt like I had no control over my emotions anymore. When I would get into trouble, I couldn’t understand why I was behaving so badly. I would later come back to my mom and apologize to her for being so out of control, and she would always say, “It’s okay, Holly. You’re forgiven. Tomorrow will be a better day.” It was hard on her, I’m sure, but she tried to deal with it by giving me love and understanding. She somehow knew that I couldn’t help myself and suspected something more was wrong with me when one day I got so depressed that I asked her, “Why don’t you just get rid of me?” I had been so down that I didn’t even want to live anymore.

She didn’t think that my behavior was all because of what was happening between her and my dad. So, she took me to see a doctor who helps kids that have the same kind of issues that I was dealing with. It helped to know that there was someone out there who could understand me. It didn’t seem like my family was able to do that at that time.

The day I threw the piggy bank my mom realized that I had gotten so out of control of my emotions that I could be a danger to myself and others. So, she and the doctor agreed that putting me in the hospital would help keep me safe while they ran some tests. It was there that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The good news was, once they knew what I had, they could find the right medication to help me balance out. While in the hospital, I also learned about bipolar and the challenges of living with this illness.

I felt so much better after I got out of the hospital. I stopped feeling so sad and then suddenly totally happy. Finally, I felt normal for the first time in a long time.

Still, when I had some bad mood swings after I got out of the hospital, I thought that Mom would want to send me back there as punishment for my actions. But my mom never wanted to punish me for doing something that I couldn’t control. She explained to me that she never wanted to be away from me, she only wanted to find the help that I needed to get better and stay better.

Sometimes I would think about how my mother could have given me away because it was so hard to deal with me when my bipolar was going on, but she is too much of a loving mother to ever do that. Instead, she was always behind me, supporting me with tons of love and patience.

When I begin to get a little out of hand, my mom watches to see if I continue the behavior. If I do, it usually means that I need to change medications because the one I’m on has stopped working. That’s part of the challenge of living with bipolar. Sometimes, body chemistry can change, causing the medications to act differently or the body just simply stops working with the medication and you have to change it.

Not long ago, I began hearing voices telling me to do stuff. I had to go into the hospital again to get off of the medication that I was on and start a new one. It was hard to face going into the hospital and going through another adjustment, but after being there for a few days and getting a new medication, the voices went away and I felt more like myself again—more balanced.

It’s been five years now since I was diagnosed with bipolar. For the most part, I am doing well, and my emotions are more in the middle now and less “way too up” or “way too down.” I can thank my mom for helping me make sure that I don’t get sick and out of control. No matter what, she’s there for me. Knowing that, I can cope with having an illness that I’ll always have to work at managing.

With her there, I can get through another day.