I feel freeeeeeeeee!

Here's a post I put on my Facebook page today, following yesterday's 'confession': It's amazing how liberated I feel now I understand it. One of the good things to come out of my son's eating disorder (and my battle to help him overcome it) is that it helped me understand mental health problems, raise awareness of them and recognise that stuff I'd battled with on a personal level for decades and felt 'weak' about and 'to blame' wasn't my fault, just as it's not my fault that my eyes are blue. The sense of liberation, the more I accept all of this, is truly incredible. I have also been very fortunate to have excellent support from NHS mental health services over the past 18 months, on and off.

Why my own depression went undiagnosed for decades

One afternoon in 1989 - on one of the frequent days I took sick from work - I lay on the bed with the large coffee jar beside me. Its potentially lethal contents, carefully amassed for this purpose over the past weeks during visits to different pharmacies and supermarkets, were just feet away from my mouth. A glass of water sat on the bedside cabinet.

Pizza Express, not distress

Ben's massive addition to my weekly supermarket shop reminded me of the other week when Paul and I drove down to Sheffield to celebrate my birthday with Ben. We went to Pizza Express, a restaurant where, back in the 'bad old days' when Ben's anorexia was raging, we had some particularly distressing episodes.

But there was Ben, this time round, ordering the larger size pizza with a sizeable list of extra toppings. When it was served, he pointed to his mountainous pizza and said "Does THIS make you realise that I am perfectly OK and that you have NOTHING to worry about, mum?" Because, yes, you've guessed it, I constantly worry, like we parents do and will probably always do...

Supermarket shocking!

Ben is back from university on Friday for 'reading week', so I asked him to send me his shopping list so I could add it to our delivery from Tesco's. Result? DOUBLE the supermarket spend compared to when it's just Paul and me. And Paul and I seem to eat pretty well! It's things like this that make me realise just how far Ben has come since those dark days when supermarket shopping was a complete nightmare.

It's team work: none of us must feel guilt

I spent yesterday afternoon worrying. Worrying that people who had suffered from an eating disorder might read my blog and feel guilty for 'putting their parents through this'. So I immediately put a post on my Facebook page that says: What I DON'T want to do, ever, is incite feelings of guilt in the eating disorder sufferers themselves (whether recovered or in recovery). They must NEVER, EVER feel guilt at 'putting their parents through all of this'. NEVER, EVER. We, as parents, simply responded with love, exactly as we would have to any life-threatening illness. NEVER feel bad about it. EVER.

The 'guilt' feeling isn't what you might think it is

Part of the vicious circle I described in my last post is 'guilt'. But not the kind of 'guilt' you might expect. I don't feel guilt at 'causing' the eating disorder because, as modern evidence is proving, mothers don't 'cause' their child's eating disorder - eating disorders are thought to be a combination of genetic susceptibility and environmental triggers (in my son's case it was trying to get a fantastic six-pack physique without doing as much sport, while eating less). No, the feeling of guilt that is very much part of the vicious circle of emotions I'm feeling at the moment is very different.

Depression is a lonely place to be until...

As anyone who has visited my recent post on the Around The Dinner Table Forum may know, I've been having a spot of bother over the last two years. The trouble is, my son is pretty much recovered from his eating disorder. But as he continued to move in the right direction and establish a new life for himself, it became clear that I was suffering from the aftermath of everything we had been through during the traumatic years during which I'd battled to help him recover from anorexia.