Normal is a dryer setting

A friend of mine at work confided that her 17 year old daughter may be bipolar. Normally a high achiever, she is flunking out of school. She is depressed and acting out. Such a worry. I have tried to get her in touch with a neighbor in the ward (Kathleen) who has a son who is bipolar (John) and another son who suffers from anxiety. I thought it would be good for the two women to get together.

Kathleen had a book she had loaned to my friend. As I returned it, we ended up taking our evening walk with Kathleen and Roy. Kathleen had several interesting things to say about coping with a bipolar child. She said that anxiety is the most common of mental illnesses (who knew it was considered in the mental illness spectrum?). She said that the average time to diagnose and find proper medications for bipolarity is TEN YEARS. (Their son is 32.) She ended with, "Tell your friend that normal is a setting on the dryer. None of us are really normal. There is no such thing."

Work continues to be anything but normal. Lots of words occur to me, but normal is not one of them.

Grandma great is certainly not normal. Bob stopped by to visit on his way home from work. He offered to warm up a dinner in her fridge. She told him he must go buy her dinner or she would starve. Definitely not normal.

Several of our neighbors have had children return home to live with them. They are between jobs, saving money for a new house, waiting for their house to sell, or going back to school. One week we had three new family memberships read in - all were children returning to live with their parents. One of my neighbors has a daughter (call her Sue) who has moved back with her husband into her parent's home. They are newly married and young. They have had trouble with cars, and she is pregnant. Currently, Sue's husband works part time while he goes to school, seeking a degree in elementary education. Sue works full time, securing the insurance for the family. How great that her parents can help them out, and that she feels comfortable asking. Sue says she wants desperately to be a full time mom when the baby is born, yet even with two incomes and insurance they need to live with her parents. I see lots of stress in their future.

We went to a wedding reception with our good friend Jay (his wife was to the young women's broadcast with a granddaughter). While he has been plagued by severe pain in recent years, now his pancreas has given out (requiring him to take three enzyme pills with every meal/snack) and his heart is malfunctioning. Constant pain, doctor's appointments, and medications are his new normal.

I went out to lunch twice last week with friends from our old Relief Society presidency. Both have had stress with a child. One said, "I have lowered my expectations. If my son isn't suicidal, I count it as a good week."

Normal is a dryer setting. Most of us are just doing the best we can. Life is perfect for none of us.