I’ve been quarantining with a friend in the city for the last four weeks. This whole lockdown is taking a toll on everyone to varying degrees. My friend Anjali @dahlia_wealth had invited me early on to quarantine with her. I declined the offer because I didn’t want to leave my parents who are 67 & 75. AND she has a cat. I am terrified of cats. My whole, “I am a “warrior woman” goes out the window and I end up being very jumpy.

Suffice to say, after being in quarantine with my parents for almost 2 months, I had reached a point where my mental health was not doing great at home. I needed to acknowledge that, I needed to take care of myself. Staying with my parents was not the ideal environment for someone like myself recovering from trauma/ptsd after my husband’s suicide. The experience of one trauma often makes past traumas resurface. One of which was growing up in a home where there was domestic violence. While staying with them now, my parents’ constant bickering left me in a state of surviving them and reliving their conflicts from my youth, instead of being able to focus on healing from my loss and the burn out from being a caregiver to someone with a mental illness.

I love my parents & I bend over backwards for them. I am grateful for all they’ve done. But they are not necessarily my safe space, nor do they have the capacity to give me the kind of support I need when it comes to my mental health. While I do at times enjoy spending time with my mother and father, being around them for too long definitely does not bring out the best in me, especially when they fall back into their unhealthy habit patterns where instead of diffusing a situation, they fuel it.

Since Anand died, I’ve needed to make my healing a priority which is something I seldom did in the past. Selfcare has been hard because my instinct is to jump & help others, often putting my own needs aside. So here I am, taking care of me, while attempting to break my unhealthy attachment to my toxic parents.

I hope you are making your mental health a priority. At the same time I hope you are being conscientious about how your behaviour might affect the mental health of those you are living with. Self awareness and holding oneself accounting is by no means easy. This is especially true if you have kids. Right now their eyes are on you, they are taking their cues from you and learning from you how to cope during a crisis. Otherwise they may step up into the role of the responsible adult (aka parentification ) which isn’t fair to them.

So far, staying with Anjali has been a win-win situation for both of our mental health. Anju lives alone & with social distancing it can make one feel isolated.

Here are some shots of us during a walk sporting makeshift masks from my old yoga pants (they had holes in them, I wouldn’t go cutting up a good pair). And of course, Mimi the cat.

#MentalHealth #GriefJourney #HealingJourney #Widow #SuicideLoss #TraumaRecovery #ToxicParents