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You're Making It Up

Not Being Heard or Seen

By Deanne HortonPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
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At two months of age, Garret wouldn’t sleep unless I was holding him. At all. No naps. No crying himself to sleep from exhaustion. It didn’t matter if anyone else was holding him. He just would not sleep. I knew there was something not right in that. Wanting to be held is normal. Not sleeping unless a specific person is doing the holding is not.

But no one would listen. I was exaggerating or making it up entirely. I was only seeing what I wanted to see, making my child out to be something he wasn’t. Making him out to be ‘different’, ‘abnormal.’

I had to quit work; I couldn’t hold him while working, and he would scream while I was gone. Staying home with him was the only option I could see. Again I was told I was exaggerating or making it up, trying to get attention, making excuses to quit my job.

As he got older it got worse. He still wouldn’t sleep unless I was holding him. He wasn’t talking, wasn’t babbling, wasn’t doing anything that related to communicating. He would stare into my eye for several minutes at a time and then go off to play on his own.

When he was a year old an ENT finally looked at him and gave a diagnosis. He was deaf. The adenoids had grown to cover the ear canals. He wasn’t babbling because he didn’t hear us talking to him. The fact he was even walking was considered a miracle.

So he had the adenoids removed. He started babbling. Started talking. Only to grow silent again. I took him in for more testing. The adenoids had grown back. They were taken out a second time. Again he started babbling.

But he still wouldn’t sleep unless I was holding him. Still didn’t want to play with other kids. Still wanted to sit in my lap and stare into my eye.

I contacted the Early Intervention team. They came to evaluate him. They watched him sit on my lap and stare into my eye before playing with blocks. After twenty minutes they told me there was nothing wrong with him and left.

It was disheartening. I felt like there was something wrong with ME. What kind of parent makes up things being wrong with their child? What could I possibly be getting out of it?

It makes me sick to my stomach to this day.

The hardest thing was my family not believing me; assuming I was making it up for attention or exaggerating. I should have been able to turn to them for support. Instead, they were a source of doubt and self-destruction.

Once Garret’s father died, I learned the family history. Abuse, suicide, mental illness – depending on who you talked to it was borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, or extreme psychosis. So I got the kids into therapy and read everything I could get my hands on. Whatever it was, it spanned 7 documented generations without skipping. I was determined to prevent generation 8 from following the same path.

Fortunately, we moved. To the tiny island of Guam. The people there recognized Garret had some differences. But they accepted them, worked with them. Treated him – and me, and his sister – as if his differences were normal things. I was not made to feel as if I was to blame, or there was anything to be blamed for. Garret was Garret was Garret and no matter what he and we were safe and accepted. I was able to relax, to enjoy the good times. Feel like a good parent.

It was on Guam that I realised how small I had been made to feel. As if I was nothing. A bad parent at best, so desperate to be noticed that I was tormenting my own child by claiming he had something wrong with him. A mental health version of Munchausen’s by proxy – I wasn’t poisoning his body, I was poisoning his mind and soul. And, like most abused people, after a while I believed it to be true. I was to blame. I was making up for my lack by destroying my child.

On Guam, however, I was NOT small. I was not insignificant. I was not destroying my child. I was doing what I could to help him be himself. I existed. It was empowering.

Unfortunately, Guam didn’t last. We moved to Colorado Springs. Everything was different there. I worked nights, so Garret’s sister took him to and from school around her own school hours. Because she wore a black hoodie she was deemed a Satanist – and because she was the one seen picking him up and dropping him off, she was considered his mother, too. The other kids were warned to stay away from Garret.

Things also got very dark for him. He started seeing things – a girl in his closet with a picnic basket that held her parents severed heads; mouths coming out of the walls to eat him; things in the vents watching him; the garbage disposal wanting to eat his arm (and him trying to feed it). He threw himself down stairs to see what it would feel like. Asked me to beat him – again, to see what it would feel like.

At school he broke another childs glasses and hid them in the sandbox, pulled a fire alarm just to see what would happen, and similar things I was not informed of until days or even weeks later. One day he pushed a teacher in front of an on-coming car because she told him to go inside when he wasn’t ready to.

I quit my night job for one during the day, hoping it would help. It didn’t. He got kicked out of the before and after school program for scaring the other kids. No one would tell me what he did, only that he couldn’t return and the other kids were frightened.

But he was as well. He was sneaking into my room every night to sleep on the floor or in my closet, too afraid of the things he saw and heard to be alone.

We were all in therapy. The kids individually and us as a family. Garret went through 4 therapists in the two years. One had to quit seeing Garret because he couldn’t remain objective; he just liked Garret too much. The third one decided she wasn’t qualified to help him. The fourth…never seemed interested.

The worst one was the second one. The one who informed me there was absolutely nothing wrong with Garret. I was making it up and had taught his sister to agree with what I said. We were both doing it for the attention and (implied, not said) so we could get drugs we could then sell. At the time, I wasn’t working at all. Garret had been making threats and had been caught with a knife tryiing to figure out how and where to cut his own heart out. I was too afraid to not be there when he was home.

His sister was having her own problems; becoming a teenager, hearing people say such horrible things about her and her brother, intense bullying she didn’t want me to know about. She wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating. I worried about her trying to harm herself, feared she was slipping out and getting drunk. (She wasn’t, although she was getting buzzed fairly regularly.)

So I took Garret off all of his medications and took him every day back to the therapist who insisted I was making it up. After two weeks, and informing me that HE was a doctor and I just a mother, the therapist refused to see us anymore. Which was more than fine with me. And Garret.

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About the Creator

Deanne Horton

I am a single mom of 2. My youngest is the main focus of this blog; our journey to get people to recognize there is a problem and help us do something about it.

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