worth the pain, morning reflections

At this moment, I'm doing something I never would have dreamed possible even a year ago: I'm watching my three month-old baby boy kick and punch the air like a tiny boxer, trying to reach small dangling birds, cows, and plastic beads from his baby gym. His eyes are still blue, and hair still quite reddish, and I'm sure this can't last. Both Matt and I are blonde, with greenish hazel eyes. Still, I can hope that, through some miracle of recessive genes, he will keep the blue eyes, maybe even the red hair. He is a miracle. After many, many years of infertility and no need to even bother with contraception, along comes this baby just when I was sure nothing like this would ever happen. He is a ray of sunshine in my life, as my Mom predicted. He is a miracle, as his Dad has said more than once.

It's reassurance of some kind, I suppose, some kind of bulwark--or distraction, maybe--against the sadness and discouragement I feel this morning, thinking of my oldest son. He starts a new medication today, and by now I know not to get my hopes up. But they're up, anyway. I can't help it. Maybe I don't want to help it. Maybe I want never to stop hoping we'll find the "thing" that lifts him out of his sadness, his darkness. How could anyone be depressed, truly depressed, and so troubled, at only nine years old? Actually, I can remember him talking about hating himself much younger, as young as four or so. He feels like he messes up, does the wrong thing all day, every day, again and again, and concluded long ago that he doesn't like himself much, that he's a bad kid, that only someone "pure evil" (his words) would do the things he does. His impulsivity is so hard to overcome. His self-regulation is so very poor. Yet he also has a conscience, the ability to feel and express love, and he knows many of the things he does are just plain wrong. Yet he does them over and over again, then feels so guilty about it all and so hopeless about himself that he is filled with darkness, blackness, morbidity, and he feels alienated from all that is good in the world. And the thing is, no matter how hard I try and wish and pray, no matter how much I yearn for him to just FEEL BETTER, be happy, be content, not hate himself, I don't seem able to change it, change him. How many nights have I held him, telling him again and again how precious he is, how much he is loved, that no one is a mistake, that God loves him just the way he is, as do we. I tell him no one is all bad or all good, that we're all a mixture of the two. I try everything, say everything. And sometimes he feels better, but it's just a band-aid, just for the moment. Apparently, I can't change him from sad kid to happy kid, no matter how I try. It's humbling, the limits of a parent's influence and direction in a child's life.

The big question is, is he depressed for more psychological reasons--guilt and despair over himself and his impaired functioning in the world? Or is it a more genetic destiny kind of thing, in which he would feel depressed anyway, more from a chemical imbalance resulting from genetics or early environmental factors? If it's the latter, maybe an anti-depressant can help, if he can tolerate it, which is far from certain, since he also is diagnosed wth Bipolar Disorder. Many people with Bipolar cannot take anti-depressants, or if they do, they're so activating that they become manic. I shouldn't have my hopes up. Maybe one day I'll learn not to.

But if I lose hope, I guess I've really lost him. Maybe I can hold onto hope for improvement while not putting so much of myself into that hope, that I'm destroyed when it doesn't materialize.