Growing up with a mother with a panic disorder
I didn’t want to write about this before because not only is this issue extremely personal but it is also not my sole experience. I didn’t want to exploit what my mother is still going through for readership. That’s not why I wanted to share this piece. The reason I wanted to share this piece was because I felt so alone and trapped when I was going through this, and I would’ve really liked to see something like this to help me cope. So here it is.
When I was 12, my mother had her first panic attack. This was after we had moved to Canada, just a few weeks after. I knew my mother was not fluent in English and I knew that the move had stressed her out in various ways. But we had to move because we would have been interrogated by the court if we had been in the country. Around then, my father was facing charges due to one of his old colleagues. Tough times.
I was so young and already so scared and I was the only one who spoke English. So I had be the “adult” in the household, with my mother and my little brother who was 9 years old and my puppy. In the little apartment we had by Lonsdale Quay, my mother finally broke down after a heated conversation with my father on Skype, and I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. My mother’s temper had always been like fire — she would heat up so quickly and she would get insanely mad and do things and say things she would never have when she was in her regular state, inadvertently hurting us. I knew her doctor gave her a diagnosis of mild bipolarity. But this was so different.
She couldn’t breathe. That was the main aspect of it. The air around us was fine and we didn’t even live that far up in the building. She just couldn’t breathe. She started wheezing and coughing and she fell on the carpet in the bedroom and started writhing and grabbing at the walls, the floor, my hand — anything. This was 6 years ago and I still remember the clutch of her hand on my forearm so clearly — how her nails had dug into my skin, leaving sharp crescent marks that bled later on. She begged me to do something. I didn’t know what to do. I ran to the kitchen and opened up just about any drawer after telling my brother, who was also terrified and crying, to look after my mother. I was blindly searching and searching until I got some pain relievers. I knew Tylenol wasn’t going to fix this but I was desperate and I had a strong feeling that this was not only physical, but mental. Maybe the pills would relieve her sense of fear.
So with shaking hands, I poured a cup of water and shook out a few pills, heading straight towards the bedroom. I begged my mother to try to sit up and after 5 minutes of trying and begging, she did, and I helped her take the pills, reminding her to be careful not to choke. I thanked heavens for her not asking any questions.
After a while, she seemed okay. She wasn’t wheezing anymore. She uttered one word. “Alcohol.”
I advised her that it wasn’t a good idea to drink, to which she shook her head at. She meant medical alcohol. I hadn’t the slightest idea why she would need medical alcohol at a time like this, but I went to the bathroom and grabbed the bottle and some cotton pads.
When I returned, my mother seemed to be sitting up a little straighter and breathing relatively normally, holding my brother’s hand. She took the alcohol and soaked one of the cotton pads with it, and she took my arm and started dabbing at it. I didn’t even realize how my arm was bleeding. It stung but it didn’t matter. Physical pain was a minor distraction.
“I’m sorry.” She said, dabbing at my arm. I didn’t know what else to tell her, so I just said that it’s okay and that she should go see a doctor. She said no. We were here on a student visa and my mother was just a guardian. Thus, the medical insurance didn’t cover her bills and the fee for seeing the doctor or going to the ER was so expensive. On a middle-class immigrant’s budget, she said it would be wise if we saved that money. She was always so, so frugal, to the point where I thought it was obsessive compulsive.
“It’s just… one of those things. Nothing serious.” She told me. I highly doubted that, but I didn’t want to argue with her because her blood pressure would increase too much if I provoked her in any kind of way, resulting in another panic attack. It was like walking on glass.
And for a few years, even after we moved back to Korea, she didn’t have any of those panic attacks. I was fully confident that they were gone. Sure, her bipolarity was still pretty bad and she still got too easily enraged when I provoked her. But not being able to breathe? None of that. But it wasn’t perfect, of course. She once said to me that it was like as if something had possessed her, shielded her eyes with white fury, and just caused her to want to destroy. To hurt. I ran away from home a few times because of that. It wasn’t very nice.
But a few weeks ago, it happened again. My mother and father separated a long time ago, but my father still supported us financially. He told me it was one promise he wanted to keep as my parent, even if he failed to be with me. However, recently, my father sent a letter detailing how he was no longer able to support us financially, due to some circumstances. My mother was fairly stricken at that news.
And this time, it didn’t happen in a single full-blown attack. It happened whenever, wherever. She was triggered by the most unusual things and she would suddenly stop being able to breathe in the middle of the freeway. I was terrified. I go to a boarding school so it wasn’t as if I could keep an eye on her 24/7 and my brother was always out and about. She would be alone at home.
Her physical and mental health had been declining for the past few years and I knew that this wasn’t a good situation. Thankfully, this time, I had relatives nearby to help me. It wasn’t a foreign country so my mother could be lingually independent. I guess that was somewhat of a relief.
I think the hardest part about all of this was dealing with the situation within myself. We are all human and sometimes we get irritated. I got irritated when my mother asked me to not make any sort of arguments against her, even when I knew she was wrong, because that would trigger her. I knew it was the right decision to make, but it was difficult nonetheless.
If you have someone in your family or a loved one that is going through tough times in relevance to their mental health, you feel so morally conflicted about the irritation you feel and you start having selfish thoughts about “what I have done to deserve this.” The answer to that is, you didn’t. No one deserves this. It is what it is.
And what I have established from the past few years is that the irritation you feel comes from a place of love and care. You won’t feel irritated if you don’t care. And later in the day, when all of this is over, there is a strange feeling of warmth and genuine love that truly defines what family is.
It’s going to get tougher and tougher for me as I become older and start having more responsibilities. But I know that I’ll get through this and I know my mother will get through this because we have each other, and that would be what matters in the end.
I used to think that I didn’t love my family because I didn’t feel anything strong binding me to that relationship. But right now, at this moment, I know with startling clarity that I love my family.
