Documenting my journey through the mental health system

Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and though I have IOP and work, I’m going to spend a little time at the VA after IOP for the Veterans Drive Thru Stand Down.

It’s a yearly event. There’s sometimes speakers, depending on the weather. They give out food, lunch, resources, and just spend the few hours hanging out. I’ve never been able to go because of my night shift work schedule. Since I’m going to be up anyway, I’m going to go right after IOP. I’ll be able to see certain friends and coworkers I don’t see very often, living like a vampire as I do.

I don’t come from a military family. My mother’s adoptive father was in the air force and met my grandmother in Morocco. My grandmother is my mother’s birth mother’s sister. So my grandfather has no blood relation to us at all.

They weren’t exactly good people, my grandparents. They took in my mother when she was six, and told her they were only taking her because they wanted her younger brother and sister. They never really wanted her, and treated her as such. She married my father at 17 after meeting him through work. He was 23. She had babies to feel some kind of love, and my older brother was born barely a year after she got married.

I never met my grandparents on my father’s side. My older brother remembers them. My mother would say my grandfather was crazy and dangerous. He had no respect for boundaries or my mother’s parenting and tried to feed a family size bag of M&Ms to my older brother, who was frequently hyperglycemic as a child.

My father was in the paper when he was born. I have all the pictures arranged and framed from 18 years ago, his funeral. He was a whopping 14 pounds at birth, so he made the front page in Snohomish county, Washington, in 1956.