Down the rabbit hole

After Disney, things didn't change much. My father spiraled further down into dementia. He needed a wheelchair which made it even harder for him to get out of the house. My mother had to hire people (finally) to come to the house to help take care of him. At first it was a few times a week, but it gradually moved up to almost all the time, except at night. He needed help with everything--things you don't think of when something like this happens. He couldn't brush his teeth, or go to the bathroom, or hold a drink, or get dressed, or anything without help. Mom was getting very worn down. My brother and I tried to help but it was tough for us too. It was just awful.

Making things worse, we still had the bugs from hell infesting our house. They were so bad we had to spray Bengal spray in the basement before people came over so they wouldn't fly in people's faces. I learned to leave on one light overnight so they would be drawn to it and I could vacuum them up more easily.  Plumbers and exterminators kept coming out but to no avail. No one could figure out where they were coming from.

At this time our middle daughter started a course of medicine to clear up her skin. It was the summer before she started highschool and we wanted her to be able to start without having to worry about her skin. We knew it was a strong medicine, so strong in fact that even though she was only 14 she had to get a pregnancy test each month to prove she wasn't pregnant before getting her prescription filled. What we didn't know was that one of the rare side effects was a type of personality change. She had been a reader, spending hours and hours reading everything she could get her hands on. She didn''t particularly talk back to her dad or me. She was pleasant, smart, charming, friendly, enthusiastic about new experiences, and generally a joy to be around. All of that changed right before high school. She started talking back to us, yelling at everyone in the house, and slamming doors. At first we thought this was typical teenaged angst. Puberty. She seemed to hate us. We never even thought about the medicine.

Her grades were bad. This was a girl who had made almost all A's and was very very bright. She was quite capable of sailing through her freshman year with all A's. She had never even made a C before. Her grades started getting really bad. Like C's and D's bad. I went to the school to talk to her counselor and her teachers. What in the world was going on? Why was she doing so badly? The teachers at her school were not exactly caring. "IB is hard, she's making C's, she's fine" was the answer I got. There was no concern over the fact that she wasn't even close to living up to her potential. It was very frustrating. We had her tested for drugs without telling her. No one really thought that was it, but we didn't want to be the kind of parents that were oblivious. She was not on drugs.

I took her to a counselor. The counselor told her to pull up her grades so we wouldn't bug her. She said that if she got good grades she could get away with anything. Then she told our daughter that we were helicopter parents and we needed to let go. I'm good about seeing my faults but helicopter parenting was not one of them. Her entire personality had changed. Finally, the doctor that had prescribed the acne medicine noticed her personality change. He immediately took her off the medicine. That was around October/November. We saw some improvement, but then something else happened that took our attention away.