Mental Illness

Our family is a family that suffers with Mental Illness.  We met our beautiful 11 year old daughter when she was 4 ½, she had been through a lot in those few years.  It was very clear that my daughter would have a lot of needs from the beginning.  Like a lot of adoptive parents we believed that love, consistency, counseling, care, and more love would heal our daughter.  We were wrong.  Mental illness in children is so hard to treat.  Finding a Dr. willing to work with children younger than 13 is difficult our area has waiting lists.  We have been lucky, our daughter has responded well to medications and is doing so much better than she was 2 years ago.  We are lucky, so many of our friends are not so lucky.  Mental illness like any chronic illness affects not just the person but the whole family. 

When we decided to get sheep and cattle we had to consider how our daughter would respond to the extra animals to care for and extra demands on her parents’ time.  Could we handle the extra chores and meet our daughter’s needs when she has a break down?  She was doing amazingly well and we decided to go for it.  So far it has been an amazing experience.  Our Pre-Teen Daughter and Stick Boy are seeing responses to their actions from the sheep and cattle.  It is on a much larger scale than the cats and dog give them.  When the sheep do not respond like we expect them to while we are herding them and Pre-Teen starts screaming at them the sheep run then we have to calm ourselves down, and calmly gather the sheep it may take an extra half an hour but the sheep need to be kept safe.  We are learning to calm down faster and not always scream our frustration.  We are trying to get the new cattle used to us and Pre-Teen gets mad that Hope, the young heifer, is very skittish and wants to run from her.  Hope seems to feel her frustration and the more rushed Pre-Teen is the further Hope runs from her.  We are learning patience.  Mostly we are learning our actions have bigger consequences than just our little world. 

Counseling, medication, and the new ranching lifestyle all are to be improving our daughter’s life.  

We are blessed.