I'm so worried about my nearly 18 year old niece. I've been worried about her for some time and now I have read a little of her blog (she gave me the URL) and it didn't make me feel any better. Although reading it DOES make me feel a little closer to her. I have 5 nieces and love them dearly and I'm pretty close to all of them. I'll just call this one "Sweet-face" because that's what I have always called her. I've loved her since the minute she was born. She was a chubby beautiful baby...just tears me up to remember how excited I was to be her aunt when she was small. I stayed with her a couple days when her folks were gone when she was about 6 months old and you had to rock her to sleep at night--she had a hard time going to sleep. I was like that, too, so I understood, but ya gotta know how you can get really tired holding a baby, a bottle, a fleecy lamb that plays music and you had to keep the music going and rock her in her chair for an hour. LOL. I have a photo of her when I was giving her a bath in the kitchen sink and photos from when she would come to visit me at my house. She loved to go to the waffle house and get anything chocolate. Sweet-face was a very happy child, at least when I saw her she was. Very active as a baby and lots of fun as a child with a great imagination and she was also a very cuddly, loving girl.

But now I am so worried about her. She is in a lot of pain--much more than she will admit, I think. I want so much to help her, but she is almost beyond me, I'm afraid. I remember the pain I went through at her age. I really do, even though that was so long ago. I hope if I just keep in touch with her in anyway that I can, that if she becomes frightened and sad, she will reach out. So many people want to help her, but the hardest part of getting help is not just knowing when you need it, but reaching out. Reaching out to people who truly love you for who you are and what you can be. You can't just love people when they're good, when they make you proud. You have to love them all the time; even when they disappoint you or act in a way you don't understand--that's when you need to love them the most because that's usually when they're hurting the most. People always think your friends have to be your peers and, naturally, most of us do have friends near our own age and interests, but that rules out older people; younger people, people who have more money or less money. Don't rule out friends of any age if you think they are good people; because they may have something to offer you that you cannot imagine. On the other hand, you do need to be careful who it is that you trust. Sometimes the best way to know if a friend is real or not is just to let time show you and until you know for sure, be a little careful with your trust. Make sure people are worthy of it.

See the thing is, Sweet-face thinks that the answer to her problems is a boy. That's what I always thought, too. But it's so wrong. Not that I don't love boys, er, men! You just can't wait for someone else to make you happy, though; you have to do that for yourself and it's easy to say and hard to do. I have a book I want to give her and I have an extra copy so I'll probably do so. It's "Hearts That We Broke Long Ago" by Merle Shain. I also wish so much she would consent to go to church some time with her other aunt and I. Meanwhile, I'll keep praying. Maybe she'll even read MY blog someday.

I've already told her that I'm afraid she might be bipolar like I am; but I'm not sure that she has conveyed this to her therapist. The thing is; I'm not a role-model by any stretch of the imagination, but I was not diagnosed and medicated until I was 45. That gives time for a lot of damage to be done, both physiologically and emotionally. In her case, they know so much more now. But I also know that her mother, my sister, dreads this possibility because she knows what I went through and knows how we argued when we lived together in an apartment for a few years and I was not medicated at all. Lots of fights, evidently she remembers more of them than I do. And they are painful memories for her. This fills me with guilt, but I can't do anything about the past now except to apologize, which I have and still do. Anyway, if my niece does have bipolar, all the anti-depressives and therapists won't do any good unless she gets on the proper mood stabilizers. She will still need to work through her personal problems as well with the therapist, but just taking anti-depressives will put her higher into a manic mood. So I'm just wringing my hands and praying and being ready in case she wants to talk to me. Since I'm 56 and my life is not exactly a teenager's dream of excitement, I doubt she will really do that now.