I admit it: my family life is in chaos!

I won't bore you with details; the details are too distressing, but – things are, shall we politely say, challenging.

I didn't send a Christmas letter last year. When all that could be said was that: nobody had died (it was close); my steadfast rock of a husband and I were still together; we were not financially destitute: well, there didn't seem much point.

2017, I thought, could only get better.

And it has.

Mostly.

I think...

Of most personal note (you could hardly have missed this), my terrifyingly violent mood-swings of the latter half of 2016 sent me back to the Mental Health Team and the wonderful Dr Samar (not his real name, which has 101 syllables and challenges even the most cosmopolitan of linguists). Dr Samar asked all the right questions, listened in the most proactive way and involved me, as an intelligent individual, in the prescription of the medication I now take. This medication has resulted in me becoming really rather boring in respect to the mania and depression (so far: it's early days yet). I now understand why many people with bi-polar stop taking the tablets... (Don't worry – I won't stop. I love and care for my family and friends too much to stop being sane).

Tom, my adopted son, moved out. This was upsetting for me. It was a relief to my husband, and a mixed blessing to the girls. While they loved having their big brother around, they hated the friction between him and their father – even when they considered Daddy was being dictatorial, unreasonable and altogether WRONG!!!

The challenges of 2016 made my husband and I talk as never before. I was shocked at some of the things he was thinking. He was challenged by some of my ideas. A full and frank exchange of ideas/opinions resulted in a stronger foundation for going forward. This was good.

Mostly.

But life, always challenging, moves on.

Life sometimes presents itself as shifting sands, where things and people you thought you could trust prove to be false, or at least, unreliable; where people you never noticed much step forward, take centre stage, and star in the soap-opera that is your life.

As I look around, there seems to be no logic; no basis on which to anchor the lives of my family and me. I love my husband and biological daughters. I love my adopted son no less. I love my darling friends Richard (another son) and Raz (a relationship far too complicated for me to even understand, let alone explain). I love my Moodscope buddies and I love you, the wonderful Moodscope Readers, to whom I write but never meet.

But unless I have some higher faith, we all are but flotsam and jetsam on the stormy oceans of life.

Forgive me if I cling to faith.

When nothing makes logical sense, it's the only thing to make ineffable sense.

Mary

A Moodscope member.