Up High and Down Low: A Mother’s Story of Managing Bipolar Illness

Have you ever thought about what a bridge can be? It can be a transition to another state of being in either a literal or figurative sense. It can help one cross over a difficult obstacle, or it can be the obstacle.
Kathleen King’s bridge was a metaphorical one. She saw normalcy as the bridge to happiness. She tried crossing that bridge in a variety of ways: career, marriage, and motherhood, especially adoptive parenthood. This book is her story of trying to cross the bridge built from a difficult childhood and mental illness into a normal life. As you read, some attempts may seem flawed now, but they were the only ways she knew of to be as normal (whatever that is) as other people she observed.
She used a variety of ways to get to the other side. One was her insistence on setting extreme goals for herself. The more difficult the challenge, the more the sense of accomplishment. When she was a young woman, people with conditions similar to hers did not talk openly about their symptoms of unrelenting cycles of depression and mania, and it seemed not even professionals understood the highs and lows. Her unrelenting super goals gave her brief satisfaction. And then the crashes would come, accompanied more than once by suicidal urges.
So, she would think, time to crank up the goals. Adopting a child? Eventually a baby was not enough. She had to adopt special needs children. She depended on those extreme goals as her coping mechanisms.
You may see yourself in Kathleen’s stories, or you may see someone close to you.