Exactly. You cry out for help, and you get the CPS on your door investigating the treatment of your 10 year old child. And otherwise, social services does zilch.

Tessa (my daughter) is pretty much treated like a princess by her father, and even if I am firm with her and disagree & we argue and she is beyond upset, I send her to her room to calm down. And it's not like she doesn't have tons of toys & books in there while she is calming down.

Because of her sensory issues, she still has meltdowns at home on occasion though I think they have finally stopped at school, and they are getting fewer at home. With today being Labor Day, the CPS worker won't be able to talk to medical professionals like my psychiatrist to deem I am not a risk to my daughter.

I know I'm not the best mom out there. I know when I stay in bed all day or have crying fits or panic attacks while my daughter is home, it has to hurt her mentally. I don't do it on purpose or mean to upset her. It just happens, and thankfully, my husband often is around to comfort her or at least he can afterward once he gets home. Or if I get feeling better, I apologize to her and try to spend quality time with her. My husband told me he has talked to Tessa about my mental illness, but I am not exactly sure what he's said to her; he's just told me they have talked about it and why I don't work, but I don't know how specific he got as he is not a big fan of psych meds, psych diagnoses, or the psychiatric community in general. However, he did have to attend required training on psych issues for 2 days (for the school district) before school began to try to help kids he might think are troubled, though he said he doubts he could pick them out from one period in physics class. He said maybe his homeroom as sometimes they have the kids in homeroom for long periods depending on what is going on in school, and he has been assigned the same homeroom class since he started teaching; they were in 9th grade then but now are juniors in 11th grade. He did tell me they did an exercise that brought to home what racing thoughts are like. He said the mental illness training got him worried about me because many of the diagnoses will share characteristics only a psychiatrist could probably tell apart and then did flat out ask me if I hear voices or have hallucinations. I have only hallucinated once, while in the hospital on morphine & in unbelievable pain after ulcer surgery. I don't hear voices though there are occasions I hear birds chirping, mostly before falling asleep, but that is it, just birds and I have for some time. I have let pdocs know this and told my husband too. It could be a way of my brain calming down prior to sleep, the pdocs said. I got really scared not about me but about my daughter when she told me she often sees floating multi-colored flowers before she falls asleep; she told me just a few days after an eye exam, which was normal, just one of her glasses lenses needing a bit more powerful prescription. However, later I talked to my youngest sister, and she sees these flowers too before sleep except hers are all one color, I don't remember which.

Despite all her sensory issues, my daughter is extremely smart (a straight A student, tagged as GT - gifted & talented since kindergarten) and definitely able to realize things are going on with me that are not normal compared to her father.

What I want & need is a social advocate and not one I have to pay for either because I can't afford it. But do you think the government (at least in the super conservative state of Texas) supplies one? No, they don't. If they do exist, they are not at all easy to find, at least not if you are non-Hispanic & English is your first language. Which also seems discriminatory to me.