Parents with mental illness

Not sure if this is the right place to post this... glancing through the topics it seemed as if maybe this was a support place for parents who's children have mental illness. Anyway I just wanted to find some people like me who have kids and struggle daily with things like depression, self injury, or other mental illness. I'm curious as to how well you "hide it" from your kids or if you even try to at all. How you cope with trying to be a good parent on bad days, and feelings of failure or- the feeling I get often- "ruining" my children. Even though people say I'm a good mom I am a single mom with two kids and major depression and some days I just feel like I'm doing everything wrong.

I don't really have an answer for you... except something a very wise woman I knew once told me. "Kids are very resilient. Like green saplings that bend in strong winds, if you truly love them, then they will be able to weather whatever storms may come."

My two cents, is to be age-appropriately honest about the situation. They may already understand more than you realize. That was the case with my kids.

Not sure if that helps any, but you are most definitely not alone.

We have and always will be honest with our son. We use to tell him we took medication for our "brain boo-boo", but as he got older he said that made him feel like a baby. We started to call it mental illness and he started to ask questions about what kind, if it's contagious, and that he has it too. We reassured him that he does not but may in the future, so we need to know about anything when he feels mad or sad so we can help him deal with that. I try to remind myself that I only have 18 yrs to screw up he has 60 to fix it. He's also in therapy to help him process things we screw up.

I don't know if your kids are old enough to write cards but keeping a mother's day card that they pick out and write something really helps remind me how my son feels about me on bad days.

My son is only two, so thankfully I haven't had to "hide" things from him yet. I know on my bad days I interact with him very little and rely heavily on the tv to entertain him. It makes me feel bad/like an awful mom, especially when he wants attention and I avoid him (escape behind stuffed animals that he's scared to go past), but I know that although it's not the ideal situation, it is better than me allowing myself to get too broken to think logically. It's especially hard being so far from family and friends. We just have to do the best we can, and try to remember that children are resilient and can survive most of our mistakes. I think for those of us with mental illness our mistakes tend to be different than the mistakes most other parents make. Good news is it makes us much more aware of our children's mental health.