20 years of bipolar

It started when I was 8 and my little brother was 6. Mom disappeared in mid December and we spent the holidays without her. Dad went out of his way to make it fun for us – it's one of the more memorable holiday seasons for me, in a good way. I didn't understand why mom is away, but I was otherwise very happy and excited.

Since then, my dad and grandparents were working very hard to hide my mom's struggles from us.

I discovered my mom's diagnosis at 14. She returned late at night after being away for a bit, but it was a school night and I was ill with pneumonia, so my brother and I were sent to bed pretty soon after her return.

Then she woke me up at 4am, inviting me to have tea with my greatgrandma who died several years ago. She seemed to forget that I'm there quite often, and at some point she tried to light up her sigarette using running tap water.

I politely excused myself, because she seemed irritated, and went to my parents' bedroom to wake my dad up. Dad woke up immediately and sent me to bed, asking me to lock my room now and to help my brother get ready for school in the morning if nobody else would be home.

Then my dad divorced my mom a few months before my brother's 18th birthday, because her illness was unbearable for him, and she made her latest manic cheating very public among my dad's collegues. He kept the family together for us, because he had a lot more power as a husband and a father married to the mother.

It's been almost a decade since, and I've been involved in managing my mom's condition for 15 years.

It drives me mad when doctors don't listen to me – I have a lot more experience with this case than they do.

I'm scared that eventually my grandparents will no longer be able to handle most of the management.

I'm scared that my mom will eventually get somebody killed, because she keeps befriending very shady individuals in her manic episodes and tells them everything about everyone she knows.

I also hate that I seem heartless to everyone when she's healthy – I'm not eager to spend time with her and don't want to share details about my life. She is the sweetest and most caring mom until she isn't. But few people see the moments when she isn't – we do our best to contain it, so that she doesn't scare away everyone in her life.

She seems to like her manias and when it takes over she's impossible to reason with. She doesn't say it when she is stable, but asking her about the fights that she picked up during manias leads to her answering "Are you saying I was wrong?" – which further confuses my relationship with her. She lies and manipulates outside of manias – but hides it better.

I hate having to deal with the duality of her, I cannot take a position and hold it, it keeps shifting, and I feel like a monster and a heartless daughter abandoning her ill mom much of the time.