Category: mental health

Dunedin Part 3

The Light and The Dark

On the eightieth or ninetieth or hundredth day of my mother’s hospitalization, in the fall of 1980, I sit in the chancel of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, wearing a youth choir robe. Palm trees sway outside the sanctuary windows. I feel like a soft-limbed robot, and whatever I sing with the other altos, I sing with fear in my throat. I don’t know the word “sepsis” or that my father and oldest sister in Washington have been told to prepare themselves for Mamma’s death. I do know about fear. I know about having been bad, and about wanting another chance to be good.

On that morning, as I try to pray, my thoughts are shards of porcelain, sharp behind my eyes. Then, all at once, a bright warm light comes into my mind and lifts me out of broken thoughts. The light surrounds me, telling me without words that I will be all right, that I don’t have to be afraid. Warmth moves from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. This lifting up and calming down happens in an instant.

It could be that this exact light extends from my mind and heart and body to the mind and heart and body of my mother. Maybe you believe in something like this light, or in coincidence, or in a traumatized girl having a delusion. At different times in my life, I consider all of these. What matters is this: on that Sunday morning, my mother wakes up asking for food, for someone to please wash her hair. Instead of dying that day, she begins her recovery. And as soon as she is strong enough, my father brings her home to us in Dunedin.

Maybe because she is so skinny and pale, her eye sockets huge, that my mother seems to glow with life, to look at Florida and each of us with wonder. A snapshot of her in a wicker chair on my Aunt Barbara’s porch shows her with bony arms akimbo and legs crossed under a draping skirt. Her face is turned sideways, her cheekbones shadowed.

As her step steadies and her eyes soften, the mechanical in me recedes. I settle into her presence and into her touch. She smooths the hair from my face when I worry at night. I feel her hand and I feel her warm arm like a shawl around my shoulders.

One night, in the moist air of early winter, my parents dress for a party, he in a white shirt and dinner jacket, she in a rayon dress and low-heeled sandals. As they get into the car, my father hands my mother a cocktail. She looks down into the plastic cup filled with vodka and 7up and raises it—unsmiling–to her lips.

Panic lifts me from wherever I am standing to a view of the drink from just outside and above the car. What must that moment have been for my mother? I imagine her having held those months of sobriety like an anchor rope growing heavier every day, until she had no choice but to let it go.

Once again, she sits alone in front of the television for hour after hour. And once again, I start sitting with her, determined to help. On random nights, she drink-talks to me about her father not letting her go to college, because education is wasted on girls. Her voice slurs telling me how terrible it is to depend on a man: Never be stuck like I am! And tears streak her mascara into half-circles under her eyes.

Trying to save her from the shadows becomes my own night-time compulsion. I listen to her, and I shush her. I help her to bed and pull a sheet up to her chin as she tells me how sweet I am, how much she loves me. Rescuing her is my penitent duty, a chance to make up for every cigarette I ever stole from her, every lie I ever told, and every time I hated her. Like the hangovers and blackouts she must have suffered, I feel the after-effects of self-martyrdom like a slow, blistering burn. I am exhausted and increasingly confused. How, when she gets up the next day, can she not thank me for taking care of her? I redouble my efforts to help and be good, to distract myself from the accumulating darkness of my resentment.

Tags 1980, Family, Florida, Mamma, mental health

Memoir mental health

Dunedin, Part Two

Must Remind Myself

Wild parakeets land between the heavy oval leaves of Nanny’s grapefruit tree, the tree whose strong branches hold late winter fruit full of bitter juice and sharp, white seeds. “Oh, the parakeets were pretty,” she tells me in her husky voice, “Florida is such a special place!” The flock of birds with gleaming green heads and pale under bellies, chattering away in pairs as they rested and preened, produced a combined mini-roar like nothing Nanny has heard before. I never see the parakeets, only feel the joy of their flight as she describes it to me.

The most alive place in Nanny’s house is her Florida room, with three walls of Jaoulosie windows in rectangular aluminum frames. Against the west-facing wall is a wooden table where Nanny sets down her orange juice, her pastry plate, or her cup of coffee, clearing space amid a shifting clutter of drawing pencils and paint tubes. Alone, she often spends the day painting, delighting in the bright plumage of migrating cardinals or blue jays as she re-creates in oil and canvass a perfect Indiana Dunes sunset or a bouquet of pink carnations.

A long, padded bench is heaped with pillows that I would curl around when I was four, when Mamma and I extended a winter visit that seemed to stretch forever into a long horizon of calm. Nanny’s house overflows with a gentle messiness. Each surface has a small stack of books, a “Cornerstone” magazine or “Reader’s Digest”. Her Bible sits on a table by her easy chair, across from the TV where she watches Jim Neighbors sing on the Laurence Welk show. She has an old-fashioned record player and opera albums. To her, stereo speakers are a modern marvel.

Nanny is 85 and a widow ten years when my sister and I arrive at her house to start high school, in 1980. Twin beds in the guest room are covered in green polyester spreads. When we open the closet to hang up our ironed jeans, our shirts and church clothes, we are greeted by the smell of mothballs. Nanny’s kitchen is narrow and shadowed, its counters littered with rye breadcrumbs, the fridge stuffed with small plates of leftovers, with jars of rhubarb jelly and mold-frosted applesauce. There are none of my mother’s scrubbed surfaces, her bustling cleanliness, no windowsills filled with carefully tended cuttings. My sister and I bring our arguments, sometimes whispered, sometimes not. We slam doors without thinking, and we take long, hot showers that fill Nanny’s small bathroom with smoky steam on ninety-degree days. We burst the seams of her small house with the expanding uncertainty of our lives.

In 1980 I am in Dunedin, but not happy, there but not there. Listening to Nanny’s story about the parakeets, yearn for her serene appreciation of Florida, and I want to believe in my own innocence again. The two or three weeks we expect to wait for our parents to come to Florida and move with us into our new house stretch to a month, to six weeks, to eight. We move over to Aunt Barbara’s house on San Mateo, where we use a different set of beds, push our clothes into another closet. The backyard here is overgrown with lush fronds tended by Uncle Jerry, whose feet are calloused from walking barefoot whenever possible. My uncle is working on a translation of poems from Spanish into English. His typewriter sits facing the screened in front porch and the small, rust colored car he calls the “Wankle,” where he leaves his car keys so he can always find them when he needs them.

Years later, I learn that our mother developed sepsis that fall, that our sister and father were told to prepare themselves for her death. At fourteen, I only know that our mother’s voice has become a faint whisper. For many days, she has not been able to talk on the phone with us at all. Day after day her strength recedes as a tide might that can never fill its former pools.

At Nanny’s house, at Aunt Barbara’s house, I keep a green notebook. I don’t write about my mother or the precariousness of our family. Summer entries are about kissing boys and smoking pot, about trying to not be mean to my nephews. The addresses of two friends from Junior High are scribbled in childish block letters, oozing with sincere plans to write, to stay in touch, to be a better person, at last. One September entry, I start to write “Aug,” but disappear it with three very hard, dark lines. Amid a jumble of fragments is this: “Everything will work out. Must remind myself.” My pen presses hard into the paper. I am trying to make the writing look good, look legible and even.

Then, crossed out in black ink, and later lined over in red, is the address where I could send letters to the hospital: Mamma (temp) 201 23^rd St., Wash DC 20027.

After that, I mostly write prayers, no dated entries for a long time.

Tags 1980, Dunedin, Family, Mamma

humor mental health

Him, Me, Him, Me

Its 5:40, I can get coffee!

No, it’s 4:40, your phone is messed up. We have to go back to sleep. Let’s curl up. Ooof, if I’m on my left side, my knee hurts, if I’m on my right, my shoulder hurts and my vertigo turns on.

You are a wreck.

I am a wreck. I need to call Frank Azar. Remember? Been in a wreck? Call Frank Azar!

[snoring]

[aching]

5:40. Actual 5:40

I think I went back to sleep.

Yes, you did. I had an imaginary conversation in my head with a holocaust denier. That took a long time, so you definitely slept.

Coffee!

All night, the full moon poured itself in the windows. All night until the sun came up. My friend has told me it is an agitated full moon, with mars snuggled close. I say, not sleeping, if it weren’t so cold, I could sit outside and knit in the moonlight. I say, to me, standing by the propane stove at midnight, clouds scuttling north at high speed, covering the moon to reveal a pocket of dark sky dotted with stars: Dear God, how is so much beauty possible?

Did you see the moonset from our bedroom window?

No, I’m watching the sun come up.

Tags Colorado, Him, Me, Skies

Memoir mental health

Son, to Part Shade

Where bold sun once beat down on hard dirt and where fresh lavender stalks pushed purple blooms toward our bright star, here we planted a tree in honor of his birth. I kneel in its dappled shade, hands coated in black soil. The sheltering arms of his skyline honey locust touch our high roofline now. Its long, brown seed pods litter the ground every summer. In the dappled shade of its yellow leaves, I seek patches of sunlit ground for pollinator plants.

This flower bed is supported by a rough line of heavy mountain stones, white and gray-veined chunks with sharp, angled corners. From the crook of one stone’s elbow, I lift a small gray rock and rest it smooth and flat against the palm of my hand. Too small to hold back dirt, too warm and smooth to throw away.

How is any rock much different from the smaller specks that clump together to make dirt? How different from molecules of air, for that matter? We move through gas particles. We inhale and exhale every day.

I need this garden like air. Its beds surround the place where I planted my adulthood, where I pulled toddlers’ jackets tight against the wind. In this yard, we turned rocks upside down to see rollie-poly bugs, to marvel at worms and centipedes. We strolled the block to gather red maple and oak leaves, then we ironed them between sheets of wax paper. Day after bright, shining day.

My hands, so much like my mother’s now, have lifted and turned this soil for thirty-three years. These palms once cradled three infants in turn, held close the start of three lifetimes. One life nearly cut short by despair and a handful of pills.

Still breathing. Still breathing. Still here. Bee balm. Astagache. Butterfly bush. All compete with weed after weed after weed. I will work this flower bed, mixing compost into clay, planting everything bright thing I can. Until the snow flies, until bitter cold casts mist from my mouth, then, when spring lures colors from these tender plants, I will kneel down once more.

Back yard astagache bush, also known as hummingbird mint.

Tags mental health, resilience, Son shine

humor mental health

Crankxiety

Photo by Adrienne Andersen on Pexels.com

Dry means dry, I think to myself, as I watch a big metal cylinder flip my clothes around and around. I’m frowning, arms crossed, in a July-hot laundromat in Chesterton, Indiana. The husband thinks that dry means done, which means he takes clothes out of the dryer when he’s tired of waiting for them, even if the necks of my t-shirts and the toes of my socks are still damp. How wrong he is to not understand that dry means dry! How frustrating when he does things wrong! I watch myself agitate, feel my shoulders and jaw turn to gravel. At that moment, dear reader, the husband is six hundred miles away. His laundry misdemeanor occurred a week earlier.

Cranxiety: the crunchy combination of grumpiness and worry.

Everywhere I go, cranky mixes with anxious into a new kind of miserable. On a hushed mountain morning, the husband walks by as I write, on his way to the kitchen for a cup of tea. His footsteps and the kettle’s hissing jolt me into worry that I can’t write, not now, probably not ever again. Why can’t he just be in the other room until I’m done? And why must I be so ill-tempered?

Crankxiety is what happens in my head when the wifi goes out. Where does the wifi go when it goes out? When will it come back? I ruminate on how wrong I am wrong to focus on what is wrong. I am supposed to be sweet, happy, and productive. I am not supposed to flip out when the husband makes tea or the wifi goes for a walk.

Cranxiety is part of what led me to re-start therapy last spring. A few weeks in, I got into an argument with my therapist. Jenny-Lynn, he said to me, so kindly that you would have thought he was a nice person. Hot tears were streaming down my face. Damp tissues were wadded in my left hand. Jenny-Lynn, he said, it is all right to feel. My objection was immediate and visceral—opposition from my toe joints all the way to the hardest part of my skull. I only wanted know why I was crying so I could stop. But I didn’t know why, and I couldn’t stop, and for some reason, I hated that he told me it was okay.

For me, anxiety is a despairing and physical need for everything to be different, inside and outside myself. It is a belly churning worry over the past and the future, including how much worse the anxiety might get, and how much crankier it might make me.

A few days after my laundromat diatribe, I tell my doctor, Crankxiety is a new circle of hell. She nods sympathetically as she fills my first-ever prescription for an anti-depressant. I’m not depressed, I report, I am just miserably irritable. Eight weeks after starting a low dose anti-depressant, crankxiety still rears its ugly head, but its talons don’t grip my belly for hours or days at a time. I can shrug and go on with my next, more helpful thought. I don’t have to be different, and neither does anyone else. These days, I say to myself, Jenny-Lynn, it’s all right to feel sad. It’s all right to feel anxious. More than anything, I feel more like myself, complaining and sweet in turn, and just exactly good enough.

Tags crankxiety, make a change, mental health, the husband

mental health Skiing

More Bumps, More Beauty

As an anxious adventurer, I have to play tricks with my nervous system, use shortcuts to get down mogul runs free of halting fright.

Recently, riding up the Beavers lift at Arapahoe Basin, I confessed to my unflappable ski buddy Carl just how nervous I had been, how downright shaky, on a run we had just finished. He was surprised when I reminded him how anxious I felt on the slopes. You don’t seem scared. Just very determined. A typically kind response.

When I ski down to Carl and exclaim, Beautiful! I am not just catching my breath. I say beautiful because acknowledging beauty burns off my crackle of anxiety and turns down my self-criticism.

When I say beautiful, I mean that I’m scared out of my mind, but I can calm myself by looking at the trees, at the sky. I say it knowing that if I face my torso downhill and plant my left pole firmly, my legs will have to swing my skis around into a turn.

I say beautiful, feeling the semi-wilderness around me and the eternal blue above, knowing that the mountain and I are connected.

Beauty is why I ski, why I ride my bike in the mountains, why I want to be in this messed up world. Hearts break every day. Wars rage. The human family appears beyond dysfunctional, downright broken.

And as part of this world, far too often, I forget beauty, forget generosity and grace. I fret about the busted pipe in our cabin. Sheltered and warm, I worry about the weather. I look at the news, and look away again. Then, out of nowhere, magic happens.

Last night, for the first time in a quarter century of looking out at these woods, the husband said, Bobcat! I have heard him say deer, elk, moose. One memorable morning, he even said bear. But never, until last night, bobcat.

She was graceful and still, square face lined in elegant geometrics, black ear tips twitching. We watched her in the early spring dusk as she sat stock still, perfectly camouflaged in her white and brown coat. After listening intently, she made a quick pounce for a mouse tunneling underneath the snow—a near miss. With the confident serenity of a predator, she watched us for a few minutes, as we watched her. She made a few strides toward us, took a showy turn or two, then stepped gracefully over the hard packed snow into the silent woods. Beautiful.

Tags Anxious, Beauty, Colorado, Skiing

humor mental health Skiing

Subzero

This is the kind of cold that kills people. Astronaut wear: Gore-Tex layered over down, over wool. Neck gaiters under helmet. And still a shiver. Eight thousand feet above the far-away sea, searing wind has pushed snow into wave-like patterns. The chair lift rises through a bleak gust. Taos ski valley. Birthday number next.

Breathing in, she puts her mittened hand over the small gap where wind blows through her goggles. The wind sucks warmth away from her thrice layered neck. Relentless. No one should be out in this weather.

A snowmobile bores its way uphill, small siren wailing, lights flashing into the white-out. Tugging a rescue sled. Please god, she murmurs, not today, not me. A group hikes skyward, skis shouldered, to launch down a couloir. They are crazy. This is crazy. This is killing cold. Raising a layer to cover her face, feeling only ice on the crusted fabric. Wind bites like fire at her nose-tip. Too cold to breath in, too scared to breath out.

At the top, in front of the ski patrol hut, and look! Everyone! Down she goes, left hip bouncing off hard scrape. Embarrassment bolts her vertical again, sliding onto the lip of a run called Honeysuckle.

Chair seven to Bob’s run to Walkyries Glade. Do not explore black trails alone. Do not enter the narrow track, or pass the sign with a pretty name for treed moguls. Do not be lulled by this hush of trees weighted with snow, by this spotlight of calm. Time falls away. Look down, turn once, turn again into perfect cushions of soft white between oval humps. Just a person, skiing.

Too fast! Trees narrow on the steep. Traverse! Angle against the hill. Knowing she will die this time. Launching into the air.

And both skis land firm. Heart pounding, looking back. Six inches off the ground, at most.

Adrenalin surges, recedes. Up to go down again. Down to go up. From death by wind chill. To a tea stop in a crowded lodge.

Legs ache for days. The slow-motion tumble? Too much thinking, too much pulsing fright? Or doing, as happens, a bit too much. Afternoons huddled on the blue couch, soothe reading Austen under hand-crocheted blankets. Pushing away, and into, this next middle year.

Tags fragments, lil anxious, Ski, taos

mental health

Yeerk Pool

Photo by Vinu00edcius Caricatte on Pexels.com

When my boys were young, we read K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs series, about alien worms who crawled into people’s ears in order to take over their brains. These interstellar slugs were slowly conquering the world. At regular intervals, the alien worms, called yeerks, returned to their collective pool to regenerate. Human hosts, controlled by the aliens, would lean down at the edge of the goopy water as the slugs oozed out to do their yeerk thing and strategize about how best to control the universe, one slugged brain slug at a time. Luckily, a group of intrepid young humans had gained the ability (from good aliens, of course) to morph into animals. So, as soaring hawks or hive-brained ants, they waged covert battle with the yeerks.

When my son, now thirty, has bipolar depression, as he does today–immobilized by invisible neurostorms–I think of the Animorphs shouting to each other, as they prepare for yet another impossible mission, Time to kick yeerk butt! And off they go to save the world.

Screen shot of one of the first Animorphs book covers. “Some people never change. Some do.”

When I meet someone who might become a friend, I often take the risk of disclosing that my son carries a bipolar diagnosis. Then I brace myself for the harshness of the typical first question: Is he taking meds? Or recently: Is he taking drugs? “Drugs?”–that one stumped me. Were they asking if he also has addiction, as so many folks with bipolar do, or were they blending the term for prescribed medications and street drugs? In these conversations, I often hear about someone’s sibling, ex-partner, or parent who struggled with mental illness. But the medication question almost always comes first. As if medications are a fix, as if surrendering the brain to psychiatry makes bipolarity disappear.

The “take medication, be fixed” way of thinking is familiar. I thought that way myself a dozen years ago, when my son was an intellectually gifted teen with a rebellious streak. Before his first real manic episode bloomed like toxic algae, before our family’s genetic pattern was revealed. Before I visited my elderly mother in the psychiatric ward, and before two of her other grandchildren were also diagnosed. For so long, I didn’t know I was thinking, why don’t people just take their medications? But I was.

Every year that goes by, I am more and more grateful for the miracle of modern psychiatric medications, for the lives they improve and the lives they save. And still, more than once, more than twice, my son has been following every recommendation of a complex treatment plan—medication combinations, support groups, highly skilled on-going psychotherapy—and boom, he is hit, as if by a stray bullet. Up he goes like a shining, untethered balloon. Or down he goes into the dark pit of depression. These cycles leave him facing yet more lost opportunities, yet more go-rounds of self-blame. The yeerks are at it again.

How to be a mother on days like this? I want to morph into a bull elephant and drain the pond where the alien yeerks strengthen, where they strategize ways to rob humans of their freedom and self-command. I try instead to stick to my known super-powers, encouragement and food. Every day, I tell him I love him and ask if he’s eaten his vegetables. I text him funny memes, even when I know his phone is off. I buy organic spinach and kale, heaping it onto his plate at every opportunity. Of course, no amount of mother love can banish symptoms. I beat back my grief and helplessness. I battle my destructive impulse to make everything right by sheer force of will. Then, slowly sink into the hard-won understanding about my mother, my son, myself: all of us, always, are doing our best. Yes, it helps to take medication, and no, even the bravest heroes are not always cured. But on they go, day by day, season by season, kicking yeerk butt.