the truth is that it's hard for me to tell the entire story in just one entry. but i'll try to at least get you to the here-and-now.
i spent the first ten years of my life in suburbia with mom, dad, and brother. we had a two-bedroom garden apartment in a typical post-ww2 suburban haven on long island. my grandparents lived 30 minutes away. my best friend lived in the apartment 5 doors away. my brother and i played "school" in the courtyard, and i'm sure there were some lemonade stands that happened at one point or another. but there are other memories too. less happy ones. my parents fighting in the living room, with my brother and i listening from our room. my parents fighting in the car. my father storming out to cool off, only to return a few hours later. i think this was about the point in time that i learned the phrase "oh, take your g-damn medication already."
when i was about ten, she sat me down in the kitchen, and told me she was leaving. i wasn't sad. i don't remember crying. but i remember thinking, without fail, that i didn't want to live with her.
fast forward to middle school. she had stopped taking medication completely. the family court had become familiar and constant, with my mother's accusations of child abuse against my father. all baseless. the local police became acquainted with her antics. she smashed a window at my father's new apartment when he told her she didn't have visitation that day. i refused to see her for a few months.
and then, one beautiful day in high school, about five years after she had initially left and stopped taking meds, my father told me she had been in the hospital for the past week. everything changed. that hospital, and the cops that dragged her there, became everything that i had ever wished for. somehow they had gotten her back on meds. and my father started to divulge her history to me. i was about 15. it was time. i hadn't had a mother for most of my preadolescence.
and while my father was my rock, he was still unsure of how to handle the "first period" speech. most of the things i was supposed to learn from my mother, i learned in health class. i learned from my best friends. from their mothers. from my grandmother. and even now, i am still learning from them. but never my mother. never her.
after her hospital stay, lithium brought a quiet change to our relationship. she became a different person. kind. attentive. went back to school and studied with gusto. found a stable apartment. i almost began to get to know her. high school came and went. she sent me off to the prom with all the other mothers. and i got used to it.
college started. but somewhere in the middle of it, she started to fall apart again. i started seeing a therapist. she would call 3 or 5 times in the middle of the night, and i felt helpless. i didn't want to shut the phone off, just in case... just in case... but at the same time, i had no boundaries for her. my therapist then taught me steadily that she was going to continue leaving me in a crumpled ball unless i shut the phone off. and so i began laying down the boundaries of our relationship. she didn't really obey them. but i ignored her antics unless she did. it almost worked.
i graduated from college about five years ago, and moved 4 hours away. she was my first visitor, and i felt awkward the entire visit. i didn't really want her there. but at the same time, i was homesick for family. i felt guilty.
a year and a half after that, all hell broke loose. she stopped taking meds. she quit her teaching job. she started spending vast quantities of money. she started the paranoia speeches again. she started the phone calls again. it was thanksgiving. by january, i had police officers at my apartment at 3 am because she called them in a panic that something had "happened" to me.
my carefully laid-out life fell apart. all the feelings of resentment, of guilt, of anger, of helplessness, came back in a flash. my brother, whom i had effectively raised since the age of eight, was failing out of school. i had no choice but to quit grad school and move home. my father said i was the only one who could help get her back to the hospital. so my brother and i cornered her one rainy january day. she responded by almost hitting me with her car, and hitting my brother's car. i fell to the ground sobbing "mommy", like that lost little ten year old losing her mother all over again.
since that day three years ago, i have felt like a motherless daughter. i had told her before that if she were not on her meds, that she would lose me as a daughter. that she would not be welcome at my passover table. that she would never know her grandchildren. but her illness won her loyalty, and i must keep my word.
how many others are there out there like me? or not like me? how many others have cut their mothers out of their lives in order to move forward? or have they sacrificed their happiness to try and keep their mothers sane?
how many of you are out there? how are you dealing with it? how is your family dealing?
my goal on this blog is to tell my mother's story as it goes on. to meet others like me. and learn from them.
