Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

~ William Stafford

Night and Day

I was crying my eyes out today after I ate "breakfast" at 12:30 pm and got on the computer. I’d started thinking about what a terrible mother I am because my husband had told me quite gently that I should stop teasing my son about his regular sleep schedule (mine's totally irregular, his used to be - I rib him about it). But whoa, I took that gently tossed ball and raaaaan with it! Got all the way to the goal post over where I had that first kid 25 years ago. Touchdown! I suck! I'm an evil witch and I didn't even know it till now! Now that all those scenes of my children's lives are clicking through my head in a terminal slideshow of recrimination, I see it all right.

My God, what have I done?.

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms.

Then I spent five solid hours on Facebook, trying to shake all that guilt and remorse by talking about something else, reading boring research, looking for images like the ones in my head to post on my wall, or for a joke that I could actually laugh at, but mostly just by being together with all the good people I know there and sharing our thoughts - the bipolar people especially, but normals too. You know, for ballast. Got to keep that boat afloat.

But things didn't really start looking up for me and my shrouded mind until about 7 pm when I called for takeout and the sun sank. By about 9 pm I’d sloughed off my slough of despond - as in every other depressed day/happy night combo I've experienced MY WHOLE LIFE LONG. When the sun goes down, my mood gets bright again.

This is not the way God intended us to be, is it? It's the "dark night of the soul" not the "dark day of the soul." There's a book about bipolar called "The Midnight Disease" meaning the disease that makes you come alive at midnight - and fight for your life with what another book dubs “The Noonday Demon.”

Touchdown! But how embarrassing! The wrong goal.

"What Do You Do?" I Don't Anymore.

Carolyn Hax had a discussion in her online advice column about how to answer the "What do you do" question when you are a stay-at-home mom. It got lots of comments. I weighed in with mine as both a stay- at-home mom and a person with a disabling mental illness.

My comment, revised:

You guys, you think you have it bad in the conversation department as a SAHM? Try being a permanently but invisibly disabled former SAHM! I dreaded the what-do-you-do question just like you do while I was a SAHM, because it truly did immediately and obviously reduce me to the status of dryer lint in the interrogator's eyes. They'd often follow it up with "When are you going back to work?" 

** Oh!! I just had an "I shoulda said" moment! "Oh, I'm not going back to work. I'm transitioning into a SAHG position when my kids reproduce." **

But now that I'm a former SAHM, I yearn for the good ole days when I at least had that true if disreputable  description to offer. As a disabled person who really doesn't do much work-wise or interest-wise despite having plenty of time on my hands - except for running a Facebook community page and dabbling as a blogger, which don't mean shit to the professionally inclined since they're strictly volunteer - I usually just go blank. Tensely, anxiously blank.

What should I say?
 
"I'm disabled?"
"I have a terrible mental illness?" 

"I used to be a SAHM? (Or that latest brainstorm: "I'm in training for a SAHG position?"
"Who are you again?"
"I read a lot?"
"I brood?"
"They just let me out on probation for knifing someone who asked me that question?"
"WTF?" 
 "WTFlyingF?"

I like the answer someone I read about always gave to the question "What do you do?" 
"For money you mean?" she answered.

Do you catch yourself thinking .......

Do you catch yourself thinking that somebody with bipolar who is really successful at something must not REALLY be bipolar? 

It's funny, but then again, not so much.

I don't like admitting to it, but I think this sometimes. From pure envy. Goddamn. Look what she did! I always wanted to do that! My bipolar has stood in the way of my doing it. So if she did it, she couldn't REALLY be bipolar. Right? Wait a minute  .....

If I had cancer myself, I wouldn't think a person with cancer who was in remission, or managing to live well with the disease, must not REALLY have cancer!

But with bipolar - it makes me feel like shit when someone else accomplishes something. Because, deep down, I still think I'm doing this to myself. I'm making myself bipolar. It's my fault. I could "overcome" it if I tried hard enough.

Bullshit. Bullshit, brain!

The Worst Thing About a Bipolar Mother

"You are officially a bad son. I give up."

I sent this message to my 24 year old son on Facebook after trying repeatedly to get his help with something and never getting an answer.

I was joking, being offhandedly "ironic" in the same way my mother-in-law threatens to "cut you out of the will" if you cross her. My other kids would have laughed it off, but my son exploded. He messaged me back furiously when he read it the next morning -- a long series of increasingly angry outbursts. He thought I meant it, and his reaction was volcanic. It spurted out of him like blood he was coughing up.

He was the child I was closest to.

It stopped me in my tracks. It was like a blow to the head and the heart at once. The worst of it was, it sounded as final as a door slamming shut so hard it shattered.

In my usual way, I freaked out, went to my crazy place and stumbled outside, where it was 13 degrees with snow on the ground, in my slippers and flimsy sweater. Then I paced the neighborhood sobbing and talking to myself. I couldn't think even one thought straight.

I finally calmed down (after crying for two solid days) - and read his messages again. They were full of rage, but anguish too. He not only took what I said literally, but did so right off the bat. That was the part that knocked me flat: he wasn't sure I loved him.

And now it seemed that I'd missed my chance to prove it to him -- that acute love that started the moment he came out of me, 10 lbs strong and bawling, and never faltered. It sounded like he'd washed his hands of me and walked away for good.

"You can't unsay it," he wrote.

I despaired.

But he called the next night. What? We weren't estranged? I was terrified. What if I said another careless thing? Could I handle his anger? I don't do anger well. But I answered the phone.

Instead of anger I heard a lot of pain. When I asked him if he had closed the door on me, he said "no" in a small voice, "I never meant that." Then he started crying. I don't remember hearing him cry since he was a baby. He was always watchful and shy, trepidatious of new people, but an incredibly avid learner always moving on to the next level, the harder thing, in a hurry to grow up. But now he was crying the way men do, as if they can push it back down their throats if they try hard enough, but of course they can't.

"Do you know," he said, "the hardest thing about growing up with you for my mother?"

I braced myself. There must have been many.

From the beginning, he said, he knew that he couldn't show his emotions or they would hurt me. I would fall apart. I would cry. I would get angry. I would act like his feelings were all about me. And he was trapped, he said, in our house. There was nowhere to go to get away from it. So he learned to not feel. He learned how to hold it all in because if he didn't there would be chaos. To make himself safe he had to take control because I had none.

"But it wasn't your fault! I have bipolar! Anything can make me fall apart, you know that! We've talked about this! It wasn't you!" It was my turn to be anguished.

"It's not about that now, Mom; guilt's not the problem," he said, "I've moved on from that. The problem is I got so good at burying my feelings it's become a habit, and I can't break it."

My son couldn't get close to anyone, I was thinking, because I'd failed him a long, long time ago, even though I tried my best not to. But no, wait. This isn't about me now.

"I thought I'd gotten better at it though," he said, still crying, "I thought I was making progress," still in that small sad voice.

But when my offhand message came through, the dam broke. All the rage he'd suppressed for years came flooding back. And when he called today and I tearfully asked if he was walking away from me, it brought back his fear of hurting me, and all the pain I'd caused by making him -- just a child! -- both the reason and the cure for my sadness, anger, sudden joy, and terror of being abandoned.

He couldn't find intimacy because an old and useless habit held him back.

We talked about all this for a while. I tried not to crumble, or yield to the spreading shock I felt at what had happened between us - so suddenly, so sickeningly. I tried to push it all down in my mind and focus on remaining present to him in the conversation, because if I couldn't do that it would mean I was still the same woman we were talking about, the selfish one who couldn't hear her own child cry without thinking how much it hurt her to hear it.

But as I sat there, I began to notice that several years were settling into my bones. I was a much older person than three days ago. Now if I looked in the mirror, I'd see this new version of me as a mother - this ugly one, who psychologically abused her child; this self-deceiving one, who managed to overcome all her best intentions, fervid self-awareness and desperation to do no harm, and still give her son the gift that keeps on giving: mommy issues.

Soon our conversation winded down. He seemed to feel better for talking about it - for finally letting out all those feelings he’d locked away from me, and then from himself. I hoped the insight he'd had into me as mother resolved things enough that he could move past them. Young people have enough future ahead of them that they can put something in the past and it will stay there.

Once I put the phone down, I didn't feel shocked or panicked anymore. I felt sad, and I knew this sadness would be with me for a very long time. But I also felt something new. The past was different now because I saw it more clearly. But I could live with this new version of me, selfish and blind to her own manipulations as she was. I forgave her. She had bipolar disorder, but she did all she could to love her children, keep them safe, and enable them to grow into good and happy people with many joyful memories. And they had.

I still had bipolar disorder - it’s lifelong - but with treatment, distance and self-examination, I was not that needy mother anymore.

All those years that settled into me as I talked to my son were enough to teach me what we all must learn to do if we are to survive. When we hurt those we love, we accept what we've done, ask for forgiveness, make amends, and then forgive ourselves.

The past had just changed forever, and miraculously I survived.

Emergency! Begin Rumination Now!

My very old mother-in-law falls one night heading for the bathroom. She calls an ambulance. At the hospital they say there's nothing wrong, no particular cause, and no injury from the fall, so back home she goes. When we visit the next day, she can't walk, her ribcage hurts and she's short of breath. Crisis. 

I act. I insist on calling her doctor. He asks some questions I relay to her because she can't make it to the phone, then he says if her breathing gets worse to go to the hospital. The next day it's worse, but she won't go. I call an ambulance anyway. (My husband and his siblings aren't taking this too seriously. I'm the only one ringing the alarm bell.) This time they tell us she cracked a rib and punctured her lung.

It turns out well. The puncture is small and the rib will heal on its own. She spends one night in the hospital (telling each visitor as they leave: "Remember, DNR. If it comes to that, don't intervene").

It would seem I handled it well, right?

But after a crisis has passed, within a short time my vigilance turns inward. I begin to examine myself - from every conceivable angle, in every conceivable light. And again I find plenty to ring the alarm bells about.

• Could I have prevented any of this?
• Did I do the correct thing at each and every step?
• Did I insult anyone?
• Maybe I contributed in some undefined way to it all happening in the first place?
• Did I overreact? Did I underreact?
• Was it really my place?
• Have I caused a rift in the family? 
• And, finally, how will I survive - not the crisis but the anxiety that follows?

When I consider every angle, from every perspective, in exhaustive detail, I find myself at the crux of everything. This thing I do, this anxiety show - it's like paranoia turned inside out. Instead of forces outside myself conspiring against me, it's me causing, directly or indirectly, presiding over, knowingly or unknowingly, and bearing responsibility one way or the other for every misfortune imaginable. I blame myself on each and every count, with no evidence or argument, and meting out no mercy. I even blame myself for blaming myself. The crisis itself is resolved, but for me it's just beginning. It's already gathering steam.

Yes, of course I didn't overstep my bounds! Of course I couldn't have prevented it! Of course I didn't cause it in the first place! Of course people weren't judging  me - they were busy dealing with the crisis! Of course I wasn't "wrong" because there is no one right or better way to handle things - there's just me as I am with my strengths and intentions. Of course I'm not perfect.

Of course to all of that.

But I don't believe it - not in my bones or at the bottom of my mind. I can't accept it. I won't let it rest. I worry; I ruminate. To ruminate is to chew the same wad of food over and over without ever breaking it down into manageable bits your throat can accept. When I worry, my mind chews on itself in the same way. Even when there's absolutely no point in it and I know it - especially when there's no point in it - my anxiety roars down the tracks like a runaway train. Except the runaway train is on circular tracks.  

It's a terrifying ride. It makes your head hurt, it keeps you up all night, it makes you literally pull your hair out and scream and cry. It makes you doubt your sanity. It makes you doubt you can ever get off and that you'll walk away under your own power if you do.

                                                *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Most people stay on that train until someone stops it or it runs out of fuel. For me, somewhere along the line I must have learned (by trial-and-error?) another way to pause the broken record. Sometimes when I've been on the same groove for a very long time, or the ride is especially rough, my unconscious mind tries to hit the brakes. It issues an imperative to create a new crisis, one that is about me, one I did cause and can control (well, usually). There will be no paralyzing uncertainties. No one else will be involved, much less endangered (except they will be, and it will hurt them terribly because they love me). I really will be at the center of this crisis and at every one of its turns because I created it and am carrying it out.

For me this imperative is usually in the form of incising my arm or thigh with a razor blade, or burning myself with a "safety" lighter - the kind you use to light a gas grill - or taking too many pills but not enough to kill myself. Sometimes I bang my head, sometimes I slam my fist against the floor or drive my leg into some furniture over and over again to watch it bruise in living color. The worse the anxiety, the worse the damage I do. 

Thus, a new crisis is born to take the place of the old one. One train pulls into the station, another one leaves. And pretty soon this new one's picking up speed. The needle's hitting the groove. I'm getting anxious.

                                               *     *     *     *     *     *     *

The crisis with my mother-in-law and what ensued was relatively mild. I didn't end up hurting myself. I white-knuckled it through. But it says something about anxiety, I think, that spending a good two days paralyzed by self-doubt, chewing my lips, balling my fists and hitting my head with them, spewing my circular "reasoning" all over some Facebook page (or no, please, not my own) and telling my husband long into the night that I was such a worthless piece of shit I'd do everyone a favor by being dead - that was a milder case of anxiety.

Bipolar cycling plays a part too - but a small one. This is anxiety's show, although bipolar sometimes sings backup. Everything starts with worry, continues with worry, and ends in worry - if  it ends at all. Obviously going over and over the past and future, obsessively and inconclusively (or all too conclusively) is futile. But it's also self-perpetuating and self-sustaining. It becomes me, or I become it. We swallow each other.

Psychiatrists call this kind of worry "rumination" for a reason. Cows chew their cud to digest. Some anxious humans chew their thoughts just as steadily and vigorously, but for us the cud doesn't thin or pass, it just gets larger. It lodges in the mind undigested. And sometimes it only comes loose when a new crisis emerges to take its place - even if we have to whip one up ourselves. 

Then we can start all over again, chewing our thoughts, wringing our hands, picking up steam.