"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.

It Only Takes One Remark

It's probably the thing I hate and fear most about having bipolar disorder combined with social anxiety and borderline personality. It upends my life. It pulls the rug out from under me. It hurtles me from place to place, from time to time, from person to person, from one trauma to another without warning. It makes me liable to lash out, to feel mortally wounded or ashamed, to confront, blame or otherwise alienate my loved ones and even myself.

And it lurks behind any corner.

On Sunday, I went to a potluck at the tiny church I'd started going to exactly one week before. My husband and daughter decided to come along. I avoid most social situations, and this was exactly the kind I fear the most: a small group of people who all know each other but not me. It sends my self-consciousness and fear of appearing odd or sick or pitiable skyrocketing. I don't know why I went really. I guess I just felt comfortable enough at the first service I attended to take the chance.

It was going pretty well. All three of us "fit in." I was pleased. I was relieved. I felt like part of the group.

My daughter sat next to me at a big table where everybody was eating. We were talking about their children whom they'd home-schooled together, and about plays they'd been to lately, the kind of ordinary interactions which weren't exactly ordinary for me, but I was handling it, even feeling pretty good.

Then my daughter made the remark.

She asked me (apart from the others, thank God) if I was going to have Thanksgiving at our house again this year. I said maybe, I hadn't thought about it, depended on what others wanted to do, etc.. But she had to pin me down. She insisted.

Considering it more closely, I said "Well, it stressed me out the last time but I got through it."

"No you didn't!" she said, eyebrows raised.

Flustered, I ventured "Oh, it wasn't that bad, was it? No one noticed. I pulled it off."

"You were flipping out!" she said. "It was obvious! You were a mess!"

No I hadn't! Had I? I cooked, I decorated a little, I put the food out, found seats for everyone, kept everyone's glass full. I didn't recall exchanging anything but pleasantries with anyone. People stayed around afterward, seemed comfortable enough. But none of that mattered as soon as she said it.

Because suddenly, I zoomed out. I was looking down at this dinner but also at last Thanksgiving, at other dinners, other occasions; other times I'd  had to be with others who weren't my immediate family. I looked down at all the times I had pretended I was not as stressed as I was, not as emotionally vulnerable as I was, not as self-conscious and judgmental of myself as I utterly was. And I looked down too at the times when I was not nervous at all, not stressed at all, times I felt totally "normal."

My brain started churning out poison: Everybody at that potluck dinner, just like last Thanksgiving's dinner and every other dinner or event I'd ever been present at,  probably saw me as strange and volatile, even if I felt perfectly fine at the time. They could see through me -- and into me, where the crazy parts were. They felt sorry for me, but didn't want to embarrass me by showing it. Maybe they were afraid of me. In fact, every stranger I'd ever come into contact with probably knew instantly that I was "different."

So every social "success" I thought I had -- like that Thanksgiving dinner I thought I'd pulled off -- was really a failure, a sham. People had just pretended they didn't notice me "flipping out." There was a giant secret all right, but I was not the one keeping it from them. They were keeping a secret from me: that they all knew I was "crazy."


I felt sick to my stomach, "punched in the gut" where all that poison was churning. I tried not to cry. I looked at my daughter.

"Really? Wow. I didn't know. That's embarrassing. Now I feel like shit."

Her face turned red. I said so.

"I'm embarrassed," she admitted. She knew she had hurt me. She didn't mean to.

Actually, I was worried I'd gone beyond being hurt to maybe losing control. I was afraid I just might "flip out" again, right there at the potluck dinner with a bunch of strangers whom I really wanted to find fellowship with. Self- hatred washed over me again like a stain, soiling every memory, every lovely moment, every triumph, every relationship I'd ever had. It got out of hand fast and bolted like a wild horse. It always did.

I was angry and disgusted. Angry at her for carelessly "hurting my feelings" when she knew it could derail me, and disgusted at myself for having such hair-trigger emotions. By now, at my age, after going through this since childhood, shouldn't I have "resolved" some of this mess? Shouldn't all the therapy and meds, and the love of my husband and family, have shown me at least a few ways of interrupting this process of self-recrimination, so that sometimes it wouldn't end in things like self-inflicted 3rd degree burns? For God's sake, STILL?

By the time we got home, my mind was rehashing my last hospitalization, a year and a half ago. It only lasted two weeks, but it felt like my whole life. It had all the elements of my worst nightmare, traumatic as traumatic gets, all my flashbacks brought to life.


So who did I lash out at, sitting at home so many months later, with all of it behind me? My husband! He let them admit me! He left me there when I begged him to get me out! He didn't demand they transfer me to another hospital with a doctor I knew and trusted. He even let them set the commitment process in motion, knowing that would be the final nail in the coffin of my self-respect, something I had never let happen in 40 years.


But we'd been over and over this. I'd forgiven him. He'd explained how stressed he was, that he didn't know what to do so he did what they told him to. I understood how sad he was, how powerless he felt. And to reassure me, we'd drawn up a psychiatric advance directive, so that I'd get the right treatment next time. (Please, don't let there be a next time.) Yet here we were again. Here I was opening old wounds that had healed over, reliving my worst memories and forcing my husband to relive them too.

One small innocent remark about a long forgotten dinner had that much power over me.

My mind is deeply grooved with painful memories, awful depressions, intense self-consciousness, loneliness, self-hatred, anger and fear. The grooves for pain are deeper than those for pleasure and love; I don't know why. My mind can't seem to get past its wounds. It can't heal. However much love and happiness grows over them, the old hurts will still open at a touch. My mind can't talk to itself and pull itself back from the brink. Once it's triggered, my mind can run away with me as fast as a bullet and ruin my life.

So that's what I hate and fear most about bipolar disorder combined with social anxiety and borderline personality disorder. At any moment, in any place, for any reason and sometimes for no reason, some unexpected tiny blip on the radar could be the missile that explodes in my face and sends me to hell. I know hell: I'd rather be dead than there.

Suicidal because my daughter said I'd seemed stressed a year ago? Welcome to my world.