Spring's Here

Gardening is the best exercise I've ever done because it lets me forget I'm exercising. I put aside my monkey mind and wend my merry way among the blooms and branches, daydreaming and talking to myself, remembering last spring's gardening - saturated heat and the smell of rain coming, my son digging out root balls for me and pausing to watch some dirt run through his fingers like he'd never seen it before, laying out a whole new bed and planting flowers and strawberries at midnight.

The next day my muscles and joints berate me for forgetting them, but what a fine dream I dreamed.   ( ~ _ ~ )

The Rabbit Died. Happy Easter!

The Day Before Easter, 2014

This actually just happened. I sat down at my laptop and fell into the Internet. Two hours later, I see from the corner of my eye one of the dogs chewing on something next to my chair, making a lot of crunchy noises. After 5 minutes I pull my eyes from the screen and actually look at her, identifying the red-purple stringy thing she's got in her jaws as a really big plush toy our beagle has, or had. It's eviscerated.

So I went back to the Internet.

More chewing- crunching, same red-purple pulp noted from the corner of my eye, but I'm thinking, still lost in the Internet, how many plastic eyes and squeakers could that toy have? (And no, I didn't stop to think at that point - as a responsible pet owner would have - that too many plastic eyes and squeakers might not be good for a dog.)

Twenty minutes later, the first dog leaves but pretty soon another one takes her place - same spot next to my chair, same chewing-crunching noises, still something red-purple but considerably smaller than before. I'm briefly and vaguely puzzled, but - back to the Internet.

Then the second dog left.

My husband yells from the family room: "Godammit! Drop it! Get away!"

And I said, not looking up from the Internet "Oh yeah, it's that toy of Augie's - they're all chewing on it....."

"NO, ACTUALLY: IT'S A RABBIT AND THEY'RE EATING IT" he stated calmly, but in all caps.

So I put down the Internet and run out there, following a sad little trail of gray bunny fluff to the family room, where my husband and I stare at each other in horror (and in my case chagrin) over the nasty little scene before us. Then I mumble something like "buh, buh but it looked like the toy ...  I didn't see any bones... I was, well, I was on the Internet! "

My long-suffering husband sighed and turned to the task at hand, asking for a whole roll of paper towels to clean up the red-purple remnants in the family room, then he headed out to the backyard to find the rest of the carcass.

And I went back on the Internet to tell this story.

So. ..... Happy Easter, I guess? And go with the chocolate bunnies, they taste better and they're a breeze to clean up - no bones.

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.