I Want to Understand

I read a book recently called Dreamland by Sam Quinones.  It's about the opiate epidemic in the US and how it came to be, from medical journal articles to pharmaceutical companies to pill mills and the Mexican dealers selling black tar heroin in small towns.  I don't know if my mother is/was on opiates.  But I assume so based on their being the norm at the time and the side effects I saw.

I've started reading a book about benzodiazepine use and addiction because benzos seem likely to have been prescribed to my mother too, based on her complaints and again what was common to prescribe.

I want to understand what happened with my mother.  The more I read, the more I feel unsure.  How much of her behavior was because of how she is?  And how much was because of what she was taking?  How can I find out what she was taking?  Even if I reached out to her and asked, I don't think she'd necessarily tell me.  And if she's as sedated as Dante said she was the last time he visited, who knows if she'd even remember what she has taken, or what she used to take, if she replied at all.

The only place I think I might be able to find a record of what my mother was taking is maybe in my grandmother's letters to my cousin.  But I haven't looked at them since the time I read through them for genealogical information and realized my grandmother -- the sanest, kindest, highest functioning person in my extended family -- habitually talked about me behind my back.  She judged me for not being concerned enough about my mother because I didn't come to her with my worries or tears.  I cried regularly about my mother, just not to her.  I remember sitting in my dorm room after my mom really went off the deep end, spending hours Googling her symptoms and behaviors and trying to figure out what was wrong with her.  I spent too much time on WebMD and the Mayo Clinic website because I thought it was a disease.  I feel so stupid.

It was years before I realized it was the pills, and even now as I read about opioids and benzodiazepines, I'm just now realizing just how much can be explained by the pills.  Example:  I thought when I didn't hear from my mother for days or weeks at a time (glorious breaks from her calling to yell at me, apropos of nothing) that she was going through a deep depression.  But she was probably just on pain pills.  She was probably mostly asleep.  The muscle weakness my mother insisted was some sort of progressive illness like multiple sclerosis and the doctors and I explained away as muscle atrophy from her refusal to get up and walk -- a common side effect of extended benzodiazepine use.  I should probably just do a search for most commonly prescribed pills in 2003 if I want to know what she started taking when she went well and truly off the deep end.  She had gone to the doctor to treat her sadness at the death of her brother.  I had asked her to just grieve instead -- told her her feelings were normal and wouldn't benefit from antidepressants -- but she took whatever that doctor gave her anyway.  This was six or seven years after the first time I saw her high on Soma (Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant and non-benzodiazepine hypnotic).

I feel like an idiot.  I didn't understand anything about drugs.  I remember hearing about celebrities developing addictions to pain pills after surgery or injuries, but I didn't understand what that even meant or what that addiction looked like.  I didn't understand what being high on pills looked like.  When it came to what being high looked like, I had only seen caricatures of stoners in comedies on TV.   It seems from my grandmother's letters that everyone realized my mother was addicted to drugs but me, and I feel like an idiot.  When I was a freshman in high school, my mother had explained her behavior away with menopause (on the rare occasion she admitted it wasn't just me who was acting differently), and I was desperate to figure out what had happened that made her this way and how to prevent it taking hold of me too, since I had inherited half her DNA and assumed all of this was just happening to her and would do the same to me.  I had never seen my mother partake in so much as a glass of wine, and she was adamantly against any form of drugs.  Except the ones billed as medicine.  Then her adage of "little do good, lot do better" seemed to come into play.  Even when it came to Tylenol, she urged me to take more than the amount indicated on the bottle if the pain was "really bad," and she took god knows how many Tylenol herself everyday for as long as I can remember.  I wonder what her liver looks like.

I don't think my mother had any idea what she was getting herself into when she started with the Soma.  This all started in 1995 or 1996, around the same time doctors decided pain was "the fifth vital sign," no one should endure pain ever and, if you are in pain, you should drug yourself out of it.  Oxycontin was new to the market and a hot, highly prescribed "non-addictive" opioid (spoiler alert:  it's highly addictive and has killed a lot of people). 

The good news is I don't have to worry about inheriting any of my mother's madness, even come menopause.  The other good news is I understand more about pharmaceuticals now than at least 85% of the US population.  And I know not to take anything a doctor prescribes until I've thoroughly vetted it online and, even then, not if I can do without.  If I ever take morphine, it'll be because death is imminent because I don't want to have to try to STOP being addicted to it.  Had I been a high school athlete or gotten into a car accident that left me in pain, I probably would've been prescribed opiates and quite possibly ended up a situation like my mother's.  It happened a lot to other people at that time and for years afterward.  The only reason it didn't happen to me was luck.  But now I know at least.  Now I have information.  And I guess it's good my mother ended up in a nursing home after her last suicide attempt and her refusal to take care of herself (and our family's collective refusal to take care of  her anymore) because she might have died of an overdose by now if she were left to her own devices and dosing schedule.

My mother is the case study I teach my daughter.  They still do DARE or some variation on it in her school, but it doesn't go into enough detail if you ask me.  The "just say no" tagline implies a hit of pot and an oxycodone are equivalent, and if a kid comes to see that something like pot doesn't actually destroy their life, they might just assume the other one won't either.  Lack of nuanced understanding is dangerous when it comes to what we put in our bodies.  My mother's insistence that alcohol and sex are evil while indulging in prescription drugs and junk food multiple times a day is a good example of how black and white thinking fails us.

I wonder what she would be like if she weren't on the drugs.  I mean, she fit the criteria for borderline personality disorder before any of that.  But she started taking hypnotics and god knows what else when I was in eighth or ninth grade.  What would her non-drugged behavior even look like to adult me?  I don't know.  I don't trust my childhood memory and childhood interpretation of what she was like before the drugs.  She wasn't all bad by any means.  Sometimes she was great, and I loved her so much.  Would she still have drained my bank account?  Would she still have tried to turn my grandparents against me?  Would she still have tried to turn me against my dad?  Yes.  That started before the drugs.  Telling me he wasn't my "real" father and that I couldn't talk about it to anyone was earlier.  Telling me he'd never wanted me and had wanted to beat her into miscarrying me was earlier.  Telling me she'd let me decide if she should divorce him and that we'd be poor and have to find somewhere else to live was earlier.

I don't know what she'd be like now if not for the pills, but I trust this particular scenario has played out as well as it could for me.  Sometimes, since reading Dreamland, I think about reaching out to her.  I hadn't realized until that book just how much the deck was stacked against her NOT becoming an addict.  But I don't want her to have my phone number, and I don't want the nursing home to start demanding money from me (I'd never pay them, so it would just be frustrating for both of us).  I'd like to check in on her and see how she's doing and what she's doing, but I don't want to interact with her.  I'm not sure if it would be worse to let things go and maybe have some regrets when she dies, or to take the chance of appearing on her radar and what backlash that could prompt.  I wonder what drugs she's on now.  I wonder how she feels, or if she feels much of anything at all.

Small Update

I haven’t posted in a long time.  I’ve been feeling sad.  I’m okay and still functioning at a fairly normal level, but I’ve been having feelings I’d rather not feel.

I met my sister.  That was fine.  Apparently her parents even knew we were spending the weekend together.  My biological father apparently told her to tell me “hi” from him, which almost made me cry because I’d assumed he hated me for writing him a letter three years ago, introducing myself and subsequently upsetting his wife.  He still stays away, but it doesn’t sound like he hates me.  His wife still does though.  Because I wrote a letter once three years ago.  “Maybe when ten years have passed and she sees that her life hasn’t changed at all, she’ll be okay with it,” I told my sister.  But if she’s still mad after three years, I can’t imagine another seven will help.  I also can’t imagine him choosing to talk to me when it would upset his wife further and NOT talking to me only upsets me in my house where I cry in my shower alone.

A lot has happened this year.  I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it all.  I don’t even know where to start. 

Last night my daughter said about the fact that I don’t speak to my mother, “It’s not too late to make the right choice.”  I tried to explain, “This is the right choice.”  She’s never met my mother, only seen pictures.  My mother has required full time care on account of her crippling mental illness and prescription drug addiction for more than twice as long as my daughter has been alive.  Dante said she doesn’t really speak anymore, presumably for the same reasons, and no one else in the family can bear to deal with her anymore.  I don’t think I’m in the wrong here.  I thought my daughter understood when I explained that my mother has a disease that makes her say and do mean things, and she refuses to be treated for the disease. 

I don’t know what to tell her.  My mother is the only person I’ve ever actively cut from my life (my dad was a passive removal – I just stopped initiating everything – same with Dante honestly), and it was really hard and I was sooooo suicidal every time she’d call me to yell at me.  I lived in fear of the phone ringing, and I cried all the time and had trouble functioning.  How do you explain that to a 5-year-old?  Every day she tells me she loves me and asks me to marry her.  I don’t want to tell her how bad things can get with a mother.  I don’t want her to live in fear that things with us will turn out the same way.

Spending My Childhood on Antibiotics

I complained of stomach aches a lot as a child, from as early as I can remember until I was in high school.  As much as I loved seeing my friends at school and socializing, the idea of inadvertently doing something wrong or getting in trouble terrified me.  I approached almost every school day terrified that I'd forgotten to do some piece of homework, or that something had been assigned during one of the many hours I'd spent zoned out and daydreaming without even realizing it, or that I might get scolded for something I didn't mean to do wrong.  In hindsight, my stomach aches were probably a combination of stress and my looking for any excuse to get out of school.  In most cases, my mother wouldn't let me stay home unless I could produce physical evidence that I was ill -- either a fever, which I ran only a few times in my life, or vomiting.

My mother took my temperature rectally until I was at least six.  When I asked why I couldn't use the oral thermometer like everyone else in the house, she said I would bite down on it.  I promised I wouldn't.  I don't even know what the problem would have been if I had -- it was a plastic digital thermometer, not one of the old style ones made of glass and mercury.  When I asked why we couldn't get one of the digital thermometers they stick in your ear at the doctor's office then, she told me they aren't accurate enough.  I wonder now how much of her insistence on using a rectal thermometer was as a punishment for my daring to ask to stay home.  I think it was at least a little bit punishment.

On the rare occasions that I was allowed to miss school, my mother took me to the doctor without fail.  I remember her saying something along the lines of how, if she let me miss school, I wouldn't be allowed to just stay home and lie on the couch watching TV all day like she did in my absence.  If I didn't go to school, by god, we would spend the day at the doctor's office.  She wasn't going to incentivize my sicknesses by letting me lie around at home all day.

No doctor ever found a source for my stomach aches or proposed that they might be stress related.  With few exceptions they told us instead that I had an upper respiratory infection and prescribed antibiotics.  I also had strep throat a lot, for which they injected me with penicillin and I was allowed to rest at home for 24 hours without being treated like someone who was trying to get out of something.  Getting a positive strep test was like winning a small lottery to me and always made me happy. 

Once when I was eight or so, my mother found an open packet of Sweet Tarts candies on a file cabinet in the family room.  I don't know how long it had been there -- it was a hoard house after all -- but she mistook them for antibiotics and got very upset at me for not taking them.  "Those are candy," I explained.  They weren't even mine.  Dante might have left them there, but they were from one of the communal baskets of candy my mother left scattered around the house, so it's anybody's guess.  I always took all my medicine though.  It never would have occurred to me not to take a dose of the medicine she gave me, let alone leave them scattered on top of a file cabinet.  To this day, I have never stopped taking a course of antibiotics before they ran out.

I was also about eight when I got my first vaginal yeast infection as a result of the antibiotics.  My entire vulva felt like an inflamed mosquito bite, and it itched so badly I writhed on my bed and cried.  I didn't know what was happening, but my mother did.  When she took me to the pediatrician and announced that I had an yeast infection, the nurse asked, "Oral yeast infection, I assume?"  When my mother said, "No, vaginal," the nurse raised in eyebrows in surprise.  When she left the room, I asked my mother why she had done that.  "Vaginal yeast infections are normally just from having too much sex," my mother told me.  "But yours is from all the antibiotics." 

She bought me Monistat antifungal treatment from the drug store later that day.  I didn't need the vaginal suppositories, she said, just the cream, but she insisted on applying it herself.  When I asked uncomfortably why I couldn't just do it myself, she argued that I wouldn't be able to see where to apply it.  "I don't need to be able to see it," I told her.  "I can feel where it itches."  She denied my request and rubbed in the cream with her fingers while I laid on my back on my bed hoping she would stop soon.  Not knowing how to explain the creepy, skin crawly feeling that was upsetting me, I told her, "I don't like it.  It doesn't feel good."  "It's not SUPPOSED to feel good!" she barked.  "If you liked this, there would be something wrong with you!"

"Show Everyone What a Good Actress You Are"

Up until my late teens I thought I wanted to be an actress.  I was in school plays and church musicals and even the occasional summer Shakespeare program, but after enough of them, I realized I didn't like performing or even rehearsing.  I liked attention and I liked pretending to be something I was not.  If I could have skipped the plays and gone straight to being hugged and told I'd done a good job, that would have been my ideal situation, but I didn't realize that at the time.

When I was in high school and depressed and had to speak publicly or mingle with strangers or do something social I desperately didn't want to do, my mother would urge me, "Show everyone what a good actress you are."  It worked.  I didn't want to fake happiness for the sake of making my mother happy.  My mother vastly preferred complaining to strangers over feigning happiness, and it irritated me that she wanted me to be a shiny happy person while she said whatever she wanted about me right in front of me (sometimes comically flattering, sometimes cruel or mocking) and continued her reign of martyrdom.  But I didn't want to be like her either, and I'd already learned that being cheerful made me dramatically more popular, so I "showed everyone what I good actress I was." 

I felt painfully shy growing up, but behaving as though I were shy tended to get me yelled at and publicly humiliated, so I'd learned to shut down my shyness along with my depression.  They were still there, but I locked them in a room of my brain where they temporarily couldn't get out or show themselves. I knew they were there, but I temporarily couldn't feel them.  I wouldn't have been able to function the way I was expected to if I could have felt them. 

It was a sort of pleasant dissociation in which the feeling part of me went on lock-down and I wore a smiling mask set to a socially acceptable autopilot program.  I don't think I said anything particularly charming or clever on autopilot, but I knew how to smile and respond politely and ask simple questions.  Based on people's reactions, I seem to have done fine.  I don't even think my mother had a socially acceptable autopilot program.  She simply smiled and laughed a little too loudly while she complained and overshared ("How are you today, Annie?"  "Oh, fairly partly cloudy.  My hips hurts, my son's unemployed, and my daughter is a moody teenager who can't wait to spend all my money a thousand miles away at college.  Kids and dogs and husbands!  Ha ha ha ha!"). 

I remember once in high school I won a small scholarship award and my mother told me I'd have to give an acceptance speech at the scholarship luncheon like it was the Oscars or something.  I'd learned to perform songs and plays from memory without panicking years ago, regardless of the audience size, but I was horrified at the idea of having to come up with my own words.  Writing always made me freeze up, even though I always eventually got through it.  I can't remember if she told me in advance or sprang it on me in the car on the way to the function, but I panicked until I had formulated a plan for something vague and sweet and humble to say.  When we arrived I, of course, learned my mother had been lying.  None of the other scholarship winners gave speeches or even said a word beyond, "Thank you."

I asked when I got to the podium if I should give a speech and the person in charge said, "If you like," in a surprised tone of voice.  Whatever, I thought.  I've panicked and written, and I might as well say what I wrote.  I also knew I'd probably be in trouble with my mother on the car ride home if I didn't give an acceptance speech after she'd expressly told me to.  So I gave my acceptance speech.  I pretended what I was doing wasn't absurd -- that I'd been so moved by their generosity I simply had to speak -- and I beamed and thanked everyone present and pandered to the organization so effectively that they gave me the scholarship again the next year when I didn't even apply for it.  I'm proud of that.  I was an average actress in theater, but I'm pretty good in real life.  I know how to behave anyway.  My mother should have thought about that before she started slandering me to her few friends and family in the years that followed.  She doesn't know how to behave.  It was yet another valuable lesson she taught me despite never learning it herself. 

Talking with My Donor Sister

My half-sister and I have arranged a time to talk on the phone for the first time ever.  We've kept each other at arms' length for the last year, though it sounds like that wasn't really what either of us wanted.  I'm nervous.  What if she doesn't like me?  What if she has expectations and I don't meet them?  What if she asks me about my parents?  I'm glad we're doing this though.  We'll never be sisters in anything more than a technicality if we don't get to know each other at least a little, and we've both always wanted a sister.

I'm trying not to have expectations.  I'm trying to remember that a sane person -- any person who I should continue to maintain a relationship with -- will not make a snap judgment about me over our first conversation and decide she hates me.  I'm trying to think of things to say and questions to ask her.  So much seems too personal.  Scheduling our phone date made me so nervous that I forgot for a little while that she grew up with my biological father as her dad.  That'll be kind of a weird topic.  Is it creepy to ask about him?  Or is it expected?  I don't know.

I don't expect to have a preternaturally close bond with my half-sister.  We look a lot alike, but we don't share THAT much DNA, and we share zero history.  I just hope if I push through the awkward feelings that we can reach a point where we enjoy talking to each other.

Wish me luck.

I Hate Being Kissed on the Mouth by Family

Everyone in my extended family of origin kisses each other on the mouth.  I know some families just do that and it's not meant to be creepy because it's what they do and everyone is allegedly cool with it, but being kissed on the mouth by my family has bothered me for as long as I can remember.  I was fine with hugs or a kiss on the top of my head, but because that wasn't how my family did things, uncles, parents, grandparents, and Dante would grab me and/or pin my arms down while they kissed me on the mouth, I presume to show me who was boss.  They often laughed about how much it made me squirm.  My uncles otherwise seemed to be perfectly decent people.  In retrospect, I don't recall being grabbed or pinned at all by two of them.  I just remember them kissing me on the mouth after I learned to cringe quietly and stop putting up a fight.  

I remember my maternal grandfather pinning me on his sofa and nibbling at my neck while my mother and grandmother ignored my screams from the next room.  I was generally accused of overreacting if I protested... anything.  "He's just trying to play with you!  Stop screaming!" was an average reaction to what felt to me like torture or assault.  I was horrified to realize my massively fat grandfather was stronger than me even when I unleashed my full strength, or was at least stronger than me when I was pinned on my back and immobilized and panicking.  I remember being panic-stricken on more than one occasion when I realized even my full strength couldn't fight off a teenage Dante or a grown man.  But shortly after I calmed myself down enough to go limp, my grandfather let me go.  I guess it stopped being fun for him when I stopped fighting.  I spent time with my maternal grandparents at least once a week from birth until I moved away for college, but I can't remember ever liking my grandfather.  I'm not sure anyone did, to be honest.  He was always kind of a dick as far as I could tell.  He's dead now. 

Homemade Gifts

When I was little, I used to make my family members gifts for holidays and their birthdays.  I think this is pretty typical for small children with zero income.  The stress that came from giving my mother gifts started when I was too young to remember.  If I drew a picture, she tended to mention how much better at drawing Dante had been than me even as a small child.  When I stopped drawing pictures and took to just coloring straight lines and shapes in the hopes of avoiding criticism, she told me my drawings were boring and that no one wanted to look at brightly colored lines.  Again, she would point to Dante's drawings (literally) as an example of what was good.  I could copy what he'd drawn at my age easily enough -- such things were still on my grandmother's refrigerator seven years later (hence the literal pointing) -- but doing anything Dante had done first was considered boring too. 

In school around the holidays, we often made things like "pencil holders" by decorating old tin cans, which I would eagerly offer up and my mother would accept with the sarcastic reply, "Great.  Another pencil can."  (It's not like she had more than she could use either.  Do you have any idea how many pencils you can find in a hoard house?  They are infinite.) 

When I learned to sew in elementary school and took to sewing and embroidering small throw pillows because it was all I knew how to make from the tiny scraps of fabric I could get my hands on, they prompted a disparaging snort and the similar response, "Great.  Another pillow."  That was around the time I started saving up all my birthday and Christmas money to buy proper gifts for my family.  I knew only babies made homemade gifts and that no one liked them anyway.  That point was very clear at my house.  That was the year my mother ridiculed me for buying her gifts at the Dollar Store.  It was around the same time Dante started stealing from me.  Childhood is the worst.

The Time I Told My Mother the Truth About Everything

This is an excerpt from an email I sent my best friend on the day I told my mother "The Truth As I See It."  It happened a couple years before my wedding, on the day my mother received divorce papers from my dad.  I count that phone call as one of the most important conversations of my life and one of the few times I was honest with my mother about her behavior and refused to back down when challenged.  I believe this conversation was at least part of the reason my mother has reached out to me to reconnect but has never once asked me why I stopped talking to her.  I said what she needed to know (if she heard it).

I mention unofficially diagnosing my mother as bipolar in this email, which in hindsight I kind of wish I hadn't done, though I thoroughly believed it to be true and that proper treatment -- especially a prescription mood stabilizer, which was one of the few things she didn't already seem to be taking -- could make her better.  She did receive a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder a couple years after this phone call took place, but I no longer believe it to be accurate.  More on all that another time.

Dear Jerry,

My mom was served the divorce papers today.  She called me sobbing and, when I answered, said, "I just called to say I love you."  I acted sympathetic and didn't say much until she started in on my dad, at which point the invisible string that my voice had been hung up on just broke and I announced loudly, "You sold ALL OF HIS STUFF," and basically told her the truth on just about everything.  I didn't yell, but when saying things I'd wanted to tell her for a long time, I announced them loudly like an orator.  I was still gentle through a lot of it though, particularly when talking about mental illness, and she was the only one who cried.  I told her she is bi-polar.  I told her she should be on meds for it and not on meds for EVERYTHING else.  I told her she appears to have Munchausen's syndrome and her car wrecks seem to be on purpose ("You think I rolled the car ON PURPOSE?!"  "Yes.").  I told her maxing out someone else's credit card is NOT OKAY, regardless of her defense that it was "only $500."  When she complained that no one speaks to her, I told her it's because she acts crazy now.  When she asked why I didn't call her at Christmas, I told her I didn't want to get yelled at.  When she acted shocked and asked, "What?" I repeated myself, only more loudly and enunciating better.  I did this every time she acted shocked at something I said.  I asked her if she didn't remember yelling at me and leaving voice mails in which she called me a selfish little bitch, or if she really believed it didn't hurt me.  She said she only remembered calling me that when I didn't send cards to my grandmothers.  I don't really remember how she said it, but it came out that she thinks I am bad for that, and I can't really remember that part through the haze of anger... 

When she said my father took the money away from her and that she would have to live without lights and heat, I explained that, if the bank account is empty, it's because she empties it every month.  Several thousand dollars every month.  I explained that I am handling their money now.  I explained that it comes to me so that I can pay the house payments that she would not.  I explained I had been instructed to put the rest back into their joint account each month, leaving my dad with nothing, so that the automatic withdrawal bills could be paid and she could blow through the rest the way she always does ("Blow through?"  "Yes."  "You think I BLOW THROUGH money?!"  "Yes.").  She said she spends money but (or because?  I can't remember) she has no other vices.  She said she doesn't own furs or diamonds; she pays bills and sometimes buys things for other people.  She said that nothing will make people happy.  We weren't happy when she was spending no money, lying on the couch all day refusing to move, eat, or bathe, and that we aren't happy now that she is out spending money.  What do we want from her?  I said, "We want you to act like a normal human being." 

She cried a lot.  She said we used to be best friends.  I told her she used to be the center of my world.  I told her she used to be my entire support system and that she dropped me in college, or in high school really, and I was forced to get over it.  She claimed it was the menopause.  I told her she should have admitted to it then rather than just yelling at me and accusing me of changing.  I told her she is bi-polar.  Again.  She said she might as well take all of the pills she has and end it all.  I confessed that I had thought about suicide in the last few months too, and then she cut me off to tell me about her problems some more.  Honestly, it's what I expected to happen.  It was more of a test than a confession.  But a normal person would have at least acknowledged the fact that the other person had spoken.  I realize it's hypocritical, but I hated her for not caring even a little bit.  I told her that, kill her or not, most pills don't just put you to sleep, they make you sick and kill you painfully (it's true -- I've read it in books).  I told her to think that over before making any rash decisions.  

She told me what a good mother she was, and how she made me independent.  I'm VERY independent, I told her.  Still, I confessed things I maybe shouldn't have told her, like how much it matters to me what she says to me and the fact that she doesn't seem to care about me.  I told her how fucked up it makes me when she calls and yells at me.  I told her that being told I'm a bad person doesn't make me a better one.  And I announced over her complaints, perhaps a little callously, that I know that's all I'm good for -- being her punching bag and something to bitch at -- to which she replied "no" and then returned to bemoaning her own sufferings, interspersed with bitching about how I don't send people greeting cards.

I guess that's why it doesn't matter how much I told her.  She doesn't care enough to hear it.  Ever.  I know it was a bad day.  I know it only makes sense that she would be upset about being sued for divorce and be focused on her own pain.  I know today might not have been the best day, after years of mostly silence, to announce The Truth As I See It.  And when she wasn't criticizing me or saying horrible things about my dad, and I had a chance to relate to her, I felt bad for her.  But she couldn't leave it alone for long, and I couldn't feel bad WITH her, because it wasn't just today.  It's her.  This will sound ridiculous, but I can't think of a better way to say it:  there is a quote that Christmas isn't a day but a state of mind.  So is the worst day of your life.  And she keeps that day alive in her heart all year round, and it makes sense to be focused on your own misfortunes on the worst day of your life, so maybe it makes sense to her to act this way.  Or maybe I'm trying to make it make sense to me and I'm giving her too much credit.  It's been a long time since she showed an interest in another human being, so it's hard to tell.

I don't envy her situation, but I don't pity her either.  She makes her own choices.  Her life hasn't been happy, but it has been in her control.   If you are unhappy, you have to decide whether or not to do something about it.  Doing nothing is still your choice.  It's just a stupid one.  I asked her to do something about it.  I asked her to see a different psychiatrist and be evaluated for bi-polar disorder so that she can get better.  She asked why she should bother.  I told her, because it isn't all about her, and if she cares about her mother as much as she claims to, she will do it to make her happy.  We'll see.

Wedding Planning

I got engaged in my mid-twenties.  Michael* and I had known each other for five years, dated for four, and lived together for two.  I didn't know how to tell my parents we were getting married.  I was nervous about their reactions.  Michael called his parents excitedly to tell them the news.

A few days or possibly weeks after our engagement, I told my mother over the phone.  "I didn't realize you were serious about him," she said.  She told me I was too young to get married.  

Wedding planning was stressful and awful in many ways.  What I wanted, what my mother wanted, and what Michael's mother insisted upon were very different things (Michael didn't particularly care what we did).  I had been saving up for my wedding since my first job out of college.  I knew if I left it until I was engaged I wouldn't have enough time to save up enough money to fund it myself.  I figured since my parents wouldn't put up anything and my fiance's parents might go by the "bride's family pays" rule, I should plan to bankroll it myself.  Michael and I ended up funding it together, but he was delighted by my forethought.  Michael's parents ended up funding something too, but that was because they wanted to hold their own separate wedding for us over which they'd have complete control, and we told them we didn't care as long as they paid for it themselves.  (They're actually lovely people.  We get along really well.  But if you give them an ounce of power... I didn't know the ramifications back then.  It was a dark time.)

I could remember my mother badmouthing other people's weddings since I was a child.  She seemed affronted whenever people served full meals at their wedding receptions.  Our family weddings were usually ten minutes long and featured cake and punch at the end.  No meal, no dancing, no alcohol of any kind.  Just vows, cake, and go home.  More than that and she accused people of being "frou-frou" and putting on airs.  Michael's family considered wedding planning a competitive sport and a chance to show up other family members, as I later learned.  "Ooooh, real champagne.  This wedding is so much nicer than Amy's was.  Isn't it?"  

My ideal wedding would have been elegant and featured cocktails and rich food and dancing.  There would be lots of flowers, and it would be held in the evening and go until after dark, unlike the afternoon weddings in my family.  We didn't know where to start though.  Michael and I lived a thousand miles away from our parents, who lived hundreds of miles away from each other.  We looked at some locations near our home in New York City.  They were very expensive, but they would allow me to be involved in the planning without taking undue amounts of time off from work.  My mother wanted me to hold the wedding in my hometown so all the family could attend.  None of my family would be willing to travel except maybe my mother.  I mentioned looking at local wedding venues to my dad, and he told me he didn't care where we held the wedding, that while he couldn't travel for the wedding, he didn't have any particular desire to attend anyway.  I learned later that this was a lie.  He was very upset at the insinuation that I might have my wedding near my town instead of his.  He had apparently wanted me to feel very strongly that I must hold the wedding close to him because his attendance was important.  But he wanted me to feel more strongly about him being there than he did, and I simply did not.  To be honest, I didn't want either of my parents there.  I'd never tell them that though.

I knew my ideal wedding wouldn't work with my actual family.  I wouldn't be comfortable getting married in front of my parents, or Michael's, for that matter.  It just felt weird.  Short of recasting my family, my secondary wedding of choice would have been what I called a "Kids Only" wedding.  Michael's and my friends and his family members who are our contemporaries would be the only invitees.  No one would judge us or say I looked fat.  No one would yell at us.  I wouldn't have to worry that my virgin mother would want to talk to me about the impending wedding night.  It would be like eloping except with friends present.  But I knew the "Kids Only" wedding wouldn't work either because our parents would be so angry at being excluded that we'd effectively trade in a few months of grief for many years of shamings.

I gave up.  I told my parents we'd hold the wedding in their town.  Michael's family was willing to travel.  I made the mistake of telling my mother that I knew it was the only way Dad could attend, and she told me that was a terrible reason to hold the wedding there.  I should have been having my wedding in their town so that my maternal grandparents could attend.  Sure it's the same town and convenient to all of them, but clearly I don't love my grandparents and she was going to tell them so! She would tell them the truth about me!  So that happened.

I knew my wedding was going to be a bad experience, so I decided I should at least keep it inexpensive.  My mother used to complain that, when she got engaged to my dad, her father had told her, "Here's $100.  Go have a wedding."  They had been poor, and I guess my mother hadn't saved up anything toward her wedding in the years she'd been working, so she had had a cheap wedding.  Ceremony in the church where we both grew up, cake in the church basement afterwards.  I told my mother she could plan my wedding.  It would be in our hometown, and I would pay for it.  She had a budget of $5000 to work with.  I thought this would make her happy.  It was a truly terrible move on my part.

I knew $5k wasn't much for planning a wedding anymore, so I told my mother I wanted a ceremony in the church where we'd both grown up and a reception in the church basement, just like she'd had.  She'd need to pick out a cake and flowers, which seemed simple enough.  She'd always scorned "fancy" desserts, so I felt sure she would choose a basic cake flavor like vanilla or chocolate that wouldn't offend anyone.  I didn't really care how any of it turned out.  I knew I had to tell her it was great no matter what.  That was how she raised me.  I just didn't want anyone to yell at me anymore.

In hindsight, it seems weird that I turned the reins of wedding planning over to my mother AFTER she told me she was going to poison my grandparents against me.  But then again, maybe it's not so weird.  I would have done pretty much anything to avoid "getting in trouble."  It didn't matter that I was a financially independent adult living a thousand miles away from my parents.  I just wanted my mother to be happy and love me and not yell at me anymore.

My mother seemed excited to plan the wedding she'd never had.  She immediately started looking for new venues.  She found an outdoor location on a major highway in our town.  I didn't want an outdoor wedding, and based on what I knew of that highway, I could only envision the local Hooters surrounded by loud traffic.  I didn't want her to find a new venue.  I knew every venue I'd explored cost exponentially more than the church.  She said she loved the place though and wanted to fax me pictures.  I asked her to send me prices.  She said it didn't matter and she would pay for everything with the money she was getting from refinancing the mortgage on the house (as referenced in A List of Mom's Antics). 

She demanded I fly home so I could taste cakes.  I told her I trusted her to pick something.  If she liked it, I'd like it.  Something basic like vanilla or chocolate would be good.  She said no, they have so many flavors and fruit fillings, I needed to taste them all.  During this time, my mother would call me at odd hours in a variety of moods.  Once she called me around 6am because she wanted to know how to fax me information about wedding venues.  She said she had lost my phone number, she seemed upset at me for that, and she said she had spent the last hour calling people, waking them up, and asking if they knew how to reach me.  She isn't an early riser, and I am confident she hadn't been to bed yet.  Other times I would come home from work to a happy morning voicemail chattering away about wedding cakes and an afternoon voicemail calling me a ungrateful little bitch who she "didn't raise this way."  I never knew what to expect.  This was around the time I started drinking.  It helped me stop shaking, which I had started to do every time the phone rang.

My high school friend Allie, who had declared herself maid of honor and who I was too afraid of to tell no, asked if she could help with the wedding planning.  I said okay.  I would divide up the planning between her and my mother, who seemed overwhelmed and increasingly mentally scattered anyway.  My mother, however, was outraged at the suggestion that I might take away any of her responsibilities.  She said Allie could plan the whole wedding for all she cared.  She was done being treated this way.  The wedding was off.  She didn't raise me to be this ungrateful.  Allie took over attempts at planning for a little while, but it didn't get any easier.  I couldn't handle it anymore.  I was afraid of both women, and I just wanted it all to be over.  I put the entire wedding on hold for almost a year.  When I felt ready to approach it again, I looked up wedding planners online and called one whose gallery of wedding photos looked nice.  It was one of the best decisions of my life. 

Wedding planning changed dramatically as soon as I talked to my wedding planner, Lisa.  She was polite, easy going, and knew how to plan an event.  Her taste was similar to mine, as evidenced by the photos on her website, so I basically just gave her some pictures and ideas of things I liked and she showed me what she thought we should do.  I usually agreed.  Easy.  Fun.  All the leg work was hers, and she didn't yell at me once.  "Are you really this easy?" she would ask when I agreed with her choices or trusted her professional judgment on something.  "This is unreal."  Lisa was a godsend.  She even helped me with my parents.

The wedding ended up being much more expensive and much more elegant than what I'd previously planned, but we had enough saved up.  It was more like my "ideal wedding" scenario except with my family present.  There was an open bar, dinner, an elaborate tiered cake, dancing, and even chair covers, which inexplicably cost $800 to rent for the night but really brought the rooms together.  Allie was a musician and remained in charge of the ceremony music, which was coincidentally the biggest source of stress for me in all the wedding planning.

I knew I had no control over my mother's behavior -- or anyone's but my own -- so I set myself two manageable goals for the wedding day:

1. I would be a happy, gracious bride.  I didn't have to actually enjoy the day or "be fully present" or anything tricky like that.  I just didn't want to give anyone cause to say I was "being a bridezilla" or to talk smack about me.  If someone talked smack about me, I wanted their listeners to be able to look over at me, see me smiling and happy and thanking everyone for coming, and think that the other person was unnecessarily being an asshole; and
2. Be legally married by the end of it.

My husband and I made a few contingency plans in case my mother tried something at the wedding.  In addition to the wedding planner, who would keep my newly divorced parents away from each other, I enlisted two close friends and bridesmaids to act as a buffer between my mother and me.  If my mother tried to engage me in a lengthy conversation, scream at me, cry at me, or do anything that might be hard for me to cope with at my own wedding, they would step in.  They would engage her in conversation, invent a reason I was needed elsewhere, and allow me to extricate myself gracefully. 

We also needed a contingency plan in case my mother faked a heart attack.  I've posted here before about my mother faking a heart attack while I was home on break from college and on the phone with my boyfriend (now husband).  Because I think there is a decent chance she faked that heart attack because I was paying attention to my boyfriend instead of her, I was very concerned she might fake another one at our wedding.  What then?  We'd be out thousands of dollars and still unmarried at the end of the day.  Being married was one of my two goals for the entire day.  If I ignored her or said, "It's okay, everyone, she's just faking!" I'd look completely heartless, regardless of if I was right.  Looking like a happy, gracious bride was my only other goal for the day, so I couldn't very well act like a harpy.  "Canceled wedding" and "heartless daughter" both sounded like outcomes my mother would potentially consider a win, so we enlisted more help.  Fortunately, quite a few of my husband's and my friends from college are doctors.  Two different doctors volunteered to leap to my mother's aid in the event of a fake heart attack or other unforeseen ailment, give her a quick once over, call out to the room, "It's okay, everyone!  Carry on with the wedding!  She's in good hands!" and remove her from the premises for further care.  Should anyone present insist on halting the wedding for her, the doctors would insist that we carry on, so we would.  Doctors' orders.

My mother called me to RSVP for the wedding.  I hadn't heard from her in awhile.  She sounded good.  Feeble, but not angry.  I think she'd been depressed.  I think that was usually what prompted her to stop calling me for weeks at a time.  We had a pleasant exchange.  There was lightness in her voice, like she was trying for me, almost like I wasn't her offspring at all.  She warned me she wouldn't look good at the wedding.  "You always look good to me, Mommy," I said, which made my skin crawl, but I felt it was expected of me.  She told me about all the gifts she'd bought me to take on my honeymoon.  She said she had packed an oversized suitcase full of bathrobes and slippers and massage oils and heart-shaped things she had found in the Target dollar aisle.

She said her parents wouldn't be attending my wedding.  My grandfather hadn't attended a wedding in decades, and she said my grandma didn't want to embarrass me with how poorly she gets around.  I insisted she wouldn't -- embarrassing me with someone else's poor mobility is not a thing that has ever existed -- but I'm sure my insistence was moot.  I don't know why my grandmother wouldn't attend -- maybe my mother had successfully turned her against me, or she was self-conscious, or there weren't enough able-bodied people to accompany both her and my mother to the wedding, or Grandpa didn't let her out of the house anymore, or she didn't want to be out in public with my mother -- but I'm confident any reason my mother gave me would be one she'd contrived herself for her own purposes.  Historically, her purposes tended to be guilt or alienation.

Michael and I flew to my hometown a few days before the wedding.  They have a waiting period for marriage licenses there, so we put the extra days to good use and spent our time swimming at the hotel pool and relaxing.  The stress still managed to run me down, and I fell physically ill like I had for my high school graduation.  My dad was delivered from the hospital across the state two days before my wedding.  I spent the day with him, taking him out to lunch and to pick up his tux and rented shoes for the wedding.  It was a difficult day, but I don't remember how much was from being with him and how much was from being sick and exhausted and wishing I could be asleep.  I remember him mostly being nice, but it was still unexpectedly hard spending the day with him in person.  He knew I was sick, but he wanted me to accompany him to his haircut too.  I didn't say no.  I was afraid I'd make him mad at me.  This seems to have been a major theme throughout my life up to that point.

I was taken aback when I saw my mother at the wedding.  One of her younger brothers had brought her and was pushing her in a wheelchair.  She had lost about 80 lbs from starving herself and sleeping all day in the months leading up to and surrounding her divorce, and she said she had trouble walking (as detailed in More Motherly Antics).  What the doctors called muscle atrophy from her months of staying in bed -- cured with some regular exercise over time, they assured her -- she insisted was an undiagnosed degenerative disease that would soon leave her bedbound like my dad.  Hence the wheelchair.  She wore an old knit pair of pants and top that she used to wear to the laundromat when I was younger.  Her hair was greasy, not just at the roots but all the way through, as though she hadn't washed it in weeks.  She wore no shoes.  She looked twenty years older than the last time I'd seen her, she was wild-eyed, and I also had a sort of visceral fear reaction to her at that point from the years of random screaming phone calls and voice mails.   

I shut away all my thoughts and put on my happy mask.  My in-laws were there in their evening finery, along with the wedding party and almost everyone else.  I knew my mother stood out.  I knew my in-laws, who had never met her before, would ask Michael what was wrong with her.  If anyone had asked me, I would have smiled sadly and said in a quiet, rueful voice, "She's severely mentally ill.  She refuses any kind of treatment.  It's really good to see her though," and silently dared anyone to judge me.  I was the gracious, happy bride, dammit.  No one asked though.  I think they could tell.

I hugged my mother and thanked her for coming.  I treated her the way a happy, gracious bride would treat her loving mother.  It was a part in a play.  She smiled and told me I looked beautiful.  If there was more to the exchange than that, I don't remember it.  My uncle wheeled her away while I greeted other guests.  I don't know what my uncle thought of that day.  I remember he wore jeans as he always had and he didn't smile, not even in the photos.  He was never an overly cheerful guy, but he used to smile and laugh with family.  I don't know if my mother had poisoned him against me as she had promised to do with her parents or if he just didn't want to be there.  I also know now that he had a cocaine problem, in addition to his diagnosed mental illness.  He died the next year of a heart attack.  He was barely fifty.

My dad got lost on the way to the wedding.  The ceremony and reception were held in our hometown, but I hadn't lived there since I was a teenager, so I didn't know driving directions particularly well.  My dad had lived there almost his entire life, but he got lost, so he called me from his van, screaming to give him directions from his current, unknown location.  I remember standing in the parking lot in my wedding gown and veil, fighting back tears, trying to orient myself in such a way that I could somehow help him and make him stop yelling at me.  I thrust my phone at the wedding planner and begged her to help.  Wedding planners are amazing.  I assume she was able to give my dad directions or at least talk him through his period of lostness (our town isn't that big, he would have found the venue eventually), but the most important thing she did was deflect the screaming from me while I composed myself. 

Most of my extended family members didn't attend, even tables full of cousins and their children who had RSVPed "yes."  I don't know why.  Maybe they do that with all weddings.  A few of my favorite cousins came though -- Uncle Charles's children -- even one who had to travel to be there.  They even gave us wedding gifts.  I was very touched and happy to see them.

None of the contingency plans surrounding my mother ended up being necessary.  She behaved perfectly.  No fake heart attacks, no loud pronouncements of who would be a more appropriate match for her daughter, as she had made at my college graduation.  As my husband and I stood outside the reception hall waiting for the wedding planner to cue us for our grand entrance as a married couple, my mother and her brother were leaving.  She has a long history of leaving events early, but not usually quite that early.  She took me aside and said something nice.  I don't remember what it was.  "Beautiful ceremony," maybe.  She was crying, and I'm not sure why.  That's the part I remember.  Maybe they were happy tears, but she was never the type for those, and it seemed she was crying hard.  My thought at the time was that she was upset I'd foiled her attempt to make me look like a terrible daughter who didn't take enough care of her mother to ensure she was bathed and properly dressed.  Maybe I don't give her enough credit.  Or maybe she was too high to be that self-aware.  She did appear to be high.  I said something nice back, and then they left.  I never spoke to either of them again.

The reception was beautiful.  I accomplished my two goals for the day, and I even had a good time dancing and talking with my friends and family.  I also have photographic evidence of the last time I saw my mother.  No one can convince me she wasn't wild-eyed or that I'm remembering it all wrong.  I have the pictures to prove it, and my closest friends were witnesses.  No more gaslighting me that she is really okay or that the real problems are all my own.  For all these reasons, I consider my wedding a win.

*Not his real name.

The Bad Things I Did as a Baby

My mother had a series of stories she would recount as evidence of how much trouble I had been as a baby.  She might still tell these stories, but I no longer talk to her, so for me they stopped a few years ago. 

The first one was my birth and the time surrounding it.  My mother had scheduled a c-section to happen a couple of weeks before I was due to be born because I was positioned transverse, with my spine perpendicular to hers.  The first thing I did was to "turn on her," into the standard head-down birthing position so that the doctor told her to skip the c-section and wait for my due date.  "You turned on me before you were even born," she used to half-joke.  She'd wanted the c-section.

The next thing I did was to be born.  I "ripped her from end to end," she liked to say.  This was her hyperbolic way of saying there was some amount of vaginal tearing.  Episiotomies -- or cutting so that the baby doesn't cause a vaginal tear while coming out -- were standard back then, but she said I was born too fast for her doctor to make a cut.  Small tears are considered pretty standard now, especially since episiotomies are no longer considered a great idea, but I didn't know this until I had a child of my own.  I also caused her pain when I was born.  I was also born a week and a half late and larger than the average baby.  I was also born facing upward, "spine to spine," which was wrong.  I thought this was very abnormal until I had a child of my own and the first thing I saw was her face.  It happens, I guess.

The next thing I did was biting down when nursing.  She said it was very painful, so she took to spanking me every time I did it.  I was too young to remember any of this, but she liked to talk about it.  After a few times being spanked while feeding, she said I refused to nurse anymore, and she considered me weaned.  She discovered the next day that I had caught chicken pox from my older brother.  I was two months old. 

When I was a few months old, my mother said she found me sucking on a vaporizer insert from the humidifier she kept on the floor of the living room.  She said she had to miss a favorite TV show to take me to the emergency room.  She always referenced that "Who Shot JR?" episode, but I've looked it up and that aired before I was born, so I'm not sure what show I actually made her miss.  She has never mentioned me needing actual medical treatment once we got to the hospital, so I presume I was fine.

When I was a little older and started pulling myself to stand, I fell and cut my head open on the corner of the coffee table.  She had to take me to the emergency room again.  She didn't talk about this event as much, so I assume there wasn't anything memorable on TV at the time.  She said I didn't need stitches but got a butterfly bandage.  I still have the shiny little scar on my forehead, but no one else notices it.  It's very small.

I also cried.  I also wanted to be held.  I wanted to be carried, despite the fact that I was heavy and "too big to carry."  I used to wake up during the night and call out for her, asking for water.  I don't know why she didn't just let me sleep in a real bed so that I could get my own water, but I remember sleeping in a crib.  I must've been at least three, and I was toilet trained, but I couldn't get out of bed to use the toilet during the night.  Still, I didn't wet the bed a single time since I can remember.  I remember crouching behind the bars of my crib, pretending to live in a cage at the zoo.  My mother said she had to take me to the doctor because I would go days without using the bathroom at all.  She said the doctor laughed at her overly careful parenting and said that I simply had a very large bladder, nothing to worry about.  I think now that I was probably dehydrated, something I was first hospitalized for the month before I started kindergarten.

I feel stupid and slightly ridiculous admitting I didn't know how much of this was normal baby stuff until I had a child of my own.  I thought I'd been terrible.  I thought I had caused everyone undue amounts of trouble.  I tried so hard to be perfect.

Mother Goes Off the Deep End

When I was 21, my uncle died in a car accident.  He was one of my mother's younger brothers, and she told me later that he was an alcoholic.  In hindsight, I don't know if this was actually true or just something she told me.  He might have become an alcoholic later in life, or it's also possible she was referring to the fact that he wasn't a teetotaler.  If he was an alcoholic before I left for college, he hid it well.

He'd been out for drinks with his son and drove home drunk.  My cousin was driving behind him to make sure he got home safe, so he was there when my uncle crashed his car and died.  My mother was understandably distraught.  She immediately got herself a prescription for antidepressants.

I tried to tell her that I didn't think the antidepressants were a good idea in this instance.  She was grieving, not depressed, and I was afraid they would make her anxiety attacks skyrocket to new heights.  She'd already dropped out of college due to her anxiety at this point, and she reported that she woke up in a heart-thumping panic most nights for no apparent reason.  My mother took the antidepressants anyway.  I don't know what else she was taking at the time.

If I were to make a timeline of my life, there would be a mark at age 21 that says "Mother Goes Off the Deep End."  She'd exhibited mood swings and money problems and spending sprees and binges and reckless driving for as long as I'd known her, but they were normal day-to-day occurrences for her, intermingled with quiet time.  Now they lasted for weeks without a break.  She seemed to function in fast-forward.  She seemed high to the point of being almost psychotic.  She didn't hear me when I talked, and it seemed like she was intent upon hurting everyone she knew.  This was around the time I started feeling upset and afraid every time I heard from her. 

Occasionally she seemed deeply depressed for the first time since I'd known her.  Her voice was much deeper and quieter on the phone.  She didn't cry or scream.  It was like she had no emotions at all.  She still didn't seem to hear me when I spoke, but she didn't threaten me either, so that was good.  Most of the time, I could guess she was depressed by the fact that she wasn't calling me at odd hours or leaving me shrieking voice mails demanding money and calling me a bitch.  We could go months without talking when she was depressed.  No warning calls from my dad to say that she was gunning for me, or for him either.  Depression was good.  Depression was safe.  I felt bad she had to endure it, but if it had to be one or the other, depression was better for the rest of us.  There was no "normal" anymore.

The Time My Mother Put Me On Antidepressants

When I was in high school, my mother already had a knack for finding doctors who would prescribe whatever she asked for.  I remember her taking me to an ENT and asking for a specific dosage of Augmentin, and he just wrote the prescription.  I don't remember what was wrong with me, but growing up in a hoard house where the basement had standing water and there was visible mold on the walls, I had a lot of upper respiratory infections, sinusitis, and related ailments.  When I tested positive for a mold allergy, the doctor told me the best thing I could do was avoid having bouquets of flowers in my room.  I spent most of my childhood, as I remember it, on antibiotics.  My mother told me they would bolster my immune system.

I hadn't had a regular doctor since elementary school, when my male pediatrician had insisted on giving me my first breast exam and, subsequently, nightmares.  I'd never liked that doctor, but that was around the time I refused to see him again.  When my mother found out a woman from our church was a hematologist and oncologist, despite my lack of any blood diseases or cancer, she decided to make her my general practitioner.  My first PAP smear was done by that hematologist, though I don't know why.  She was not good at it. 

I remember one day my mother called the hematologist's office while I sat on the couch beside her, and she announced into the phone that her daughter was being "a moody teenager" and needed to be put on antidepressants.  I'd still never been allowed to speak to a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist of any kind at that point since, as my mother said, "our family doesn't believe in therapy."  I also made straight A's in school and was absolutely terrified of getting into trouble, so my parents stood to gain very little beyond my own happiness by letting me speak to a professional.  I didn't get to speak to the hematologist either, but she called in a prescription for an antidepressant to our local pharmacy at my mother's behest.

I took the pills my mother gave me.  I thought they might help me get through my final years living in that house, which had been hard.  My mother had been self-medicating with prescription drugs for about three years at that point, some combination of pain killers and muscle relaxants and sleeping pills, though I don't know how consistently she took them back then.  Her behavior was more erratic and confusing than before, but she didn't seem high all the time.

I don't remember what the antidepressant was called, but the pills made me feel self-conscious and anxious in a way I thought I'd long outgrown.  I had been a shy and nervous child, but as I got into high school I'd learned to lock down my fears, put on a smiling mask, and act my way through situations that would have crippled my younger self with social anxiety.  The pills unraveled all that. 

I remember in kindergarten my mother bought me an ugly red sweatsuit with clowns on it and insisted I wear it to school.  It looked like pajamas to me -- ugly pajamas at that -- and I desperately didn't want to wear it, but she insisted.  I sobbed and begged, she called me ungrateful, and I spent the entire day I wore it sure that everyone was staring at me, judging me for wearing pajamas to school.  The antidepressants made me feel like that everyday.  My nerves felt raw.  Fortunately, I recognized it must be the pills doing it.

I don't remember how long I took the antidepressants, but I would guess just a few weeks.  They broke me down pretty quickly, and I remember approaching my mother in tears, telling her honestly but melodramatically that I couldn't go on that way -- that I had to stop taking the antidepressants or double the dosage, but I felt terrible all the time and something had to change.  My mother said I wasn't acting any better yet and therefore couldn't stop taking them.  She looked me in the eye and told me to double the dosage, which struck me as odd because -- even though I'd proposed it -- I knew it was dangerous and a bad idea.  Was she calling my bluff?  Had I been bluffing?  Was she serious?  She didn't call the doctor.  I never saw that doctor -- or any doctor -- about the antidepressants, so I took matters into my own hands and just stopped taking the pills.  I know now that you're supposed to taper them off under a doctor's watchful eye, but I didn't have that, and I quickly went back to normal, mildly depressed but high functioning, feeling better than I had in weeks.

Much later, as an adult, I tried to look up those pills online to see why I'd had that reaction to them.  I'd become scared of ever taking antidepressants again, and I thought maybe if I knew what they were I could be sure to avoid them in future without writing off all antidepressants forever.  I tried to request my file from the hematologist's office, but she had retired years ago, her private practice no longer existed in any form, and no one knew what had become of her records.  I remembered the prescription was a generic, and I know it was the '90s.  I also know it had to be something commonly prescribed in order for a hematologist to feel comfortable doling them out.  I'm guessing it was an SSRI like Prozac or Paxil since these were the most common kind of antidepressants on the market at the time.  What I did learn from the internet is that my reaction -- anxiety, essentially -- is a common symptom of SSRI overdose.  I also learned that the starting dosage for these drugs in the '90s was often too much for a lot of patients -- meaning a lot of people had the same problem that I did -- and starting dosages are generally lower now.  Cue "The More You Know" music.

Mother Goes to College

Both my parents came from working class families filled with mostly skilled laborers and artists, where going to college was unusual.  I had always planned to go to college for as long as I can remember, originally planning to attend an Ivy League school and become a doctor, and my parents had been supportive of my ambitions.  One of my cousins started taking a sign language interpretation course so that she could hopefully pay rent while looking for work as an actress.  As I got closer to graduating high school, my mother tried to convince me to do the same.  I could continue living at home and attend a local community college to become a sign language interpreter too and then, she said, I could finance my own four-year degree after that.  This had never been my plan -- neither the extra two years of school nor staying in the same state as my parents -- and I refused. 

When I solidified my college plans and got ready to move out, my mother decided she would go to college too.  She would attend the local community college and become a sign language interpreter.  I thought this was a fantastic idea.  While my older brother, Dante, was still living at home when he hadn't recently been kicked out again by one of our parents, he was no longer treated like a child and my mother seemed to be going through empty nest anxiety.  Second, she had a history of taking jobs for which she was both overqualified and ill suited -- fast food service, warehouse temp work, the paper route -- often followed by getting injured in some way or doing something else that would abruptly end the job.  Finally she was aspiring to a job that required her to become more qualified and might hold her interest too.

My mother was very nervous about the community college entrance exam.  She was a perfectionist.  She told me that, in high school, she had taken remedial classes whenever possible so that she could be the best in the class.  The community college entrance exam covered two years worth of math she hadn't taken.  In preparation for the exam, she bought some geometry and trigonometry flashcards, and I taught the subjects to her.  It was unexpectedly easy.  She understood most concepts without my having to explain them twice.  She was obviously smart -- even at math, which I consider hard -- but she demurred and gave all the credit to my teaching.  She'd never believed she was smart and certainly never expected to go to college.  I understand the second part -- neither of her parents finished high school, they were poor, and she was a girl in the '60s -- but I don't know why they didn't tell her she was smart.  She always told me I was smart, and it is the one thing I never doubt about myself.

She had to write an entrance essay too.  It was riddled with unnecessary commas and all the same cliches she used when she spoke.  In fact, it sounded exactly like how she talked.  If she'd been writing as a character, it would have been fantastic.  Her style required a bit of tweaking and editing for an academic setting, but she was a good writer.  She didn't believe me.

She was afraid the other students would make fun of her.  She was an old, fat lady, she said.  She was self-conscious about her appearance, her eyebrows.  I reassured her and taught her to apply makeup.  First she seemed happy and calmer; when it came time to visit the school, she said it looked ridiculous.

Finally the summer ended and we both started classes.  She made two new friends, one my age and one a little older than Dante.  I was homesick, halfway across the country from anyone I knew, so I called home a lot.  My mother got angrier.  "I let you go to that school because I thought it would make you happy!"  "All you ever do is talk about yourself!"  Aside from the homesickness, I was actually happier.  School was hard, and I had to make all new friends, but having access to healthy food whenever I wanted it, walking outside without anyone stopping me, and living in a clean space with friendly people had a positive effect on me.  Colors looked brighter.  It was literally like a grey veil was lifting.  I was just experiencing new stressors and missed my mother.

She upset one of her new friends by saying her 4-year-old daughter was so fat she looked nine months pregnant.  She didn't understand why her friend was upset.  "It's true!" she insisted.  This was her standard defense when someone became upset at her insults.  Her other friend got married and adopted a toddler.  She told me about each of her friends' marital and sexual problems.  She recounted the stupid decisions they made and how each of them was better and kinder to her than me.  I don't know if her insults were becoming less subtle or if I was becoming more attuned to them. 

Near the end of her two-year degree program, my mother's anxiety attacks reached an apex.  With less than a semester left, she dropped out of her classes.  I couldn't convince her to stick it out.