Childhood Depression

When I was little, before I knew the words "depression" or "early onset dysthymia," I tried to explain what I was feeling to my mother.  I was in preschool, and I knew what I was feeling wasn't "sad" or "angry" or "sick," but I also knew something felt wrong.  I'd always been overly sensitive and easily irritable -- I can't remember I time I wasn't anyway -- but now at four I also felt sort of dull and grey and off.  "Sad" was the closest word I knew to what I felt, but I also knew if I said, "I feel sad," she would ask, "About what?" or the less helpful, "What do you have to feel sad about?" and I didn't know the answer, so I told my mother, "I don't feel happy." 

My mother replied, "Nobody gets to feel happy ALL THE TIME!  GAWD!" and went on about how my expectations are too high and no one can ever meet them.

We Need to Talk About Dante

Trigger warning.  There is some physical violence and some what would probably be termed low-grade sexual abuse of a child in this post.  No touching, just inappropriateness.  I had planned to write a series of shorter posts about life with Dante, but it all sort of came vomiting out.

Dante was our household's "problem child."  He was my hero in a lot of ways.  He was good at drawing, and he was seven years my senior and very "cool," as far as I could tell.  He seemed fearless when it came to troublemaking, which was the opposite of me.  He got detentions and failing grades in school ("He's too smart, he's not challenged enough, he just doesn't apply himself," our mother explained), while I got mostly A's and was terrified of doing anything that might lead to getting in trouble.  I relished any attention he paid to me.  When he let me have a picture he'd drawn, I kept it on the wall of my bedroom or -- when I was old enough for school -- as the decoration on my Trapper Keeper so that I could tell people, "My brother drew that."

Dante is a scary person.  I knew that as a child, and I know it better as an adult.  He is volatile and violent, and I have never seen evidence that he has a conscience or sees other people as people.  Maybe things are different with his friends, I've always thought.  Maybe it's just because he hated me and our parents.  Maybe that's why he didn't treat me like a person.  Maybe that's why he didn't bond with anyone in our family.  He was so charming and likable.  Most people really liked him.  Maybe I deserved the way he treated me.  Maybe I was asking for it and provoked him, like she said.  But I can't think those things for long because I strongly disagree with them.  I've always strongly disagreed with them.  No child deserved that.  Then a little voice that sounds something like my mother's whispers snidely, What makes you think you're soooo good?

We lived together in our parents' house until I moved out for college.  Mom took Dante to a child psychologist when I was fairly young.  I remember being enthralled with a particular toy in the waiting room -- one of those little tables with beaded wires on it that I always pretended were roller coasters -- and I think I must've been somewhere between five and seven, which means Dante was 12 or in his early teens.  I remember my mother afterward telling me with what I could only interpret as pride that the psychologist had said Dante had "the makings of a criminal mastermind."  I was jealous.  "Mastermind" was impressive.  I assumed she was proud because it was yet another way Dante was exceptional, just like with his art and his being too smart to do well in school.  In hindsight, I think she might have felt vindicated in the hard time she had had parenting Dante, and maybe that was what I was reading as pride in her face and voice.  She was proud of herself -- Dante's behavior wasn't her fault.  She only took Dante to that psychologist one or two more times before they abruptly stopped going.  When I asked to be allowed to see a psychologist myself a few years later, she told me it would be a waste of money because all they do is get you to blame your mother for everything.  Based on that conversation -- as well as what I think any psychologist worth his salt would have advised -- I think the child psychologist might have suggested my mother receive therapy herself, prompting my mother to stop seeking any professional help for Dante.  I think she had been looking less for help to improve things than for someone to diagnose Dante as a "bad seed" and absolve her of all blame.


One of the most irritating things Dante did was the stealing.  As a small child, I habitually saved up any birthday money that came my way so that I could buy my family "real" gifts for Christmas and birthdays.  One year I managed to save up $80 in my Hello Kitty lock box before I noticed the money was gone.  The same day Dante bragged to our mom and me about how easy it is to break through cheap little locks, but our mother refused to believe he had stolen the money.  "You lost it," she said. "Don't blame Dante for your carelessness."  When she found my electronic pocket translator in the back of his closet on one of her regular bedroom searches, she told me to take better care of my things.  I confronted Dante about it later that day and he laughed and admitted he had planned to pawn it like he had already pawned my stereo.  He even cut open a large piggy bank I had filled exclusively with pennies -- over 3000 pennies -- and emptied it.  My mother told me if I was going to complain so much about something so minor she'd give me the money herself to shut me up.

Dante started showing me pornography when I was about six and he was 13.  He invited me into his room in hushed tones and said he had something he wanted to show me.  He pulled out some magazines and said a friend had stolen them from his father and let him take them home.  I was thrilled at the idea of being part of Dante's inner circle.  I knew Playboy wasn't appropriate for a six-year-old, but I thought, He's so excited, and he has no one else to share this with, so he's letting me be his friend.  I sat down and looked at pictures of naked ladies with him, excited both by being treated as an equal and also the fact that I knew we were doing something we weren't supposed to be doing.  Partners in crime!  Then he pulled out Penthouse and showed me a picture of a woman fellatiating a man.  He asked me if I liked it.  I said no, it looked disgusting and I didn't understand why anyone would do that.  He said we didn't have to look at that one if I didn't like it.  We could go back to the Playboy -- he'd look at any porn his six-year-old sister wanted. 

He called me into his room a few more times in the following months, whenever he brought home new magazines.  It never went farther than looking at magazines.  He didn't try to touch me or make me do anything, and it didn't occur to me he might have any idea what he was doing was inappropriate.  He was seven years older than me, but I didn't see him as more emotionally mature than me or someone capable of controlling his impulses.  He has no one else to talk to, I'd thought because that was me.  I had no confidantes.  Then I got older and realized he had friends, including the friend who had given him the magazines in the first place.  Now, giving him the benefit of the doubt just means remembering that he didn't see me as a person, that maybe he just wanted to see what kind of reaction he could get from showing pornography to a small child.  I don't assume he was grooming me for something more.  If he had, in hindsight, I don't think anyone would have prevented him.

Dante did eventually get yelled at for having pornographic magazines.  One of our parents found them somehow -- I think it was Mom on one of her regular bedroom searches -- and Dad lost his mind while Mom insisted that boys will be boys.  It was a really big deal for the rest of the day, and I don't remember anyone mentioning it ever again.  After that, Dante stopped bothering to hide his porn and it took over the cabinet under the bathroom sink where normal people might keep cleaning supplies and extra toilet paper. 

I remember a family gathering at my dad's parents' house a couple years later.  My grandmother had made a lot of the fancy picnic dishes that I so hated as a child but probably would have loved as an adult, and my few paternal cousins were there with their parents.  I rarely saw my dad's family, despite them all living nearby and Eric being my closest family member in age at just a few weeks my junior.  Eric and Dante and I were wandering the large yard after lunch and, out of the sight of parents, Eric unexpectedly shoved me hard to the ground and walked away.  I don't know why.  He was always kind of a prick as far as I could tell.  Dante looked down at me lying on grass for a few seconds.  Then he stepped over my body wordlessly and followed Eric.  I cried.  I was heartbroken.  I knew Dante would sell me out for older kids any day of the week, but Eric wasn't even older.  Eric wasn't even cool.  Dante was high school aged, and he wouldn't even tell him, "Hey, that's my sister," or help me up.

I went crying to my mother and told her what had happened.  She told me that couldn't be what had happened.  Older brothers stick up for their sisters, she said.  She'd had an older brother in Uncle Charles, so she knew.  Once when she had come home from school and said that a car full of boys had threatened to rape her on the way home, Uncle Charles had been so enraged he had sworn he would find and kill them all.  He hadn't actually done anything, but he'd sure been mad!  That's what big brothers do, she said.  What I had described couldn't be accurate, so I needed to stop lying and trying to get Dante in trouble.

When I was about 12 and Dante was 19, I was sitting on the living room couch with my mother when a woman called our house.  She told my mother to keep Dante away from her 13-year-old daughter.  "Who is this?" my mother asked.  The woman introduced herself and said Dante and his friend Darrin had been calling her home and coming over and hanging around her daughter, who was far too young for them, and she wanted them to stop.  My mother replied, "I've never even heard of your daughter, and I'm sure my son hasn't either," and she promptly hung up.  She ignored the fact that the woman had known the name of Dante's best friend and also that we rarely knew where Dante was when he wasn't at home.  After all -- he was an adult.

Dante had some minor trouble with the law when he was around the same age.  I remember my mother saying that he and a friend had been arrested and hauled to jail in a paddy wagon for disturbing the peace.  It was another occasion when I thought I heard pride in her voice.  "A paddy wagon!" she kept saying.  "Can you believe it?"  She'd had to go to my grandparents' house to ask for enough money in cash to post his bail because it was late at night and the bank was closed and, if ATMs existed, we didn't know about them.  As an adult, I understand that "disturbing the peace" usually means the police come to your house and ask you to keep down the noise.  Dante had been at a friend's parents' house in a particularly affluent neighborhood.  Affluent white adults don't typically go to jail for disturbing the peace, nor do their adult children when the parents are standing right there as his friends' supposedly were, so I wonder now what he and his friend had actually done.  I don't think this was the only time he got arrested and my mother had to post bail, but I can't remember the other times.

Probably the most physically aggressive thing Dante did to me that I can remember was the time he wrapped his hands around my throat and choked me while simultaneously lifting me off the ground.  I was in my early teens, and he was in his early twenties.  I don't remember what prompted this action from him, but I do remember our parents were in another room and, when one of them called for us, I was able to regain my footing with minimal physical damage.  I don't remember if I "told on him."  I usually did, endlessly optimistic as I somehow was that someone would help me, and depending on which parent heard, either our dad would scream at Dante, our mom would scream at me, or both.  There was often a circle of screaming at our house.

There is a splintered area in the door of my childhood bedroom from the time Dante tried to knee or kick it in.  I had said something mocking to him, knowing full well it would piss him off the way he liked to piss me off, he had given chase, and I had only been safe because I was fast enough, my bedroom was close enough, and he couldn't pick the shitty locks on our interior doors with his fingernail like I could.

When I was in high school and he was in his twenties, Dante started stealing my yearbooks and keeping them with his stack of "Barely Legal" and other assorted pornographic magazines under the bathroom sink.  I went to my mother outraged and said, "Tell your son to stop stealing my yearbooks and keeping them with his porn!"  She acted shocked and told me I was never to use such a bad word as "porn" ever again, she said nothing to Dante, and Dante kept stealing my yearbooks, even after I took them back and told him to stop doing that.  They are probably under that same bathroom sink right now.

"I Need My Mother"

When I was in my early to mid-20s, sometime before my parents' divorce became final but after my mother had started calling me almost daily in unpredictable moods, my mother had a fight with her father.  My grandpa had a tendency toward rages and rudeness.  I never particularly liked him, but I wasn't allowed to say so.  Every time my mother complained about him during my childhood, if I dared to agree, she scolded, "That's my FATHER you're talking about!"

Anyway, at this point in our lives my mother had gone so far off the deep end that she criticized just about everyone to their faces.  It was one of the things that made my life at that point easier actually.  Instead of pitting relatives against each other, being sweet to some and treating others as scapegoats, she tore down everyone.  She kept no allies for herself.  I think the cocktail of prescription drugs she was on had something to do with her inability to effectively manipulate the way she once had when I was younger.  Now she just drove everyone away. 

When my mother lashed out at her father for something during this phase, he got mad back.  She was good at angering, and he was an easy man to anger.  Either as punishment or simply because he was tired of listen to her vitriol, my grandfather assigned a limit to how often my mother could call and visit his home, where her mother also lived.  Previously, my mother and grandmother had spent at least three days a week together for as long as I can remember: church on Sundays, a Walmart shopping trip followed by lunch on Wednesdays, and grocery shopping on Fridays.  (Even when I wasn't in school, I was not invited to anything but church.  It was "Mother-Daughter day," my mother would say, and I was persona non grata.)  My mother stopped by on other days and called her mother most days, possibly everyday, but those were the three days they spent together with scheduled regularity.  They were close to a point that might be considered pathological.

My mother called me in tears.  She said her father was limiting her contact with her own mother to two days per week.  TWO DAYS PER WEEK!  She hadn't had such little contact with her mother at any point in her life.  "He's trying to keep me from my mother!" she sobbed.  "She's MY MOTHER!  I NEED MY MOTHER!" 

I have a gallows humor that made me want to laugh at our mutually stupid situation.  My aging, emotionally unstable mother who hadn't been a comfort to me in several years and hadn't been reliable at any point in my childhood was calling me to comfort her through the trauma of only getting access to her own mother twice per week.  The darkest parts of me wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it.  But I didn't.  I wasn't quite that cold.  I couldn't conjure up the pity she wanted from me -- I didn't even try -- but I could imagine the kind of pain she might be feeling.  She's like a child in a lot of ways.  I had been a child like that once.  All I could think though was, You don't get two.  You already got one mother.  Just because she isn't enough doesn't mean you get me too.  I felt sad for both of us.

The First Time I Wrote Publicly About My Parents -- And My Mother's Reaction

The first time I wrote publicly and honestly about my parents was my senior year of high school.  I had to write a paper for English class -- one of many -- and I don't remember the theme of the paper, but it included a memory from my childhood.  My parents were screaming at each other in the living room.  I was maybe six years old and watching them from my hiding spot crouched behind the recliner at the edge of the room.  My mother wanted to leave the house and was trying to take her purse, and my dad had wrapped the shoulder straps around her forearm and was yanking on them, trying to prevent her from leaving.  When she finally got the purse off, there were red strap marks on her arm. 

I rarely witnessed physical altercations between my parents, so that one had stuck with me, comparatively benign as it was.  I don't remember what my parents had been fighting about, but the screaming matches were an almost daily occurrence.  My six-year-old self had crept back to my room at the end of the long hallway and scribbled a note to Dante, who must've been 13 at the time.  It read, "Mommy and Daddy are fighting.  I could really use a friend right now," and I folded it up and pushed it under his bedroom door, which was adjacent to my own.  A minute later his door opened and Dante stood in my open doorway holding the note.  "I could really use a friend right now," he mocked in a high-pitched voice, and then he threw the note into my room, laughed, and walked away.  Typical Dante.

Sharing this memory in an English paper was kind of a big deal for me.  We did peer editing, so several of my classmates had to read it before even the teacher did, and as far as I can remember, I had never told any of them about my parents' fights.  Up to that point, I usually tried to make my papers funny rather than serious.  I mean, look at Dante's reaction when I tried to write something sincere -- can you blame me?  The surprising outcome was how many of my classmates came up to me at the end of class and said something along the lines of, "I thought it was just me."  I hadn't expected to strike a chord with people who I thought had happy, loving homes.  That's when I decided everything could be relatable if the retelling is honest and detailed enough.

I finished editing my paper and turned it in the next day with the rest of the class.  I would get an A, as I always did in high school, though I didn't know that at the time.  My mother took me out to dinner that night at Outback Steakhouse.  This was years after she'd given up cooking at home.  She was sullen and significantly more quiet than usual that night.  I knew she was mad about something, so after we sat down to dinner I tentatively asked, "Are you feeling okay?" and she erupted.  She informed me that she had found my paper and read it.  "Why?" I asked, and it came out that she had a previously unknown to me habit of searching my backpack every night after I went to bed.  I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was surprised I hadn't found out about that sooner.  I was also surprised at how upset she was.  I didn't think the paper painted her in a bad light at all.  It was about my dad being physically abusive, and she was the victim.  It seemed like a depiction that would delight her, though I admit I wasn't enough of a fool to say so out loud.  Apparently I hadn't understood the house rules as well as I'd tried.

My mother had told me since I was old enough to write, "Don't write down anything you wouldn't want published on the front page of the newspaper," and I had indeed taken that message to heart.  Since I was old enough to write, she had searched my bedroom for journals and stories and notes under the guise of "cleaning," in spite of the fact that nothing ever got clean, and she'd read them out loud to me in a mocking voice much like Dante did, so I knew to be guarded.  I knew to make sure I really wanted to say what I was about to say before I wrote it down.  I knew to say only what I wanted to publish.  The English paper was the first time I understood that her intended lesson wasn't actually, "Don't write down anything you wouldn't want published," but instead, "Don't write down anything I might not want published."  But it was too late for that now.  Now I knew how good it felt to tell the truth.

"Won't You Feel Guilty When Your Mother Dies?"

I didn't see a therapist for the first time until after I moved halfway across the country without telling my mother.  I was 28.  I hadn't talked to her in over a year at that point and had realized I never wanted to talk to her again.  My therapist asked, "Aren't you afraid you'll feel guilty if your mother dies before you can talk to her again?"

"I always assumed I would," I told her.  "I choose to stay away from her because I feel better with this distance between us and because I felt so terrible whenever I heard from her, but I always assumed it would be a trade off -- feel worse later so that I can feel okay now.  Then I had a dream that my mother died, and all I felt was relief.  I was just so relieved that it was all over and she couldn't hurt anyone anymore."

My therapist replied, "I don't think you should talk to your mother again."

The moral of the story is this:  If you cut a family member from your life, people will question you.  Your therapist and your family and even your friends might question you.  It's a valid question and one worth thinking about, in my opinion.  After all, lots of interpersonal problems can be remedied with compassionate communication, and most people won't know the full extent of your situation.  But just because someone asks, "Don't you think you should give things another try with your mom?" doesn't mean you can't answer No.  It doesn't even mean other people won't ultimately agree with you.  Only you can decide what's best for you.

My First Halloween Costume

My first Halloween costume I can remember -- quite possibly my first one at all since I've never heard stories or seen photographic evidence of my dressing up before the age of three -- was the negligee my mother wore on her wedding night.  It was sheer polyester chiffon in Pepto-Bismol pink, trimmed in cheap lace of the same hue, and it comprised all the dress-up clothes I owned as a child.  I cannot remember a time before it was in my possession.

I remember several preschool Halloweens for which I threw it on over my sweatpants and t-shirt and -- with the addition of some kind of accessory such as a toy wand -- claimed to be a fairy, a princess, or a fairy princess.  It didn't occur to me until I was much older that this was strange.  I am not remotely surprised that my hoarder mother would recycle her decade-old wedding night negligee by gifting it to a toddler, but it does seem a stretch that she took me out of the house dressed that way -- both for trick-or-treating and to preschool costume parades at our Methodist church.  I always wore clothes underneath, but it was still very clearly sexy -- albeit heinously ugly -- lingerie.  I also can't remember a time I didn't personally know it was from her wedding night.  She made no secret of what it was, and it was the only piece of sexy anything she'd ever bought -- she made that fact well known too.  Somehow as a child I thought that other people couldn't tell what it was.  As far as I could tell, it was simply the most elegant article of clothing in the house.

Wanting To Be Sick

When I was little, I used to fantasize about being hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.  I knew nothing about what went on in mental hospitals; no one in my family had been hospitalized for mental reasons at that point, and I was also very young.  I remember my mother talking about specific teenage girls from our church who were straight A students and on the dance team and preparing for college and how they would be hospitalized because of the stress of being so amazing at everything, and also anorexia.  I wanted to be like that.  I wanted to be so amazing that I had to be hospitalized for it.  I envisioned my mother and doctors and nurses stroking my forehead and telling me to rest, that I shouldn't work so hard.

Mental illness wasn't acknowledged in our house or in our extended family, in spite of my uncle's suicide and almost all my mother's siblings eventually being diagnosed with one thing or another.  The only illnesses that were valued and treated (and faked) were physical.  Stress counted as physical though.  Only the best, hardest working, most put upon martyrs felt stress, so my mother was in a fairly constant competition to be the most stressed out person she knew.  I think this is part of why I wanted to be hospitalized.  I wanted the attention, and I wanted someone to acknowledge that the stress I felt was real too.  I wanted a reaction that wasn't, "Why is that little bitch crying again?" or "Stop being so sensitive."

One of the best side effects of my mother going off the deep end was that she stopped responding positively to my ailments, including the ulcerative colitis I developed in college.  I learned that I had to care for myself and no one else would do it for me.  I could ask close friends for specific help, and they usually came through, and hired help is an option for almost everything if you have enough money, but I was responsible for making sure I had what I needed.  No one else.  No one would decide I was too sick or under too much stress and tell me to take a rest.  If I let myself hit rock bottom, no one was going to come to my rescue.  It is a little depressing to grow up wanting so much for someone to stroke your hair and take care of you and tell you not to stress yourself, and then to realize that will never happen, but it was an important lesson to learn, and it was a better situation than the one my mother had. 

My mother's parents took care of her until they died.  She lived within walking distance of their house up until they moved to the next town over in their 70s.  I remember watching her mother cook for her, and her father giving her money when she needed it, despite her income via my dad's disability payments being several times that of my grandparents.  She moved in with them after the divorce, when she refused to bathe or feed herself or find anywhere else to live.  She always had a human safety net.  Until she didn't.

Shortly after my grandparents died, my mother took a bunch of pills, called herself an ambulance, and ended up in the psych ward of the local hospital.  Based on what I've heard as an adult, I imagine the psych ward wasn't as soothing or nurturing as I'd fantasized as a child.  No friends or family came to her rescue that time, and they ultimately discharged her to a low-end assisted living home where she was required to see a psychiatrist.  He was the one who diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. 

I don't know where she is now or how/whether she takes care of herself.  I heard she left the assisted living home after awhile.  My dad said they wanted her to pay something to keep living there, but I don't know if she got evicted or if she left because she wanted to go.  She had tried to reach out to me via Facebook from that assisted living home to say my brother, my husband, and I were all the support system she had left in the world and she wanted me back in her life.  It had been some three years since I'd heard from her at that point.  I never replied.  After she left assisted living, she talked about suing my dad for more monthly spousal support and wanting to pick up the things she'd left at the house after the divorce, including some major appliances, but nothing ever came of it and then she disappeared again.