Sister from another mother

I heard from Jessie Sholl the other day. Her memoir, DIRTY SECRET: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding, is coming out in December, and I am hanging on this book. The title itself is revelatory, makes me think of my own mother -- why is our mothers' problem our secret? Why does it hang over our heads? It's vicarious shame, like vicarious embarrassment, the agony you feel when you're watching someone make an ass of themselves in public (which of course the Germans have a name for: fremdschämen). It's empathy, but it's too much empathy. It involves entering the mental realm of the disordered in order to understand them. I've likened interacting with my mother and her husband to jumping into a double dutch; you just try to anticipate how they're going to turn the ropes, try to stay inside the eye of their cyclone of fucking lunacy. 

I was watching Hoarders on A&E the other day, thinking suddenly, I wouldn't want my child to live like this. I thought about all the heartbroken parents who genuinely love their kids, but whose kids are suffering from addiction and mental illness to the point where they have to be given up for gone. I thought about how far I would go for my kid, how I'd fly anywhere on the map for them, and how I would march in there (wherever there was) and physically drag them to rehab, or a hospital, or out of the filth they've been living in, and get them cleaned up and safe. So why won't I do that for my mom? Because I tried once and failed? I must not have tried very hard. Shouldn't I try again? I wouldn't give up on her if she was my kid.

I KNOW, I KNOW. My mother is not my kid. I KNOW. She is childlike in her helplessness, in her stubbornness, in her lack of practical sense. In the way she lies about things poorly, stupidly, like children do, with pie all over their fingers and face, insisting that they didn't eat the pie. She is a fucking eight-year-old brat at times. But she's not legally a child. If I had a kid who lived like this, I could appeal to the authorities and courts, I could send that child to a disciplinary school, I could have that child kidnapped, like my friend A.'s parents did to him when he was fourteen, had him woken up in his bed in Brooklyn by two men who threw a bag over his head and tied him up, then threw him in a van and took him to the airport, where he was sent to boot camp in the desert for three months. If my mother were my child, this would be legal.

But she is neither a child, nor is she mine. She is her own adult. She is legally allowed to live however she wants, and though I don't see how that could be possible, the authorities have told me so. Animal Welfare, Building Department, social services for the elderly -- they say there's nothing they can do. Even the guy I wanted to hire to clean the place up told me he couldn't and wouldn't do it. "This is how they choose to live," he told me. "They're not unhappy about it. You're unhappy about it."

I didn't realize, until I had this stray thought, that I still thought she was mine, that I ever thought she was mine, but of course I always have. Even when I was avoiding her, I knew I could never leave her. The best I could do was stuff her in the attic like Rochester's wife. Now it seems she's escaped.

The strange thing is, she ran away from me. And all this time I thought I was the abandoner. 

The Lexapro Diaries

I'm taking medication because my mother won't. 

Last year around this time, I was dragging my mother to the doctor, hoping to get her medicated again. After a few months off her meds for Multiple Sclerosis, a disease she's managed for the past twenty years, she was wobbling and reeling enough for her to accept my help, after my ten-year near-absence from her life. She'd stopped paying for her health insurance, as she was facing bankruptcy and foreclosure; she, her fifth husband, and their twenty three cats, stood to go homeless.

The next six months were a book nobody wants to read ("Too dark." -- Major Publisher). They were an over, over long episode of Hoaders, where the crazy old person is still living in feces at the end, and the (oxymoronic) adult child combusts with sadness and rage until they give up. In the end, I got her back on her MS meds. I never got her back on Haldol.

Oh, the halycion days of Haldol! Back when I was in high school, after the group home and before I left to live with Sebastian, my mother was on an "anti-anxiety" drug called Haldol. She'd got it from a shrink she was seeing, someone she saw on Tuesday evenings, while I babysat in her Park Slope apartment. Haldol was one of the things that helped her finally leave her psychotic fourth husband (and I don't use psychotic as an insult, just a descriptor, so you understand what he was going through); it was one of the reasons I was able to come back and live with her again. It was how she was able to sit, night after night, placidly knitting in front of the TV after her toddler was put to bed, instead of pacing, biting her lips ragged, making calls. Haldol saved us both.

One day, Sebastian was over at her/our place, and he cornered me in a bedroom. Who's on Haldol?, he wanted to know.

My mom, I said. It's for anti-anxiety.

No it's not. It's for schizophrenics. That's the shit they give you when you take too much acid. That's some hardcore shit.

Okay, I said, shrugging it off. Well, she takes it for anxiety.

Years later, at my own shrink's behest, I look up "Haldol" online. It's for schizophrenics. What does that tell you?, she asks.

That she needs to take it. That she was better off when she was taking it. That I don't know when she stopped taking it, but it's pretty clear that she should probably start again. 

Right. And: that your mother is schizophrenic.

The last six months have been about swallowing that bitter pill, and more recently, taking my own. I haven't taken an anti-depressant in thirteen years, unless you count marijuana, in which case I have taken anti-depressants pretty much my whole life since I was fifteen. But it was time to start again. This summer was tough, dealing with last summer's trauma; I completely fell apart during acupuncture for my arms, and was diagnosed with PTSD. Is that why I sat up bolt upright at 4 a.m. every night for thirty-eight days during the Gulf oil catastrophe? At the time, I thought that was the rational thing to do.

So, meds; the shame that comes from taking meds; the conversations with friends you didn't know were on them too; the thanking god for being able to treat your first-world problems with drugs while the people who suffer the most don't get them (see, it only works up to a point; I'm still kind of watching, as David Foster Wallace called it, "The Suffering Channel.").

It is sane to be sad in this case, as in most cases in life. I think the appropriate response to most of life is sadness, horror, grief, and fear -- a lot of fear. But it's also sane not to want to suffer. I wish my mother would take steps to alleviate her own suffering, but she won't. So I will.

My mother looks like Sarah Palin

Or, my mother used to look like Sarah Palin, back when my mother was forty and thin. She had the cheekbones, the wide, slightly open-mouthed smile, the big eyes behind the big glasses, and especially the hairdo, the one she'd been wearing since the early seventies, after she cut her long, flat-ironed Crystal Gayle hair; a betrayal, somehow, at which I'd cried and cried. The hair then became a Jiffy Pop bouffant in the back, and two sculpted swoops in the front, framing her gorgeous face, and it stayed that way until the mid nineties, when she gave up. It took hours; she had to shower the night before and spend half an hour with her curlers and pins and setting spray to put it in place. Then she slept with this acrid wire cage on her head; then it was another half hour in the morning blow-drying it, unrolling it, fluffing it, spraying it with Aqua Net, always with the Merit 100 burning on the edge of the sink, threatening to incinerate the apartment. Sometimes women on the street would stop and ask her where she got her hair done, and she would brighten -- "I do it myself!" The color and everything. She had naturally dark auburn hair which she brightened with dye, sitting in front of her heat lamp with her cigarette, her hair slathered into a purplish, sideburned mohawk. The women who asked always had lipstick outside the borders of their lips.

My mother looks less like Sarah Palin these days, though she agrees with her one hundred percent. I get into my mother's car, on the way to take her to the neurologist, and her radio is tuned to right-wing talk. The host is talking about "Obama," and his eyes are rolling so hard it almost gets gutteral for a second, "Obghama." He's making fun of the "way...Obama...talks sometimes...," which, truly, can be ponderous, but oh my god are you fucking kidding me? After that moron Bush, who couldn't spit out two words without mangling them and draining them of meaning, you're complaining about how Obama talks? This is the reality in my mother's car: Left is right, up is down, good is bad, and we have always been at war with Oceania.

At the neurologist, the doctor has her say the date, the year, count backwards from 30, spell her last name, identify the president, and tell her something that's going on in the country right now. "Well," says my mother, confused by this last one, "Obama's ruining the country."

The doctor happens to agree. They both look sideways at me like they know I'm one of them. Enough said; my mother is lucid, if not sane. 

Later, she tries to drive the wrong way down a one-way street, gets lost driving in the town she's been living in for eighteen years. She hasn't cut her toenails in months; I saw them in the doctor's office, they're gray and yellow and fungal. She has twenty-four cats and she doesn't always remember all their names. But Obama's ruining the country.

I really detest Sarah Palin. I hate her willful, blithe ignorance; I hate her arrogance; I hate her insistence that you don't have to be good at anything, or know anything, in order to be politically influential. You just have to keep that wide, open mouthed smile going and your hair plastered in place.