Don't Call Me Mother (41 page)

For the next hour I wandered the halls, circling around the nurse’s station, going down the elevator and coming back up, curious about what the psychiatrist would say. To my knowledge, no mental health professional had ever assessed my mother. A few years earlier she had told me that a doctor suggested she see a psychiatrist. She’d laughed uproariously in her trademark cackle. “I don’t need a psychiatrist. Why, they’re all crazier than anyone, aren’t they, Linda?” It was a typical dig, her asking me, a psychotherapist, to agree with her outrageous statement.

Eventually, I spotted Dr. Hart talking on the phone. He waved and told me to wait for him in the next wing. Ever vigilant, Mother yelled from down the hall, “Don’t you dare talk to him. Go away. You’re nosy and rude!”

I ran off to our secret rendezvous. It was farcical, Mother chasing the doctor around the halls, trying to keep him away from me; Dr. Hart and I surreptitiously making arrangements to talk. I hiked to the next wing, and he joined me a few minutes later. We sat in comfortable chairs that faced each other in a room dimly lit by sunlight filtering through Venetian blinds. He gave me a conspiratorial grin and said, “I don’t think she’ll find us here.” He leaned on his elbows, his eyes the most striking thing about him as he asked me about our history.

I told him the whole story.

“My mother was abandoned as a baby when her mother left her to work in Des Moines, then Chicago. I don’t know much about her early life, but I was told that she wandered from place to place, living with her great-grandmother Josephine, for whom she’s named, and with an aunt on her father’s side. When Mother was thirteen, my grandmother finally brought her to Chicago, where she felt unhappy and out of place. They had a violent, screaming relationship. Mother ran away to get married when she was seventeen, but her mother insisted the marriage be annulled.” Dr. Hart listened silently, occasionally jotting something down in his notebook.

“I don’t know anything about her young adult years, but she married my father when she was twenty-nine and soon had me. They divorced when I was one. I was with her for only four years. For a brief period we lived with Gram in Wichita, but mother decided to go back to Chicago and we never lived together again. She would visit me occasionally when I was little, but once I got older and started coming to Chicago, she didn’t want anyone to know she had a child or grandchildren. She won’t let anyone she knows meet me even now. I don’t know what we’ll do when she leaves the hospital; she’s told me nothing about her arrangements. There’s some attorney she’s having an imaginary love affair with who’s supposed to take care of things.”

The doctor watched me attentively, absorbing it all. I went on.

“Gram, her mother, who raised me from the time I was six, sat in a hole in the couch for years, crying, raging, and ranting. She hated my father and tried to live her life through me. Mother and Gram were a lot alike, negative and critical, staying up half the night, ranting and raving for hours when they got mad.” As I talked I realized how much Gram and Mother approached the world, and me, in similar ways.

When I had finished pouring out the story, he was silent for a very long moment. “Your life must have been very difficult,” he said, his eyes reflecting his compassion. Laying out my entire life in one sitting to a stranger had a profound affect on me. I felt like crying with joy and relief. He had seen with his own eyes how my mother acted; he understood how it had shaped my whole life. I bowed my head and thanked him. Then Dr. Hart delivered his assessment.

“My diagnosis is bipolar disorder, but manic-depression better describes the mood swings, the ups and downs. I’d say your mother is hypomanic.” He went on to say that there was underlying depression, but that Mother was more obviously manic in her behaviors. I asked him about Gram, her moodiness, her bouts of crying, the hate letters. “She was more melancholic, more on the depressed part of the spectrum, but it all falls under the same diagnosis.”

I stared at him in silence, all the puzzle pieces fitting into place. The monster that had haunted my family for generations finally had a name. I had given both Gram and Mother a dozen different diagnoses over the years, but this one suddenly made perfect sense. As I sat there absorbing Dr. Hart’s words, it dawned on me that medication existed for this illness. I asked if treatment could have helped them.

“Medication could have helped, but the problem is making the diagnosis. These kinds of people stay away from psychiatrists. Most of them don’t like to take their medication anyway, especially the manic ones—they like their highs. Nevertheless, I plan to recommend it for your mother.”

I sat with him for a while longer, trying to comprehend the full meaning of what he’d told me. Naming Gram’s and Mother’s disease swept the scattered ashes of my childhood into orderly boxes. There could have been solutions, if anyone had named it before. There might have been a better outcome… “if only,” I thought. I saw Gram and Mother through a new lens now—they were mentally ill, unable to control and come to terms with their own pain, urges, wishes, dreams, and ultimately their very lives. The sorrow of it all weighed heavily on me. I also saw my own struggles anew—my dark nights of the soul and the ups and downs of mood. While not as striking as theirs, they were still a significant influence on my life and my children’s lives. This illness has lived in our chemistry, an unwelcome but real guest in our family. All this was so complex. I knew from my studies that the disease includes an alive, creative, and exciting element. What a paradox.

Mother no longer needed to be hospitalized, but the psychiatrist agreed she wasn’t ready or able to live on her own. When I explained that she wouldn’t let me make any arrangements for her, he said that he might be able to help.

It was a strange day when my mother officially became a psychiatric patient. An entourage of attendants and I led her from her room in oncology to the geriatric psychiatry ward. She had been told that she would be more comfortable there. She said she loved the “nice, kind, doctor.” I suspected it was because on some level she knew she needed the kind of help he could provide. One person in the little parade was a jive-talking orderly who obviously enjoyed kidding around. He noticed the family resemblance and asked if the patient was my mother. I said she was, watching mother’s reaction carefully, prepared for her scream of denial. This time she said nothing.

I settled her into her new room. The nurse’s station was in the middle of the ward, with patients’ rooms splayed out around it like the spokes of a wheel. I saw families gathered around some of the patients, and wondered about their histories. How had their lives been affected by mental illness?

Mother became disturbed when a nurse wanted to take her purse. She didn’t understand why, and clutched it to her chest. The nurses, used to handling irrational patients, finally convinced her to let it go, but Mother was too nervous and disoriented to sit and talk with me as I prepared to say good-bye to her. I had been in Chicago for a week and needed to go home. I stood a few inches away from her, wondering what to say, aware that we had so little time left. Never one for emotional good-byes, Mother turned her back to me. I tried to hug her, but she just kept murmuring, “Why did they take my purse?”

I kissed her on the cheek and walked away, my mind reeling with the astonishing idea: “Mother is in a psychiatric unit. She really is mentally ill.”

After so many years of her bizarre behavior, I felt great relief with this new diagnosis. At last she was in a place where she might feel understood and accepted. It was easier now for me to feel compassion for her, to comprehend more deeply how difficult it must have been to be so alone with her demons. I didn’t know my mother, not really. I had no inner knowledge of her as a person, and perhaps she didn’t know herself either. She was lost, and always had been. Those were my thoughts as I walked away from the hospital, not knowing if I’d ever see my mother again in this world.

Mother was happy in the psychiatric unit and often told me on the phone how much she liked the “lovely” doctor, but after two weeks she was scheduled to be released. In the meantime, I’d had several conversations with the attorney she had recently hired. This new young and handsome attorney was shocked to find out that Josephine had a daughter or any living family. He had said during our first phone call that he would discuss nursing homes with her. I warned him of her bad temper and stubborn will, of her irrationality and furious demands. At first he wasn’t concerned, but after a week he was calling me for advice nearly every day. When he suggested a well-appointed nursing home as the next step, Mother would have none of it. It almost amused me to watch another person go through the same kind of hell as I had with her. The lawyer was persistent, however, and finally—with the help of the nursing home director, an angel named Margie—Mother moved in.

Margie became a maternal figure. Mother would curl up on the couch in her office, talking nonstop. Margie had been a nurse for many years and understood old people, the mentally ill, the dying. Mother seemed to sense this woman’s compassion and deep soul acceptance of her. Perhaps she had never felt such an unconditional presence before in her life.

At the nursing home, Mother’s queenly demeanor was indulged. She was allowed extra favors and given sterling attention. When she acted out by running off to have dinner at her favorite restaurant across town, she was brought back with gentleness. Mother loved it when Margie hugged her and tucked her into bed like a little child. During this period, Margie tried to help Mother face her impending death, but Mother always laughed her off.

As for our relationship, Mother still treated me like cast off rags. Once, I recorded a phone conversation with her, just to preserve the sound of her voice. At times it was her usual throaty monologue, but when I said something she didn’t like, she responded with a scathing attack in a high-pitched rant. To this day, I can’t bring myself to listen to that tape.

During that summer I kept a journal entitled “Requiem for a Ghost Mother,” chronicling events from the day she was moved to the hospital’s psychiatric unit.

A deep purple sorrow rides within me. I ride it, like th e horse of death. I am chained to it as we careen through this dark time, galloping as if the devil is chasing us. Sometimes it feels that through my mother—and before that, my grandmother—the devil has been chasing me. Some people romanticize mental illness. For me, there is nothing interesting or fascinating about it. It is pure pain, the kind of thin, trilling pain you feel when the dentist drills with no Novocain. The pure pain when you slice your finger or have one of those late labor contractions. It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t get pretty and light. It is what it is. Pain is.

Who am I? Who are we? What is it about, this trip though the vale of earth shot through with flashes of light? I have tried to understand it all by becoming a therapist. I thought there was a way out. This kind of ending with my mother makes me feel as if I’m strapped in a jet plane. There is great, frightening turbulence, and I can’t get off. I have to stay here until the turbulence stops or we land. No escape.

She is lost, the woman inside the illness. She is lost, the mother I always looked for when she came to visit. I’d wait and watch for the human to come out of the demanding, whiny child in a woman’s body. I’d wait for her, holding my breath. She always showed up, for a few minutes—when she played Liebestraum on the piano. When she asked me to scratch her back.

I hadn’t predicted that I would experience such pain about my mother’s death. I thought I would escape.