About My Past, Part I

I wanted to avoid writing about my background when I started this blog, partially because I didn't want to make excuses but also out of fear thinking my past would weigh me down, unnecessarily. Social pressure alone made me wish to evade the topic. People want to hear about happy childhoods or none.

Since then, I've learned avoiding my history is actually what's harmful. I'm writing this not to play the victim, or make excuses; I'm telling this story because denial is a prison. No matter how much I want to hide or forget my childhood, without a past, I can't navigate the present and have no material with which to build a future. Therefore, I'm looking back, like Lot's wife. Unless you can turn me into a pillar of salt, you have no right to judge.

 In perspective, my childhood wasn't horrid compared with other ordeals children get subjected to. It's not comparable to a war zone or a concentration camp. Many times, however, the weaker blow at a vulnerable point can do as much damage as a harder one elsewhere. After all, The Titanic sank with light hull damage, but the widespread internal effect was deadly.

People have trouble identifying with my early life because two weird, horrifying medical tragedies burdened my family. Together they made growing up in my parents' house like a David Lynch movie.

First, my mother had bipolar illness. Not so unusual, you think, but hers was a rare syndrome that acted a lot like energetic paranoid schizophrenia. Psychiatrists call this-maybe-it-is-maybe-it-isn't kind of illness NOS, or Not Otherwise Specified. To make this even more odd, my father apparently married her without realizing there was anything amiss, which says enough about his childhood.

And he suffered for it. Her insanity included paranoid delusions toward him and his family. She would do things like teach us a sacred dance to ward off Dad's evil. (I couldn't make that up.) Angels and saints visited her to give her advice and orders.

One night, her most reliable hallucination told her the world was ending. In a frenzy, she roused me and my siblings out of bed and herded us into the basement. (I wondered at the time how being down there was supposed to save us. Noah had an ark, my mother had a basement.)

She'd laugh and cry simultaneously, and would have shouting matches with people who weren't there. (I think she won.) Playing music, usually opera, at ear-splitting volume was not unusual for her during severe episodes; neither was her role-playing biblical characters. That experience was the most traumatic for her children. Later, after being medicated, she'd laughingly call her more outlandish companions pucas. From Irish folklore, that's a whimsical spirit. I'd sometimes see her look almost straight down next to me, and she mouth words, giggling. For those who were there to witness what pucas commanded her to do, however, there was nothing amusing about them.

If you could refer to Stephen King's book, Carrie, my mom was a more bizarre, more Catholic version of Carrie's mother, Margaret White. I immediately recognized that character, played by Piper Laurie, when I saw the 1976 movie, but never admitted it until now.

You never knew what was going to set Mom off, and once her temper was out, it would rage from one thing to another for hours. I lived in fear of her. I won't go into any detail about abuse, because my family would never forgive me. Like the rest of her behavior, it was mind-bending.

Sleep was difficult in the house, partly because my Dad would reliably arrive home from work drunk at 2 a.m., resulting in a loud, scary fight. None of this was crazy, any wife would do that. The chilling she'd shout to him, we're crazy. Not only would her children get no sleep, but she would be set for a horrible mood in the morning.

My father was really out of touch with his family. He and Mom fought so much, he avoided home at all costs. (On the other hand, he also made a lot of money doing it.)

Up until the age of nine, I wasn't informed that she was mentally ill. I thought it was normal and every kid lived under the same stress. This was one thing that put a wall up between me and my peers. All the relatives on her side of the family did a great job of acting like there was nothing wrong. I don't know if it was from a conspiracy to keep my Dad from realizing it, or what. The possibility of insanity was not even in his world, nor in mine. I kept trying to understand her and thought her over-the-top temper had some reason behind it.

After a huge family blow-up over one dark Christmas, she ended up in the hospital “for rest.” So, did Dad, in fact. He came home in two weeks, she stayed in for months. He was simply exhausted and had begun to believe what she told him. Psychotics can bend your mind. Doctors hit him over the head with the fact that there was something seriously wrong with her.

Then, he broke the news to me. It was presented as, “You must now be strong and brave, and help your mother.” He lacked any empathy for what his children had been through. He made sure to tell me that, as the oldest, he was entrusting me with a great responsibility to help my mother and siblings. Meanwhile, he continued to be absent, coming home drunk at 2 a.m. after working so hard. That might be attributed the fact that he was a Madman, and as you could see from the show, they did business like that.

I have mixed feelings about my dad. He never divorced my mom; No, he saw love as duty first. He made a lot of money, and I hate to imagine how much worse things might have been if we were in poverty. To explain my Dad's ignorance, or put it into context, he was medically the most inept person imaginable. I once saw him turn athlete's foot into a life-threatening illness. He grew up instilled with certain beliefs: 1) God was supposed to be responsible for health, not you; 2) The almighty would forgive ignorance if you prayed and went to Mass enough; 3) There was no mental illness that couldn't be diagnosed as sin and treated by priests, and 4) psychiatry was a scam. Not that these were actual teachings of the Catholic Church, mind you, but that was the way he practiced them.

If there was one thing he admired in Mom, it was her devout faith. I imagine it stunned him to have to face the fact that she was mentally ill, but it got to where he couldn't deny it anymore.

From the time I was nine until I was fifteen, she went into the psychiatric wards for three to six months at a time. Upon discharge, she went off her medications, and within two months was back in the ward for another stint. Rinse and repeat many times and that was my late childhood and early teen years. Things reached a peak when, with my sister's friends in the house, she fired a shotgun into the kitchen floor. To be fair, she was trying unload it, and shooting it was accidental, but it should have never been out and loaded to begin with. She was hospitalized for a longer time after that.

They finally put her on Prolixin, a medication injected every two weeks rather than taken by mouth daily. With that, her insanity took a long hiatus; and everyone in the family, but her, spent months taking sighs of relief. Her psychosis remained under control close to 25 years, before she was allowed to relapse with tragic results.

While she was medicated, I could see she how bored and disappointed she was with the real world. She had been hallucinating since grade school. I could imagine how it must have been: having saints and angels visit and give you assignments; being a player in a great battle of good vs. evil; having all kinds of beautiful, talking pucas helping you. Then you take some medicine, and it's all gone.

She had always thought the hallucinations to be her connection with God. When they were gone, it baffled and saddened her. I think it also made her lonely.

When she was medicated and purportedly well, she either dismissed her behavior as funny, refused to talk about it, or didn't remember. The last is pretty common with mania. The memory stops working. Taken together with what she did otherwise, however, it made me an angry child.

In hindsight, I also had some impulse control issues due to Attention Deficit Disorder, diagnosed in adulthood. I overheard my mother talking to relatives about it. She didn't believe in getting it treated, didn't like medicating children, and thought it was a normal phase I'd get over. She reassured me. I didn't think about it again until decades later when my diagnosis came through. With that action, she determined I would never thrive academically nor socially. Worse, I did things throughout childhood that made me feel horrible about myself. I went into adolescence with a lot of rage and crushing guilt.

As a Catholic, I was commanded to honor my parents. I think I fulfilled the letter of that, even if I'm now an atheist. It was fair to do so. My mother was mentally ill and wasn't responsible for her actions, but that's a judgment a child can't make. I waited for her to ask me questions about what I experienced, but always when it got uncomfortable for her, she would chuckle― in surprise, I think― and the conversation stopped. I waited patiently for the discussion that never came. At the end, her health was so poor, and she was insane again, so I wasn't going to press her on it. I never had a reconciliation with her.

I know what they say about forgiving and forgetting. The latter is impossible: I wish I could forget. The former misses the point. I did forgive my mother, but it did nothing for the pain I felt, nor for the damage that was done to what I feel and what I can feel. Only she could have done something about those when she was medicated and purportedly well, but she didn't. She never faced up to the responsibility of what she did.

My mother did love me, about that I have no doubt, but that just made it even worse. When you've experienced love going that wrong in your most intimate childhood relationship, it shatters your reverence for love and leaves you suspicious, cynical, and numb. You feel corrupt and soiled. From there, it's very difficult to get anywhere good in just a lifetime.

It was a blow at a vulnerable point, and I was taking water. My brothers and sisters were a little better off. They were younger and didn't experience so much time alone with her.

But another chronic illness would rock my family even worse. This one suffered by one of my siblings, and even stranger and rarer than my mother's.