I'm worried again tonight, the old worry that lifted for a few recent months and returned this week. I need to talk, dear Therapeutic Interweb Audience, so here is something I wrote six years ago. I've used some pseudonyms, of course.
On Saturday night, my thirteen-year old niece sat at
her grandparents' kitchen table, embroidering a kitten on a pillowcase.
Michelle worked surrounded by five Scrabble players: her Grandpa Phil and Grandma Ruth, her mother and father,
and me.
Michelle giggled at Grandpa Phil growling, “No, I
will not show you the score!” while he glared at us from behind his thick
black-framed glasses. She asked,
“Mom, help me thread this needle.”
Grandma Ruth introduced her to the wonders of a bent wire and pressed
foil contraption that pulled the embroidery floss through the needle’s
eye. She smiled as her father
sneaked photos with my cell phone.
She ate chocolate cake and quietly hummed “My Girl” and “I Can’t Give
You Anything but Love” under her breath.
I think she was happy.
It was a happy scene. I heard my brother Rob say later, “That was the most fun
I’ve had in a long time.” I am
convinced in many ways we were happy.
Perhaps partly manufactured for Michelle’s benefit, perhaps fleeting,
but it remains a kind of happiness, a hard happiness, long overdue, perhaps not
earned, but as deserved as any. I
did laugh that night, even though every breath felt bruised.
All is not as it may seem here. Michelle’s abrasive Grandpa Phil and
gentle Grandma Ruth are actually her great-aunt and great-uncle. I suspect the difference between the
loving names my niece calls Ruth and Phil and their precise relationship means
little to her. Ruth and Phil
raised my brother and me after our parents died in a plane crash in 1969. I have little memory of my
parents. My brother was nine years
old.
All here is not as it may seem. Michelle’s parents
sat at the same table that night, but they are divorced, necessarily. Michelle's father, my brother, wandered
out of the realm of reality shortly after her birth. His law partners, his wife, and the government all conspired
to kill him. They, and other
unknown agents, bugged his car, pumped noxious gases into his office, sent him
messages through the radio and the television. Naturally, he lost his job, then scores of others, was
disbarred, divorced.
I remember the first time I saw Rob after what we've
come to call “his break.” He had
moved back in with Ruth and Phil and would spend long hours lying in the dark
in the back bedroom. He had dyed
his normally sandy brown hair a dull shade of black. He wanted urgently to talk to me alone. As we pulled out of the driveway, Aunt
Ruth watched us from the picture window, her arms crossed, her face set with
concern. It was an overcast day, spitting cold rain. Rob drove a long way into Kansas, talking little, evading my
questions. He pulled the car off
the road in a field. The tires
bumped over ruts.
“Let’s get out of the car,
Cindy, and talk.”
“No, Rob. I
don’t want to get out of the car.”
“C’mon, Cindy.”
He was still smiling at that
point. I was near tears,
frightened. I gripped the leather
handle on the side of the car door.
I understood that Rob did not want to talk in the car because he thought
it was bugged. When we were children,
he had threatened me, even hit me, like a big brother will do to his little
sister. We were not children now
and my fear was not a child’s fear.
Saturday night Rob's ex-wife stayed to play a game of
Scrabble with us before taking Michelle home. When she arrived to pick up Michelle, Aunt Ruth invited her
carefully: “Would you like to join
us for a game?” My tall brother
stood awkwardly off to the side, looking at the floor with a small smile on his
face. Patient and wise, Michelle’s
mother barely hesitated before saying, “yes.” She has remarried an understanding man. Despite undependable to non-existent
child support, countless disappointments, scary and confusing episodes when Rob
made the girls cry, she continues to encourage her daughters’ relationship with
their father.
My brother sat at the table, shaggy haired, but
clean. A week ago he was arrested
on outstanding warrants. He was
able to concentrate on the Scrabble board, but muttered occasionally to himself
under his breath: “Okay. . . control. It’s okay. Good character . . . good relations . . . Ha ha! No problem.” Rob’s conversational labyrinths no longer distress us. When he muses to me about the
connections he sees between his on-line alias, the financier Warren Buffet, our
father’s old jewelry business, and the name of the street where our cousin
lives, I listen carefully, make a few neutral comments, but don’t contradict or
engage.
I know he is brilliant. I can’t help nodding when he says, “Cindy! I’ve been working on a new computer
program. I’ve graphed nobility of
action, honor, and righteousness against the y-axis of the involuntary human
processes of the lower gastro-intestinal track, you see?” He holds a paper napkin scribbled with
pencil, wrinkled with effort. His
huge hands are thick-fingered and dry-skinned, nails bit to the quick. I appreciate the brightness of his
metaphor. I mourn the ashes of his
potential.
Years before his break, when Rob
came back home at Thanksgiving from his first few weeks of college, he was dynamic
and huge, shiny with excitement about this different, unabashedly intellectual
life he had plunged into.
“Cindy!” he bellowed, “listen to
this!” And he posed, one foot
forward, knees bent at the ready, one grand hand held out towards me. It was the pose of a hill-striding
Romantic poet, the stance of a Greco-Roman wrestler.
“None of them knew the color of the
sky,” he intoned dramatically. He
was so excited, so exciting. I
giggled. It is the first line of
Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” an account of lifeboat survivors after a
shipwreck. Rob would go on to earn
two degrees in engineering, marry a beautiful and intelligent woman, become a
lawyer, have two daughters.
Now he lives in sad little motels, pays cash for
everything, works construction gigs for a couple of weeks until his lack of
focus, temper, paranoia and baseless prejudices get the better of him. He frightens the secretaries. He won’t take medication and he cannot
be forced into treatment as long as he is not a threat to himself or
others. Acknowledging his illness
is anathema to him. He calls the
poverty, near-homelessness and barely managed chaos that mark his life now
simply “a reversal of fortune.”
My brother does love his children dearly. He just can’t take care of them. Through half bitter, half hopeful
laughter, Aunt Ruth and I say of the girls, “Hey, great and happy people rise
from adversity.” His oldest daughter is an A-student, a college
sophomore living in a sorority house, on her way to medical school. We say with conviction, “She’ll be
fine,” to comfort ourselves.
Earlier that day, I had watched Michelle, my
brother’s younger daughter, play the character of Fiona in a local theater’s
adaptation of Lois Lowry’s young adult novel The Giver. She
possesses a natural presence on stage, with none of the overly earnest Annie-style emoting I’ve come to expect from
non-professional child actors. Her
father is no longer allowed at her performances. Not since the night of A Christmas Carol when he began talking back to characters on the
stage and yelled with incomprehensible anger at Michelle in the lobby after the
show.
“You just don’t know what to do,” his ex-wife
confided to me. “It’s scary. You feel so sorry for him; you know he
can’t help it. But it is
frightening. Michelle was so
embarrassed.”
Before my sister-in-law left Saturday night, I overheard
Rob thank her for coming, then say, “Miss you.”
There is no loneliness like his.
A therapist recently told me that current medical
therapies can make miraculously rapid improvements for those inhabiting the
murky spectrum between bipolar disorders and schizophrenia. Miraculous in the sense of a matter of
weeks. I don’t dare to entertain
this kind of hope. I cannot afford
the luxury of believing my old brother could come back. My brother is here now. We must take him as he is now, flawed,
transformed, sometimes frightening, but here.
I sat at that table as a sister, a niece, a
sister-in-law, an aunt. I played
Scrabble and ate cake in a different world than the one I inhabit in my own
home where wife and mother are my primary identity. It felt strange and a little empty to have no child’s
pressing and immediate needs to distract me from the game. That night I would brush no one’s teeth
but my own. I would step meekly
into pajamas with no need to wrestle a kicking and thrashing wild lemur-child
into hers.
I had flown in that morning from Chicago to see
Michelle’s performance. My husband
Randy stayed home with our daughters, at his suggestion. “You’ll have more time for your work,” Randy had said,
arguing for me to travel alone.
“Less distractions.” It is
true - our girls are two and four.
Their constant needs – for a steady stream of calories, diversion,
reassurance – and their mercurial moods fill my hours when I am with them. If Nora were here, little Nora who
stands no higher than my hip, she would walk up to me as I played. She would put her head in my lap and
suck her thumb, bobbing a little and humming to herself. “Mommy,” she would sigh, with no other
purpose than to hear the word, to identify her feeling.
I sat at the table and the 600-mile distance I felt
from my new life, my good life, as a wife and mother drew out none of the
humor, none of the irony here. It
pulled only the poignancy from the scene.
I waited my turn in the game, left with a “Q” I couldn’t find a way to
use and I felt deeply sad.
Impatience and frustration rose in me. I wanted my girls.
I wanted them here on my lap.
I had to slow my mind, remind myself I am here for Michelle, for her
play, for the book interview I will do tomorrow. I will fly home tomorrow night.
The next day, when I would tell the story to Randy,
we would laugh at Uncle Phil, the surly and sore winner of the game. I would wonder yet again at Aunt Ruth’s
patience for her grumpy husband and her skill with defensive letter
strategy. Retelling the news of
Rob’s recent temp job, in front of a tax office, in costume, would reduce me to
helpless gales of somehow proud laughter.
I would marvel at the miracle of the few moments of peace shared by this
cobbled together family around the kitchen table. I would remember that even when I despaired on this trip,
lonely and desolate, driving through barren housing developments carved out of
Kansas prairie, missing my corner of Illinois and its tall canopy of oak trees,
I could console myself, knowing I was only a few hours away from my daughters
and my purpose filled life.
The oddness I felt Saturday night, this sadness I
feel about my brother, seems relatively new, cumbersome but necessary, a stiff
pair of boots at the advent of a long winter. For years I could recite the facts, “our parents died in a
plane crash . . . my brother was nine years old . . . we lost our brother and
sister in a car accident seven years later . . . ” but I did not allow my mind
to catch on the jagged edges of that break. I needed to float sadly above. Now I am a mother and I look at my brother with the
beginnings of an understanding of what he has lost and of the vastness of their
absences from his life.
Mother. Father. Brother. Sister.
Wife. Children. Self? Does he miss himself?
Does he remember his old self?
Does he miss the capable, confident person he used to be?
In The Giver,
a young boy in an unnamed totalitarian state is given the responsibility of
receiving the collective memories of his community. The day he takes on this role, he reads a list of
instructions for his new life: You
are no longer required to be polite.
You may ask anyone any question.
You may not ask for pain relief and you may not ask to be released.
Motherhood forced me to blaze through previously held
illusions about delicacy and caution.
I probe mouths with my fingers for buttons, pull out elastic waistbands
in public to confirm a suspicious whiff.
I bark “Slow down!” at vans and teenagers gunning down our side
street. So now, armed with no more
strength than I ever had, but with less fear, now, simply because I can, I dare
ask, I dare try to work through our hard family questions: What does it mean for my children to
have mental illness in their history and perhaps, their heredity? Where does a wife’s love go when her
husband involuntarily turns into a different person? How does a smart and talented thirteen-year old explain to
her friends that her father is not like other people? Would Rob’s illness never have emerged, remained egg-like,
small and unrealized inside him, if our parents were never lost? How do we distinguish difficult
personality from emotional or mental disorder? And most difficult of all: How can I help him?
How does tough love apply when we have so little leverage, when he
disappears for weeks at a time?
How can we deny him the cash, the rent, the bail he asks of us if our
rejection leaves him homeless, defenseless? What power do we have if his illness prevents him from ever
recognizing rock bottom?
Our father, a man who clung to self-sufficiency, left
for Rob’s inheritance a genetic and tenacious independence. I have heard the stories of our father
insisting to work his own way out of tough situations: wrenching the roof ladder inch by inch
along the gutter-line while he perched on the top rungs; defrosting the frozen
engine of his prop plane with a Mustang’s exhaust and a length of hose;
wrestling control of the same plane when the engine stalled high over Mexico
City; finally, fatally, misunderstanding the severity of the weather while
behind the controls one stormy March weekend. I see a similar myopia in Rob, who once recommended Don
Quixote to me without a trace of
self-consciousness or irony.
Saturday night, after Michelle left for home with her
mother, Rob said goodnight to Ruth and Phil and me. He has a new job that starts this week. I wish him well. He shakes my hand formally, pats my arm
from a distance. “You’re alright,
you know that, Cindy?” He glances
at me, his head tipped low. Steady
eye contact is difficult for him.
I may not see him or hear from him for a while.
When he was a teenager and I was
not yet, we stood in the garage with the door up and watched a summer
rainstorm. Sheets of rain hit the
driveway hard. The trees bent as
if to break in the waves of wind.
When lighting flashed, our whole street lit up in a new green way, suddenly
looking reversed as if north was now south. It was exciting and loud and the entire scene framed by the
open garage door was full of motion, the trees waving their leaves like go-go
girls shaking their long hair.
Suddenly Ron burst out of the garage, ran out into the rain and danced
and yelled, waving his arms and spinning in maniacal circles, invited by the
storm. I completely understood. I laughed and laughed at the antics of
my big brother, prince of the storm, a young Lear to be.
Here are the rationalizations, the ugly bargains I
draw with myself in moments of capitulation: Yes, my brother had more time with our parents, more years
to save away memories – but immaturity protected me from fully understanding
their loss. As the older brother,
he stood before me, taking the full brunt of the stoning. It may have driven him mad. We don’t know. Rob’s transformation alighted twenty-four
years after the trauma of losing both his parents, seventeen years after our brother and sister died. Was it only some diabolical coincidence? “Of course,” say some who hear his
story. “Of course he is this way.”
I need to walk away from the words we left on the
table, the hard puzzle, an ending of the game when we are all trapped with
extra letters, no words to spell.
I’ll go back to my little ones, and tell them in the simplest, most
truthful, most healing language:
Mommy is home. I missed
you. Give me a hug. I will return and feel the relief of
tears quickly stopped, of fears easily soothed.
