Kerry NevilleHEART AND WINGSThis is how tired I am: I am locked on the inside of the inside (read Suicide Watch Unit) of an Acute Psychiatric Crisis Floor with Maya who is saying over and over and over and over, "They fucking hate me. All my friends. I hear them talking about me." Maya waits on her bed, cross-legged, long blonde hair cinched in a tight, high ponytail, fists in her lap, ready to pummel a wall, a nurse, me, herself. She is so young, so beautiful in her effusive petulance and cursing and weeping. Ophelia on speed only hers is the naturally-occurring manic variety. I want to believe that a group of her former friends huddle outside in the parking lot beneath our reinforced Plexiglas window, whispering incantationsemdash;Maya, Maya, Fat and Blue. Maya, Maya, We Hate Youemdash;and that she can hear them. I want to believe her when she says, "I don't belong here. I want to go home. I'm not supposed to be here." I want to believe her because she, then, must believe me: Really, I didn't mean to cut up my arm with scissors. I didn't really need my husband to hold me all night in bed because I kept threatening to run outside and throw myself in front of a truck. Really, I'm not supposed to be here. Maya's repeated insistence, louder and more hysterical over the next few hours, necessitates nurses and orderlies. "Even when I was in my bedroom," she whisper-yells, "I could hear them. My landlord was in on it, too. She was following me everywhere. She was in love with me. Always messing with my stuff." Doesn't Maya know that I'm here for refuge, from the chaos, from the noise, from what I left behind? Can't she shut up? This was promised to me when I was in the exam room in the Emergency Room. That was what the doctor said: I would get rest. But don't I know this is bedlam? That my retreat to a prim and proper silence is only the opposite but equal response to an unrelenting careening around the curves of a disordered mind? What I do not scream because I will not make a scene: Please. Please. Please. I need to sleep. I haven't slept in months. Shut the fuck up. Though it may sound like the exaggeration of someone equally crazy, this is true. I am in that room with Maya for a reason. For two straight months, I'd been breastfeeding my nine month old son through sleepless nights (his) every hour, and then, because of my own version of Bipolar Death Match, had been unable to fall asleep between the intervals, waiting for him to wake again (twist, turn, roll, snuffle, snuffle, cry, wail), waiting for him not to wake up again (twist, turn, roll, roll back, silence, silence). So, two months with less than two hours of cumulative sleep a night equals a nearly psychotic Mommy who is additionally exhausted because she has also been manically (maniacally?) running 35 miles a week around and around and around an indoor track like a brutalized racehorse, and gradually and persistently cutting back on the food she will allow herself to eat (a sicko reward and punishment system). But unlike Maya and her conniving friends, I have a more pressing problem: it has been six hours since I asked for a breast pump. I forgot to pack my own in my methodical, crazed packing earlier that morning when I was wondering do I bring to the psych ward my make-up, books and the papers I need to grade by the end of the week? What about a razor to shave my legs and armpits? Try to maintain appearances and pretend this isn't really happening? I didn't want to become a hairy, raving monster because I was coming back out ASAP. But I forgot the most important thingemdash;the breast pump drying in the dish rack. Perhaps a deliberate oversight since I'd never needed it around-the clock before. Now, sitting here listening to Maya's ravings? Milk drip, drip, drips from under my soaked nursing pads, spilling down my ribcage, pooling in the folds of my stomach. And my son is not in my arms and his lips are not on my breast for the first time since he was born and all I can think is how I have failed him, how I have given in to this illness, how I haven't been strong enough to withstand this assault, how I was home this morning, holding him to me and now I am gone. And my three-year old daughter, too, what must she think to be without her mother, what sense can she make of this as she waits for her goodnight kiss? Her mother off to the madhouse? What I don't know is that Maya and I are being watched on 24-hour closed-circuit television. Crazy Girls! The New Hit Reality Show. A room emptied of all personal effects, bodies stripped and housed in bland hospital gowns, feet covered in navy hospital socks, wrists banded in yellow. What do the nurses see on the closed circuit TV? No tears. Not even when the tsunami of guilt crashes over me and I start raking my arms under the sheet remembering the night before: my husband's arms around me, restraining me because I threatened to do what? Or roll my arm into the slash of light, inspecting the cuts from wrist to elbow I did this? I do not sleep. I cannot, will not. My punishment for arriving Here when I had two children at home There. What else do they see? My fingers tiptoeing over the cuts on my arm. My head falling to my knees, kneecaps pressing into my eyes. My arm, the good one, trying to staunch the flow of milk which won't stop; milk soaking the hospital gown, the pillow, the sheets, but not the plastic mattress. What waste, what waste. I abandoned my son. How will he ever understand this instant and inexplicable end to my nipple in his mouth, my body beside his, his Momma now gone, simply gone? On the third day, the breast pump appears, shrink-wrapped, on top of my bed. I fill bottle after bottle, what would have filled him. I tip bottle after bottle over, spill all of it down the sink. I no longer leave behind stained sheets and pillowcases. On the fifth day, I stop soaking through the pads. My body begins to contain itself in the short sad process of diminishing supply. And because I am no longer nursing, I can take gobs of medication, so the mania subsides and medicated sleep descends and suicidal thoughts wane. On that fifth day, I fake a wobbly smile, because it's been too long that I've been gone from home, from my children and I am ready to fly out of that locked unit. How will they ever understand this? Will there ever be a way to explain it? *** I leave the hospital that first time (there will be many more times following), knowing that I clearly and irrevocably suffer from Bipolar Disorder. Although to say "suffering from" suggests that I am only a passive victim in relation to this disorder. Perhaps this was true for the first few years after my diagnosis when I leapt across the high wire, pushing manic highs and falling into suicidal lows, resisting stability, and preferring my own prescriptive ideas over my professional team's. But in choosing to be a victim of this disorder, I was not the only one who suffered its effects. My children suffered along with me, whether it was my son who had to abruptly stop nursing at nine months, or both my children who contended with my daily mood shifts that could be both baffling and fearsome. I was the mom who had endless energy for dance parties in the kitchen but also the mom who missed birthdays and first days of school because I was in the psychiatric hospital. To this day, on occasion, both kids will still crawl into bed with me in the middle of the night because they aren't sure I'll be there in the morning, afraid I'll disappear back into the hospital, and perhaps, because I've also attempted suicide, afraid I might disappear for good. But I don't just have to be a "victim of" Bipolar Disorder. I've been learning how to manage this illness. "Managing" offers control, puts me back in charge, allows me to be the "Mom." Just like my kids, I have a schedule, a bedtime, a team that I answer to, and I abide by a policy of honesty, integrity, and accountability. *** When Alexander is three, he makes up a game he calls "Monster/Mommy." He zaps me with his finger and I become a monster. He zaps me again, and I'm back to being Mommy. My monster performance is a bit hysterical, desperateemdash;Mommy losing her mind. It scares him, but he laughs; he loves being scared but he also keeps looking at me like I am unrecognizable. This goes on for several minutes then he zaps me and says, "Now be Mommy forever!" Isn't this the perfect analogy? One minute I'm Mommy, the safe harbor, and the next minute I'm this terrifying mad monster, all traces of Mommy erased. And that insistent plea at the endemdash;Be Mommy Forever! The absolute impossibility of that because that monster is also always there, ready to surface, ready to terrify the ones I love. *** I have to get my Lithium level checked so my daughter tags along. The phlebotomist ties the rubber band around my upper arm, taps the crook of my elbow looking for a vein, then pauses to read aloud some of the words I had written in permanent marker along my forearm: Integrity, Hope, Self-Love. I want to crawl under the chair, ashamed as she'd likely seen the scars, too. Sophia squeezes my hand. "Momma, what's integrity?" "Oh gosh," I say, "It sort of means being honest and truthful in what you think and do and say." "You tell me the truth," she says, then points at the vial that is quickly filling with my blood. "Can you see your brain sickness in there?" "Maybe one day," I say. "But right now it's invisible." "It's a superpower then," she says, satisfied. "Which makes you Super Momma." How can I be Super Momma after all I've put her through? But I forget the wondrous power of a child's forgiveness that comes only from grace. *** My daughter draws a picture for me when I am in the hospital. It looks like Monster/Mommy Insect. I lie on the pillow and hold it above me, trying not just to see her crayon drawing, but to see Sophia at our yellow kitchen table, bent over the paper, choosing the green and the brown and the blue, to feel Sophia thinking of me, her Momma as she drew the picture, trying to feel anything but the wound-up, clawing depression which is eating away at my heart. The face on the paperemdash;my faceemdash;is enormousemdash;big eyes, a curved nose, and a jagged, fearsome mouth. The body isn't humanemdash;no demure dress, no earthbound feetemdash;but great wings that are beating, bringing me into the sky, and a long tail whipping behind it. In the corner of the picture, three small stick figures, a girl, a boy, and a larger boy: Sophia, Alexander, and my husband. And out of Sophia's mouth, a giant word bubble that takes up half the page: "Come Home Momma!" How can suicide be a serious option when I have my daughter calling me back to her, to the family, to home? But I am inside the danger zone of this illness which is why I am inside the hospital: when I am in a severe mixed state, switching rapidly between mania and depression, I go numbemdash;can't love or feel loved. And my brain is moving so fastemdash;it's like being both the announcer at a race track as well as the horses going around and around, and the race only stops when each and every horse collapses from exhaustion. Home. I don't know how to come back from this. I put the drawing on the nightstand. The distance between my daughter and me seems impossible. After all, I'm about to be wheeled out for my Electric Shock Treatment. My fourth one. This is what it's come to for me. Momma strapped down with electric currents running through her brain. "Just like Frankenstein!" Alexander said. He thought it was funny, like a cartoon. But Sophia? She only said, "Will the procedure finally fix what's wrong?" I don't know how to make myself right for my family anymore. How can I go home if I'm still wrong? I look over at the drawing again. Pick it up. Those great, beating wings. That ferocious tail. Not an insect nor a monster, but a dragon. Sophia is obsessed with dragons. She collects them, draws them, hunts for them in the woods. They are her totem creature; they make her heart beat faster and make her believe in the impossible. And this is how she imagined meemdash;as one of her dragons. Fierce, angry, ready to break out of its prison and fly back home. *** The ECT treatment went off without a hitch. The IV slipped right in, the anesthesia worked as it should, the seizure was short and sweet, and I woke up feeling great. Better than great. Instead of my usual collapse into bed for the afternoon, I was perky and ambitious, even suggesting to Christopher that we hit the supermarket and then stop for lunch. Yes, I was hungryemdash;hungry enough to eat a real meal. Indian: paneer, vegetable curry, and rice. No measuring cups, just flying by the seat of my pants, estimating how much I should have without any panic. Part of my equanimity was certainly due to my mini "lecture" on Depression and the effects of ECT that my psychiatrist asked me to give to a group of visiting potential Residents. "What does Depression feel like," he asked. I was lying in the hospital bed, waiting for the nurse to insert the IV, anxious about the imminent ECT procedure, and despite these nerve-wracking distractions, my doctor believed I could offer them insight, an intimate glimpse into the debilitation of depression. "What it's like," I said, "is hell. I've been suffering from depression since I was fourteen, cutting my arms, starving myself. Depression leaves you at a great distance from yourselfemdash;you no longer have a self you care about. You no longer believe there's any possible way to climb out of the well. Inert, stuck, dead to the world. Everything that you know should joy fails. There is no capacity for joy. No imaginative capacity; no ability to see beyond the bleak wall of yourself. What ECT has given me these past few weeks is a chance to get unstuckemdash;sure I still have serious ups and downs, but I don't stay down. There's a new clarityemdash;I guess what I'm feeling, as tentative and precarious as it may be, is hope." Later, Christopher says I was brave to speak as I did. "I couldn't have done it," he says. "Speaking like that in front of a group of strangers. That just shows how far you've come."
A few hours later, at my kids' swim lessons, I am sitting with my daughter and we are watching my son take his first few strokes without the aid of a flotation belt. "I can't!" he screeches. "I can't do it!" "Of course you can," his teacher says, "You're already doing it." And in fact, he isemdash;he'd swam the first few strokes from her arms to the wall without even registering his success. Like my son, I often feel like I'm sinking, drowning, flailing helplessly in the waters of this illness. Can I stay afloat without the perverse comfort of Depression, without the scaffolding of the Eating Disorder and its sick but soothing, dictatorial order? The answer? Of course I can: I'm already doing it. How can I be sure? Not five minutes later, because it is a million degrees in the natatorium, I strip off my sweater, leaving me only in my black tee-shirt. Sophia looks over at my bare arms. "Momma," she says, "how do you think you got all those scratches on your arm?" I take a deep breath. "You know, I got them so long ago, that I don't really remember." Wishful thinking, perhaps, but my arms are healed these days. No cuts to have to hide or explain away, no crazy scenes with scissors or knives. No bandages or lies. Scars, yes. But I believe that there will come a day when how I got them will be an indistinct, vague memory. I truly won't remember how I could have ever done that to myself, how I could have ever believed that damage and death were the only ways out. What I will have in their place will be a joyful, creative life and I will be swimming confidently and with imaginative purpose through light and love. *** Months later, I am once again interred in the research hospital in Pittsburgh where I spent several weeks a few years ago. I apologize in advance for my irony; a defense mechanism, surely, as I am merely exhausted and frayed. Initially, I was told the Pittsburgh program had a waiting list weeks long; as a result of circumstances, I waited weeks. Breathable depression skidded into its black chokehold. My therapist wrung her hands, at a loss as what else she could do except to suggest that maybe the time had come for me to try to circumvent the waiting list and simply "present" at the Pittsburgh hospital's ER. "After all," she said, in genuine concern, "I'm worried you really are at that crisis point now ." I climb into my big bed with my kids and explain to them that Momma had to go to a hospital in Pittsburgh for a few weeks because the doctor who had been doing her ECT procedures up in Erie was no longer working at that hospital. I pulled Sophia and Alexander close to me, holding them as tight as possible because I could see their eyes widening, realizing that their hold on me at home was tentative once again. "I'm so sorry," I whispered. "You know I would stay here at home with you if I could. But you also know how bad Momma has been feeling these past few weeks?" Sophia stroked my hand. "Yeah," she said. "Like when you and Daddy are on the couch talking and then you start yelling and crying." "Mommy's just having a hard time feeling like her inside feelings are okay these days. I'm tired of being sad and mad for no reason," I said, "because you are the two best reasons I have to always be happy." Alexander, solemn and thoughtful, sighed. "Who will take me to my first day of Kindergarten?" His first day of real school with the Harry Potter lunchbox we picked out together. "A BIG BOY lunchbox," he'd demanded. And then Sophia, in tandem, realized, too: "That means you'll miss my first day of Fourth grade?" Sadness, but more--fear and loss. All summer long, she'd been hyping up the transition to Fourth grade—worries over friends, water bottles, hair styles, eyebrow thickness, wanting to get "perfect" grades in "every" class because she intended to study hard "every" night. And she wanted me with her, still holding her han—not too grown up yet for that. But then Sophia hugged me harder, and said, "Don't worry, Momma. We love you always, even when you're sad and mad. You're the best Momma ever." Whew. How's that for suicidal antidote? So, last Sunday, Christopher and the kids dropped me off at the pearly gates of the Pittsburgh Hospital—they couldn't come in. I didn't want them to come in--the kids didn't need to hang around a psych hospital admission intake waiting room for hours upon hours, watching me pace, wring my hands, grind my teeth, prevaricate, minimize, and attempt to be honest about where I am, body and mind. But Sophia reminded me as she kissed me goodbye before leaving me at the hospital, "You are always the best Momma, no matter what." *** Why We Must Struggle I carry a copy of this poem in my wallet, reading it every time I pull out a dollar bill, a constant reminder, a necessary impetus pushing me to struggle, to live, to call upon my own "latent double," the stronger, stable, life-loving, life-giving self. That latent self might dress herself in the mystical garb of Julian of Norwich, professing the necessity of a love that fully-encompasses the senses, that loves life and limb (no self-flagellating rending of skin on the forearms); a love that floods the body and the soul, a love that weds desire with completion: Love Yourself, through and through--bony feet and knobby knees, stretch-marked thighs and flabby stomach, deflated breasts and that often-self-maligned face that stares back at you in the mirror, but most of all, the large heart concealed within, beating and beating, struggling to keep pace, to keep compensating for all the bouts of starvation, all the times it has been split in two, all the times it has been filled with lead weights, pulled down by the suicidal dive of depression to the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. But that tired, wounded heart beats on, struggles on, despite all efforts to surrender to a self-proposed end. That latent self, too, might dress herself in the wings of a Zebra Swallowtail butterfly, swooping and diving into sticky nectar, knowing that loss, while inevitable, can be contained and delayed--flap the wings into headwinds, seek out the sweet honeysuckle, drink sustenance even with the knowledge that there will be an end to the glorious flights on the trade winds, that one day the black-and-white striped wings will beat and beat, then flutter, then eventually fall still, but not from a lack of trying, not from having lived a strenuous, heroic life in the face of predators and storms and obsessed lepidopterists, but will fall still of their own natural, end-of-life accord. Why must I struggle? I must struggle for the eight ounces of heart that beats and beats within me, trying to sustain me, forgiving all the damage I have myself inflicted, healing all the losses I have myself hollowed out. I must struggle for the invisible wings that beat and beat on my back, lifting me time and again from the bottom of the well, flying straight for the sweet nectar of food and love and forgiveness and grace. This morning, I did not want to struggle. I actually said a small, desperate, non-sane-mind prayer that I wouldn't wake up from anesthesia I'd receive from this morning's ECT treatment. I was overwhelmed by the sheer exhaustion of this struggle, by the dailyness of it, by its thirty-year grip on me. I prayed my heart and wings would stop beating that I could simply just drift off into the ether. Thankfully, that was not to be: I woke, shocked back into my struggle, into the necessity to do my absolute best to see it through, to persevere and return home to my children and husband and dogs and cat and Chinese Water Dragon, and friends and family. To promise them all, at least in this very moment, I will struggle, anchor myself to NOW, to what the present moment offers: that I love and am loved; that I need and am needed. Because the only alternative, is one unfolding before me right now: a fellow patient, twenty-five years old, has been in and out of Eating Disorder hospital units for the past eight years (she was here, in fact, when I was here one and one-half years ago). Now she is on a feeding tube, her body reduced to the rubble of severe, what seems to be an almost-irreversible end to her anorexia. She is trying to get admitted to hospice care: "I won't ever recove r," she said. "And there is no one to recover for, least of all myself. I'd just like to be allowed to die." So I must keep my struggle close to heart and wings, beating, beating, beating. *** Lately, Alexander has been obsessing over Mad Libs. In fact, he threw one of his rare, though powerful, pouty, foot-stomping, "Life isn't fair!" tantrums when I came home baring surprise presents for both kids last week: a Mad Libs book for Sophia and an age-inappropriate Icky/Bizarro Body Book (i.e., up close and personal photos of how Oreos are transformed by the digestive track into poop). I thought that Alexander, at age 5, would prefer the poop over the more ponderous grammatical concepts of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Apparently not. I was the Unfair Momma. But Sophia being Sophia, the daughter who delightedly stirs octopus brains on the beaches of Greece with her forefinger in pre-Nobel for Science, happily traded books. I spend the next several hours and days explaining and re-explaining the differences between nouns, verbs, and adjectives. "A noun is a thing, like dog or cat or, well, poop. A verb is a thing you do, like run or walk," I say. Alexander nods, "Or poop. You can poop, too." Ahh, a potential linguist in the making. Already he understands the way language can be manipulated. "And an adjective describes something. Like red or slow or soft or tired," I say. Tired. Yes, I know that only too well these days. Again, he nods. "Brown! Like brown poop!" So, not interested in reading about it, but certainly fascinated in its literary composition. Alexander's Mad Libs have thankfully drifted away from excrement and veered towards T-Rex territory, and since Halloween is fast approaching, ghosts, pirates, zombies and blood are often repeated nouns; run, scare, and hide are the verbs; while red, bloody, and dark are the go-to adjectives. (Small digression: we went to one of those Haunted Houses last weekend, this one underground, and really meant for adults as most of the tableaus featured fairly sadistic CSI/Dexter type scenes. I confess, I was scared, but held it together since I was holding Alexander's hand. For the first few rooms, he gripped my hand, his voice quavered, and he kept saying he was scared. All of a sudden, though, he decided he was some sort of brave Superhero, and he ran up to each awful incarnationemdash;the bloody Freddy Kreuger, the Chainsaw-wielding Madman, the creepy, man-spider crawling around on all-foursemdash;and shouted in their faces, "You don't scare me! You don't scare me!" And the thing was, he meant it.) So today, Sophia and Alexander proposed "Mad Libbing Momma." I was initially hesitant. What sort of nouns, verbs, and adjectives in reference to me would they come up with? Noun: Okay, maybe an easy givenemdash;Momma. But I gave Sophia a reprieve from studying for her Social Studies test (Regions and Weatheremdash;to be honest, a pretty hard test with a lot of vocabulary and informationemdash;not sure I could memorize it all unless I was hoping to get a job as a meteorologist for CNN) and this is the result: Sophia's Mad Momma Lib: Mom: Roses are red, CHIPMUNKS are blue. She PLAYS like a CAT. Mom can be fun, and loves GREECE. She wears clothes that are LIGHT BLUE every day. Alexander's Mad Momma Lib: Mom: Roses are red, T-REXS are blue. She HOPS like a SEA SERPENT. Mom can be fun, and loves DISNEY LAND. She wears clothes that are ORANGE every day. And my own self-referential Mad Momma Lib: Roses are red, BIRDS are blue. She TWIRLS like a TREE. Mom can be fun, and loves GREECE. She wears clothes that are PURPLE every day. Nothing here suggests crazy. Nothing here mentions my long absences, the hospitalizations, the manic flights of desperation, the disappearance into the dark cellar of depression over and over. They knew, and I knew, in advance the theme of this Mad Lib was meemdash;and yetemdash;the words that came to mind, were words of strength, of agility of movement, landscapes of light and innocent play. Okay, a few roaring, coiling monsters, but my son draws those monsters and hangs them on his wall. "You don't scare me!" I have to remember that he runs up to those monsters in the House of Horrors, seeks them out. They don't scare him. He longs for the rollercoaster. And Sophia? The curled up, serene purring cat. Just last night, we had what might be a typical pre-teen blow-up, initially mishandled by both of us, but then, we resolved it. For most of the night, though, I carried her words around inside me: "I'm angry at Momma! She yelled at me. I'm so angry at her!" Remembering the wounds I carried inside my own 9 year old self when I believed I was unfairly yelled at by my own mother. But later that night, after we apologized to each other, after we hugged and made up, I overheard her telling her brotheremdash;no, telling isn't a strong enough wordemdash;insisting that she was going to sleep next to me that night. "It's my night to sleep next to Momma. She's mine tonight." Mad Libs. Mad Love. Momma Love. *** The kids and I are cuddled up on the couch watching "60 Minutes" and a segment comes on about untreated schizophrenia and its links to most of the mass shootings in the past fifteen years. In hindsight, I probably should have switched over to "America's Funniest Home Videos" so we could watch babies launched across the room from sling shots or poodles riding skateboards, but all three of us seem transfixed by the expert psychiatrists' testimonies on symptoms of schizophrenia and the history of the treatment of schizophrenia and how schizophrenia could be better treated. To be honest, I'm not really thinking about why my kids are so compelled by this segment until Sophia turned to me and asks, worriedly, "This isn't the kind of mental illness that you have, is it, Mom?" "Yeah," Alexander says, "do you have this kind?" he keeps glancing back and forth at the screen which shuffles pictures of the faces of recent shooters suspected of being mentally illemdash;D.C., Colorado, Arizona, Virginia. Was he waiting to see if my face would pre-emptively appear? His hand creeps across my lap and finds my hand. "No, no, no," I say. "I have Bipolar Disorder, not Schizophrenia. They're very different from each other." Though not so different chromosomally. Close cousins, really. In fact, I've taken the same medications that Schizophrenics take, so I'm not sure how different we are, except for the hearing voices part. Because in the horrific depths of depression and at the heights of mania I've had psychotic episodes and delusions. But I don't tell the kids this because I can see that they're weighing the mental illness that they know their Mom! Their Mom!!! has against the mental illness these mass shooters have and they want me to be as far and away different from them as possible. "That's right," Sophia says. "You have that one. You have the mood swings one." She inches closer to me on the couch as if that would close the gap between what might be threatening about what was still unknown in my mental illness and what was known in her mom. "Because," she continues, "your mood swings can be really bad. Sometimes you just get really angry at us for no reason." Alexander throws both his hands in the air. "Yeah! You do! Like sometimes we'll be sitting on the bed and you'll just start yelling at us for sitting on the bed and we won't be doing anything but sitting on the bed!" I close my eyes. I might not have the voices of Schizophrenia, but I have the voices of punishment, of self-loathing, the voices that say: See? This disease will ruin your relationship with your children. It's the wrecking ball, swing through love, punching holes in walls, knocking out cross beams and support beams. I open my eyes and the kids were looking at me like I was crazy. "I know!" Alexander says. "Maybe when you start yelling, or before you start, you should just go into another room." "Yeah," Sophia says. "When you feel a mood coming on, so you don't take it out on us, you can just go into another room. And then it'll be okay." I smile at them. They weren't really afraid of me winding up on that television screen. They weren't even afraid of my having a mental illness, of my being Bipolar. All they wanted was a tool to help me contain it. So they could help me help myself. So they could feel powerful instead of powerless. "I have an idea," I say. "Sometimes it's hard for me to always know when a mood is happening. I'm not always able to spot it right away. But you guys are experts. So how about we have a code word for when you think I need to go to another room for a time out and I'll go?" Alexander smiles. "But we won't use it if you're angry at us for being crazy and we need to stop being crazy and calm down." Sophia says, "Or like we need to stop fighting with each other and we're not stopping." "Right," I say. "It's for when I'm getting angry or a mood swing is happening that has no good reason and maybe it's scaring you so you think I need a time out. So all you have to say is ‘Another Room.' Okay?" They both nod and we shake on it. Then Alexander gives a great sigh of relief and throws himself on me in a hug. I hadn't realized my mood swings had seemed so scary? overwhelming? engulfing? My own mother has a big personality with powerful emotions and I was able, as a child, to build a pretty good defense system constructed from concrete blocks and a dissociative moat. I forget, sometimes, that my son, while not fragile, is more delicateemdash;he's like a butterfly or moth; his wings beating on the outside of his body for all to see and to be damaged. And I forget that for my children, the wings they see beating outside my body are not the ragged wings of some storm battered butterfly, but the colossal wings of a Bipolar dragon, furiously flying into the heavens, then folding back for the dive down into the black well. And just the day-to-day effort of keeping aloft? Enough to make a mom tired and stupidly, unthinkingly angry. Enough to know when it's time to go to "Another room."
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