Neurosis

I know that, inherently, she isn't a bad person. It was just a few short years ago that I felt very close to her, for the first time in my life. We had about eight years of good after I moved away, talking on the phone weekly and visiting one another every few months. There were still moments of tension and even some arguments, but never anything like before, and not what we have today.

My mother is very ill, and always has been. I've known my entire life that she wasn't like other mothers, but it wasn't until I was an adult that I learned what manic depression is, and that my mother was what is called "bipolar I". It's been two years since she had her latest major manic episode, and she still has not pulled out of it. She left behind her job, her home, and her belongings to move hundreds of miles south and live on the beach. Even worse, my mother has hoarding disorder, a serious form of obsessive compulsive disorder. What this means is that my mother must always be surrounded by stuff, and since she can't afford to buy her own stuff, she is getting it from people's dumpsters and garbage cans. And that isn't the worst.

My mother has begun creating her own reality. She tells extensive stories about her life and the lives of people she knows. She's created life-threatening illnesses for me, illegal occupations for specific people that she doesn't like, and relationships that don't exist. Years ago, my friends and I would lightly joke about how we could be in one room and hear my mother having a conversation with someone in the next, but we would never see anyone with her. She would create characters and voices, asking herself questions and answering them. When we'd catch her, she'd embarrassingly laugh it off as just talking to herself, and we summed it up to her eclectic nature. Today, I look back on that and can't help but think that I could have stopped what I fear may be the culmination of schizophrenia, a disease prevalent in her family. Again, I naively believed that this disease required one hearing Satan and trying to kill family members, because no one educated me on the more common symptoms.

I have begged my mother for years to see a psychiatrist to get the proper medication, but her pride refused to let her listen. She was once in a relationship with a man who laughed at her for seeing a psychiatrist, and I remember him telling her that her head was shrinking and that she was a lunatic. It never occurs to her to remember that this same man beat her regularly and abused drugs, and how can you trust the opinion of a man who hits a woman every night? Eventually, I spoke with her new general practitioner after Mom was approved for work insurance. Her new doctor agreed with my observations and was shocked that no one before her had prescribed anything for my mother's condition, and my mother was put on an antidepressant, an anxiety medication, and an anti psychotic. Everything spiraled down hill simply because, one month, my mother decided she felt well enough to not refill the meds she had been on for several years.

As soon as I realized what was happening, I was doing everything I could from afar to get my mother emergency mental health assistance. I contacted everyone who had been around to witness her behavior and begged them to serve as a witness to her actions. I researched how to have my mother hospitalized under her employer's plan so that she would not lose her job while she was away. I spoke to her landlord and creditors, giving them a vague explanation that her health was not good lately and they agreed to give her some time. My family, though, saw my efforts as selfish on my part, and instead of my mother going to a hospital, she went to live with a schizophrenic sister. It has only gotten worse from there, as I mentioned before.

I still want to help, but what I see as help, her family sees as cruel. My mother needs to be somewhere with professionals and trained caregivers, she needs therapy and medication. My family willingly complains about her behavior, but ostracizes me when I try to intervene with my solution. They see my efforts as spiteful and unnecessary, though they are happy to explain her erratic behavior away with "your mother is very sick right now." Though it's not been said, I am sure that they are waiting for me to volunteer to take her on and let her live here, with me. I can't betray her and tell them the horrible things she says to me when we do speak, and when we are together, she makes a point to berate me, in turn causing an argument. I am told that I should just let her criticisms go because she is so very sick, but I want to stand up for myself to the person that should inherently want to protect me. I want to love her like I did before, but I am not sure if that will ever be possible again.

Detachment

There is no solid memory in my mind of my parents' relationship. I was a year old when they finally married, and it was a year later that they were filing for divorce. I do remember the weekend that we left him, the plane ride back to the U.S. with my mother sobbing over the Atlantic ocean as I cuddled with a new stuffed animal that I had come to adore. To cheer her, I would repeatedly hand her my companion and try to get her to hug him, but she would only sob harder. It is one of my earliest memories. Only when I was older did I realize that the bottom of one foot was marked "With love, Nora." She was the woman my father had been having an affair with, the woman who was pregnant with his son, the one who would marry my father exactly a month after the divorce would be finalized.

My father and Nora felt like a solid family to me. She was from a Middle Eastern family with deep-rooted family values and exotic traditions. I spent most of my very early years with them, and even came to call her Mom. While her family followed the tradition Arabic tradition by gushing over my baby brother, Nora never let me feel set aside. I never felt less important than my brother, and I never felt as though her love for us was different. It wasn't. Even when I did wrong, she never yelled at me, but instead took an intellectual approach. She was somewhat of a feminist, though she still took great pride in her culture. Our house was always filled with the smells of fresh tabouli and baklava, made for us with love. We spoke fluent Arabic, a language the kids around me couldn't understand, and it made me feel as though we had our own secret family language for just us. We were our own unit, a happy home, and I was loved.

Shortly after I started school, my cozy home was torn apart. Abruptly, my father was taking me back to my mother, saying only that his job had decided to send him back to Europe and that it would be better if I was with my mother during this time. It was not long afterward that he and Nora divorced, and I would only see him two more times before I was an adult, each just briefly. It was obvious when I returned to her that my mother resented what Nora had done--I had left a Cherokee daughter and returned an Arab child. Or that was what I believed the issue to be. It's amazing how children relate small issues like that.

In reality, Nora and my father had been trying to win custody of me, and my father had tried to convince my mother to let Nora adopt me. It wasn't sensitive of him, but in his young mind, it was the right thing to do. The fact that my mother had given birth to a second child, only to have a court remove him permanently from her, only validated my father's point. The problem was that, at some point during their marriage, my father had secretly become a violent alcoholic. The person who had been my safe haven from a negligent, mentally unstable addict had himself become an abusive addict. It was at that time that I began to understand that the only stability I had in this life was me. It's a heavy cross for a six year old to carry.

Dogma

Among my family's many complications is the issue of God, religion, and church. There are many ministers in my family who teach a cult-like existence from the pulpit, complete with hell, fire, and brimstone. It's an all-or-nothing faith, meaning when you go to church, you give it 100%; however, if you decide to stop, you merely hang on to the fear and live the rest of your life on the wild side. I always felt as though my mother wished she could be in the former group, but put herself in the latter group when she confessed being unmarried and pregnant.

On occasion, my mother would cave to the pressure of her brothers and begin sending me to church regularly. The rules were numerous and overwhelming:

*only dresses and long shirts;
*ask no questions about what you are told, just accept the "truth" as God has given it;
*no makeup, no fancy hairstyles, nothing to drive the men wild;
*women are to be submissive and accept their lot in life as wife, mother, and homemaker;
*no hospitals or doctors--if you are sick, come to your church family for faith healing;
*you may pray, but not meditate, for Satan lives for the moment he can jump into an empty mind;
*fear God, and love Him for breathing life into you;
*tithing is to be literal, and to ensure that you are giving at least 10%, you must report your income and assets in a formal report on a quarterly basis;
*God prefers poverty over wealth, for money is the root to all evil;
*children are to be seen, but not heard;
*the fruit given to Adam by Eve was from the Tree of Wisdom, therefore, anything that intellectually develops our minds further is an attempt to become too much like God, which is a disgrace and a sin;
*pain is our reminder of the suffering Christ endured to save our souls;
*the price of sin is death, and your sin shall be carried through the next seven generations--our children and their children will pay for the sin you commit today;
*your life hardships are the result of the sins committed by your fathers before you, so accept them with grace and live to not overwhelm your future generations with more sin;
*most importantly, never forget that we know the truth, and "they" are wrong--do not expose your mind to the teachings of those false prophets.

It amazed me and disappointed my mother that I rejected this theology as early as four years old. But I continued to endure it when she'd push the issue, not only because it was easier, but it was a popular faith among my friends. Society around me told me that this was the right way to live, but my heart taught me something different. I had too many questions, even as a child, that I was told were inappropriate to ask. I was degraded for being a thinking individual, and told that dealing with this intellect was the price I had to pay for my parents' sin. I would forever carry the weight of this, for being the bastard child of my family, a label that defined me, though it was something I never had control over. I would never feel as though I fully fit in with these people, many of which were my own flesh and blood.

Scapegoat

When I was in middle school, my mother and I spent a few months living in housing projects while she tried to find a job in our new town. The year before, we had jumped states on a whim of hers--I had a 36 hour notice of the move--and came back to her childhood home with only $1300 and our last 7 years crammed into a tiny hatchback. It was the first moment in my life that I realized something was terribly wrong with my mother, and it would take another decade before I learned the term "manic depression." Instead of using our money to set up a rental house and find a job, she decided to enjoy her new found "freedom" and reverted back to teenage behavior, going to parties while leaving me with people I hardly knew. When she was short a sitter, I'd have to tag along, and we'd usually end up at a river party or a strange house, me sleeping in the car and her staying awake for days at a time. Since we had no address, I couldn't attend school, and I missed half of my fifth grade year.

So the projects were an upgrade of where we'd been. Cruelty manifests itself best in the minds of preteen girls, and is even easier to achieve when the housing projects are built directly across from the school. My classmates would see me walking from the apartments to class every day, and while I wasn't the only kid in school living there, I was the only one not already affiliated with a tough clique to protect me from the other kids. To make matters worse, I had a small inventory of clothing in my closet: three button up shirts, one pair of faded jeans that were a size too big, and a pair of cheap sneakers with holes in the toes and inner soles. Though she wasn't much bigger than I was, my mother made it clear that her closet was off limits.

I was quiet, nerdy, and hiding scars from the recent traumas I had endured. I was an easy target. First, there was the lunch room, every new kid's worst nightmare. Ours was clearly divided into groups: the popular kids took up one table, the brainiacs another, and the middle-of-the-road kids had several in a little group of their own. In the back corner was two tables of students who always dressed in black clothes and dark makeup, and who looked at everyone else with haunting eyes and threatening expressions. They didn't need two tables, but no one questioned them, ever. There were also young gang members--most of these people lived near me, but never spoke to me--who stood at two tables near the darkly dressed kids in a manner that dared you to look them in the eyes. In the middle was a space surrounding the lowest beings of all, the ones without a label who were clearly the "fair" target of every group's anger and meanness. This is where I was told to sit, but even then, there was always at least two spaces between me and the next person. I wasn't even good enough to be with the lowest of the social classes.

My classes were easy and I loved studying, but I hated the class change in between. This is where I would find people pointing at me and whispering, sometimes even laughing or daring to ask "don't you own anything else to wear?" It never helped to answer that question honestly, but instead seem to give many of them the right to push me into lockers, or push my books out of my hands into the ground. I was a tiny girl, much smaller than the rest of the girls my age, and I knew that fighting was not an option. Instead, I learned to stay quiet and endure the whispers and taunts. When I'd tell my mom these things, her answer was to either fight or stop whining. I couldn't win.

These few months have stayed with me the rest of my years. I look back at my later years at different schools, at my high school and college days, and I feel a sense of remorse for all those that I know endured the same treatment. I learned to develop a tough shell and a witty sense of humor so that, when we moved, I deflected this torture and thus managed to escape being a victim. My experience taught me to keep my nose clean, mind my own business, and always be the first to laugh at myself. But I wonder now, how many people like me did that tactic allow me to let down in the end?

Prologue

A little bit about me...Present Me, not the Past Me that you will be learning about here.

I am a happy, healthy 30-something living the American dream. I have a house, a marriage, a career, and a black lab. I drive a Toyota and set hair appointments 8 weeks apart. My friends BBQ and text message and Twitter on a regular basis. I have a retirement account and a shoe fetish. If you saw me in the mall, you wouldn't look twice at me.

This blog is a purge. Things have happened within the last few years that have caused the closet to fly open and family skeletons to begin spilling out. I had already dealt with most of these several years ago, when I packed my bags and moved nearly 1,000 miles from anyone who knew anything about me. I saw therapists and took antidepressants while I sorted through the pain of the two decades that had past.

It is my family now who needs the healing. To aid in this healing, I have needed to relive the pain of yesterday and stop protecting people in my life. The more I unleash, the more compelled I am to share these experiences with anyone who may also feel in their lives that they are the only ones who hear their own cries.

I am great today. I am happy. I am sure that this will not appear so as I continue to write, because I am writing from a place parallel to where I am now. I have forgiven, but before I forget, I must reveal. If it appears in my writing that I have yet to heal, then I will be proud, for that means that I have finally mastered the art of writing.

Gluttony

I was watching a documentary on DHC last night and heard a doctor say that our food habits are developed as early as infancy. We learn how to eat by how our parents feed us during early childhood.

Last week, a relative mentioned to me how worried they are about my mother and her new eating habits. She eats constantly, can't seem to satisfy herself, and, consequently, has put on an unhealthy amount of weight. They asked me, "didn't your mother use to eat like a bird?" Understatement, I'd say.

Since I can remember, my mother has suffered from a mild to moderate case of anorexia, depending upon how out of control her life was at the time. No one ever labeled it, but she explained the lack of food in our house with "well, I never eat much anyway, and Rain gets free lunch at school." We received food stamps, but when they'd come in, she'd sell of a good portion of them for discounted cash, which she'd use for cigarettes and alcohol. We never ate breakfast at our house, we never had milk or bread out of the rationalization that they'd go bad too quickly. Mother always had a case of Dr. Pepper that I was not allowed to touch, and we kept a supply of off-brand boxes of macaroni and cheese--only margarine to prepare it with--and hot dogs, maybe a few cans of tuna for the macaroni and some bags of beans to be made in a crock pot. To this day, I can't eat any of those things, except maybe a really good tuna salad.

This all had me thinking about how these habits may have affected my adult life. Since she couldn't--and didn't--cook, I read every cookbook I could find to master this art. I still collect cookbooks today, it's one of the few gems that will ever attract me to a flea market. I frustrate my other half by always insisting that I clean my plate in a restaurant, even though the portions are notoriously oversize. I battle the weight, fluctuating from a 2 to a 14 in dress sizes, mostly because I just love good food. A food counselor asked me once what need I was trying to feed, and I told her "the need to eat." She was extremely unhappy about that. I don't relate food to emotion, I relate food to the wonderful sensations on my tongue. Moving away from home was like exploring a whole new world to please the senses, and I added to my hobbies "trying new cuisines."

If one tried to analyze this, they could read any number of euphemisms desired.

Dichotomy

He was the first to want me over the other girls--really want me, with all of my baggage and insecurities. He was the cliche--tall, dark, devastatingly handsome, and older, with a white smile and a big laugh. He was gentle with me, as if I were a glass menagerie in his large, strong hands. His patience won my trust, and his compassion won my heart. He was also older, more worldly, and much more experienced in ways than I had ever known.

"So, we need to discuss the boundaries," he said one night as we lay in front of my TV.

"Boundaries?" I asked naively, "Like what?"

"You know, like, where can I touch you and what's off limits." I must have immediately turned red, because he instantly added "Just so that I don't make you uncomfortable, that's all."

"Well, we can kiss, and you can touch here," I pointed to my neck, "and here," I lifted my shirt to touch my naval, "and then here," I touched my thighs. "But nothing weird or gross."

He laughed. "By 'weird' and 'gross', you mean...?"

"You know, like, that stuff."

"You mean sexual stuff?" I felt my face get hot again as he laughed. "You say that like it's so far-fetched."

"But isn't it? I mean, who really does that anyway?" I felt myself turning more red as he tried to contain his laughter.

"You're almost 16 years old. Do you mean to tell me that you really believe no one your age is having sex?" He paused to catch his breath and stroke my hair. "Oh, my sweet Rain, you really are a gem."

I felt myself starting to get angry at the thought of him ostracizing me. "I'm just saying that I'm not a loose girl, and if not being a slut is a bad thing, then fine, I don't care!"

He grabbed my hand in a light way and pulled me close to him. "No, no, I mean it--I love that you're pure and actually care about these things. I love you for not just giving yourself up like other girls do so easily, and I promise not to push you." I knew what he meant--he loved that I wasn't like the girls he'd dated before me. I knew he was experienced, and that thought was the one part of our relationship that scared me a little. And I knew that he meant what he said about not pushing.

My mother found all kinds of reasons to never come home, and when she didn't, I was too afraid to stay alone. He stayed with me, this boy, and would leave early in the morning to go home to get ready for school before his dad found him gone. Never once did he invade my space--he always slept in a sleeping bag on the living room floor, rather than pushing himself into my room. More often than not, I'd lay next to him with my own blanket and pillow, but he never asked for more. His presence was a protective figure in my life, saving me from the dangers of the drug addicts and pedophiles that lived on our street--to be expected for the ghetto in which we lived. He was safe, this boy, but he made me question the things I wanted to know about myself--the feelings I didn't want to have, the desires that I didn't want to feel. But he was dangerous, too, this force that was bound to upset the balance in my life.

Denial

My mother had the most intense fascination with sex. It wasn't perverse, but more of a need. Almost as if she believed that if she had sex with enough frogs, she'd eventually bed her prince. I realize now that she falls into the category of "women who use sex to get love", but I didn't have that label then. Early on, I was repulsed by her desperation, her seduction, and her promiscuity. My mom had a tiny body with a huge rack, and she dressed accordingly. She loved to giggle at strange men while flipping her silk mahogany hair across her shoulders. I had an understanding of flirtation before I ever added the word to my vocabulary.

I associated this needy mating dance with our poverty. The smart and successful women I knew didn't act like my mother, with her need for men and acceptance. So, I revoked everything about myself that was sexual and anything that had to do with boys. To me, sex was a pathetic, empty act that would leave me heartbroken, diseased, or--like my mother--pregnant long before I was ready to handle any of those things. I hated my breasts, my legs, and my curves. I disassociated myself from boys who saw me as anything more than an equal companion, and I rejected my own interest in the opposite sex. While my girlfriends giggled about their prepubescent crushes and wrote love notes to boys in class, I allied myself with the boys that I trusted would never take an interest in me. I saw myself as ordinary, plain enough to be overlooked and underestimated as a girl. I denied myself the thrill of being a tween girl because I didn't want to identify with her. It was more than just the men--that was just a symptom of what lied beneath.