The following fall was my freshman year of high school. Since Bedford didn't have a high school, I had to take the bus to the big city of Manchester. Manchester High School West was a giant school with thousands of students. I got lost every single day. I didn't know anyone, except for an occasional Bedford kid peppered among the masses. And, you know how there's this giant discrepancy between ninth and twelfth grade?--I mean, Jesus Christ, there were guys with beards. There was a fucking smoking patio.
I remember one day getting off the bus when Julie, now only a casual friend, spotted me and came over to say hi. She laughed, "Remember how we used to go to that hypnotist for bedwetting? How hilarious was that!?" I laughed and agreed. It was hilarious--though not quite as hilarious as the fact that I was still going to Dr. Grimm. That I was still spending my nights and mornings wishing this humiliating hobby of mine would stop. Not as hilarious as that.
* * *
Summer Camp: The Second Worst Kind of Camp for Jews
* * *
I realized I was going to be a bedwetter for the rest of my life. I supposed maybe someday this nightmare would end, but even so, you're always an alcoholic, right? Even if you're living dry?
To still be a bedwetter in high school, to have a condition this deeply entrenched, is a pretty serious problem for a child. And to be factually accurate, not every measure my parents took to address the issue was the best one. But to be fair, they were doing what they thought was right. They were loving parents who did the best they could.
One of the biggest--and I would guess most common--mistakes parents make is to transfer their own childhood shit onto their kids. Whatever their joys and agonies were growing up, they assume will be exactly the same for their children, and they let it guide their parenting. I can see the same dumb instincts in myself. When I first started hanging out with my old boyfriend's kids, I found it depressing because I would just look at them and think of how miserable they must be, and how totally alone they must feel. To me, that's what childhood meant. But the truth was they were fine. Happy-go-lucky, even.
When they were kids, my parents were both unhappy during the school year. Both were Jews going to strict and highly religious Protestant schools in New England, which, in the 1950s, was very much not a blast. In fact, they describe their experiences as "Dickensian." But in the summer Mom and Dad both flourished. They were popular and thrived at their Jewish sleepaway camps, where Dad was hilarious and Mom was a star athlete.
And so, from six years old on, I was sent to sleepaway camp every summer. If you recall from several pages ago the terror I experienced in just one sleepover--now multiply that into a month's worth of nights.
It's not like my parents didn't consider that--they gave my counselors special instructions to walk me to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And let me tell you, the thought of a sixteen-year-old kid knowing my problem was oh so comforting. Summer camp--salvation to both my mom and dad--was, for me, a camp-fiery hell. My teeth were bigger than my face, I was coated in hair, and I smelled like pee. Of course, most events in life are about context. Had my parents instead sent me to live in the Baboon Reserve at the Bronx Zoo, I would have been happy and confident, judging the others for flinging poo, and feeling downright aristocratic.
First there was Camp Conastan. I was six and terrified and knew no one. Laura was there too but she was eleven and I never saw her. I cried every day and wet the bed every night. I would wake up, take off my wet clothes, put them in my hamper bag, and make my cot up like nothing ever happened.
When I was nine it was Camp Huckins. Same scenario, though I made some friends and was great at softball, soccer, and basketball, which gave me some confidence. I was the clown of my bunk, but still, I was sleeping in dried-pee sheets every night, so don't worry about me getting too cocky. I learned to make my bed perfectly after being yelled at in front of the whole bunk by my counselor, Ellen. She said that my hospital corners were shitty (I'm para-phrasing), and as she ripped my bedding apart for me to redo it, a fresh wet circle presented itself in all its glory for the bunk to see. My bunkmates were slack-jawed. Good going, Ellen, you fucking asshole.
When I was eleven I went to a camp called Forevergreen. It was a full eight-week Jewish camp--which was not salvation for me like it was for my parents. I didn't find life in Christian New Hampshire to be a nightmare. I wasn't ostracized for being different (other than being called "gorilla arms"). It was the '80s, not the '50s. This Jewy summer camp wasn't salvation; it was culture shock. Most all the girls had gone there every summer since first grade--they all knew each other, they were all friends.
Keeping a stiff upper lip at Camp Forevergreen
My counselor was the daughter of the people who owned the camp. Her name was Rachel and she was beautiful and blonde (one of those charmed vanilla Jews) and, uncharacteristically for a girl with those characteristics, angry. Superfucking angry. She clearly hated us, hated life, and did not want to be bothered. The perfect candidate to care for children separated from their families for an extended period of time. And who better to be privy to my painful secret, and to be at my side during my nightly marches of shame to the bathroom. She was openly grossed out and annoyed by me.
As I've said, I'm not a cynical person, and I don't believe that human beings are naturally evil. Cuntiness comes from somewhere. In Rachel's case, it was most likely because her sister died of cancer the previous year. For some, that kind of tragedy might make one more sensitive to other people's pain. For her, the event either turned her into--or did nothing to lead her away from already being--a cunt. In the middle of the night, with the human tenderness of a morgue technician, Rachel would poke me awake, and with hard, impatient exhales, make sure I knew that this was seriously cutting into her evening plans of sneaking cigarettes and fucking guys.
Another thing about camp: I hated swimming. I couldn't understand how these other kids just jumped into the cold water at swim period. The whistle would blow and all the kids would dive into the lake like little Pavlovian fishies and there I'd be, still on the dock, paralyzed. The counselor would first encourage me to jump in, then instruct me to get in, and then finally just scream at me. I'm not sure why I was such a pussy about it, but it was serious to me. The idea of being wet and cold...I dreaded swimming in the days as much as I dreaded swimming in my nights.
Life got so bad at Forevergreen that I went a little crazy. I would send letters home saying, "When you get this letter get in the car and pick me up!"
I would pretend that I was in a glass box--that I was in this glass container that no one could see, and it protected me. At night I would open the door and get out of the box to go to bed. In the morning I stepped into it and closed the latch. I dreamed that I would somehow be transported--that all this sadness and fear would actually fuel this glass box and carry me home.
Eighth graders at McKelvie School go on a four-day camping trip up Mount Cardigan. I was elected student leader of said camping trip, which I was proud of but extremely nervous and anxious about for a couple of reasons: (1) I was a bedwetter. This is going to be tricky, and (2) did I mention I PISS IN MY SLEEP?!
In the last month of my twelfth year, my mother helped me hide three diapers in the bottom of my sleeping bag and sent me off to go lead my fellow students camping. We were loaded onto the bus and on our way. When we got there, we lifted our gigantic packs onto our backs and up the mountain we hiked, led by me. I don't even think it was an hour before I started sobbing. When the teachers asked why I was crying, I reached for a more stoic answer than the truth.
"I'm worried about my mother being alone without me."
"Aw, I'm sure your mom will be just fine," the teacher said.
"No, she won't! You don't understand," I said, figuring broad and nondescript might be the way to go with this.
As we set up our tents it started to pour, and after eating our smoky, fire-burned dinner, we went to sleep. Surrounded by my tentmates, I subtly reached to the bottom of my
sleeping bag with my toes and took care of business without incident, probably because, in their wildest dreams--among the giggling and gossip and talking about boys--they would never guess that one of us was wearing Pampers.
* * *
Living with Unrelenting Agony and Shame Proves to Have a Downside
* * *
Our bus pulled into the school parking lot after our long journey. The kids hopped off to be met by their parents. I stepped off the bus and saw my mother, waiting with the other moms, smiling. I was suddenly overwhelmed with shame. I was so embarrassed by my behavior that first day of the trip, and seeing my mother made it real and permanent. This pain was compounded by the fact that with each step of the bus I descended, Mom was snapping pictures of me, the flash illuminating my shame from the inside out. I begged her to stop, but like a shuttering paparazzo she ignored me while continuing to take PICTURES. It's a bizarre way to be ignored.
Here my mom is telling me I'll be happy to have this picture someday.
As I walked to the car, enduring Mom's relentless camera flashes, a wave of...something...washed over me, and instantly transformed who I was. It happened as fast as a cloud covering the sun. It was at once devastatingly real and terrifyingly intangible. I felt helpless, but not in the familiar bedwetting sense. As quickly and casually as someone catches the flu, I caught depression, and it would last for the next three years.
* * *
Another Chronic Condition That Nobody Has Any Fucking Clue How to Treat
* * *
Everything about who I was changed. I was not telling jokes. Not chasing laughs. I had always been able to turn pain or discomfort into humor, but that trick was gone now. I couldn't relate to ever knowing it.
I stopped being social. The thought of seeing my friends felt like a burden. All I could focus on was that I was alone in my body. That no one would ever see through the same eyes as me, not ever. It filled me with a loneliness that only deepened when I was not alone.
My friends didn't understand. How could they? I didn't. My parents didn't. My friends even threw a surprise party for me for no reason, thinking it would make me happy again, but all it did was consume me with the guilt of knowing that no party in the world could change the fact that we are all alone.
* * *
An Emotionally Disturbed Teenager Is Given a Bottomless Well of Insanely Addictive Drugs As a Means to Improve Her Life, and Other Outstanding Achievements for the New Hampshire Mental Health Community
* * *
My parents sent me to a therapist. He was an old man whom my dad had seen give a lecture somewhere about working with kids dealing with divorce. Even though by this point my parents had been divorced for six years, my father figured my sudden depression was most likely a result of it. Who knows, maybe he was right? I walked into the therapist's office, and he had two chairs set up, facing each other. He had me stand with one foot on each chair, explaining that one represented my mother and the other, my dad. As I stood, he pulled the chairs farther and farther apart until I couldn't balance without jumping entirely to one chair or the other.
"I love them both!" I yelped, as I fell forward and off both chairs in defiance.
When Dad picked me up after the session, I told him what had happened, and it was back to the drawing board. The next therapist they sent me to seemed to have more promise. He was a psychiatrist, and that's like a real doctor. I described how I felt and he said, "Sarah, I'm going to write a prescription for a medicine called Xanax, and I want you to take one whenever you feel sad." I was thirteen.
Dr. Riley's office was in a big Victorian house in Manchester, New Hampshire. He shared the house with one other doctor--Dr. Grimm, whom you may recall as the hypnotist who did not manage to hypnotize me.
It was January and pitch-black out already at 4:00 p.m. when my mother dropped me off for my second appointment. I sat in the waiting room and flipped through People magazine. By the time I got to the end I realized I had been there for a long time. Finally, movement from upstairs--it was Dr. Grimm. He came down and walked straight to me. As our eyes met I noticed that his were red and tearful. He was trembling. And then, with no elegance, or any sign of bedside manner, he unleashed a primal scream directly into my face: "DR. RILEY HUNG HIMSELF!!!"
Following the scream was an ever so slightly more awkward silence. I feel bad that I'm about to make another criticism of Dr. Grimm--he's already come across so poorly in this story--but there is a larger medical point that should be serviced here. There needs to be some protocol, some set of standards, for how we tell depressed teenage girls that their shrinks have killed themselves. I'm not a psychology expert, but it seems to me that screaming the news at them, along with the detail of how it was done, is probably not the way to go. It might be the worst possible way to go. I'm glad that Dr. Riley did not saw off his own head with a chainsaw, or stab himself in the brain by jamming a spoon into his eye socket, because I would really not have enjoyed having that primally screamed at me. I'm not saying that Dr. Grimm should have lied to me, or told me that Dr. Riley was carried away by fairies. What I take issue with is the way in which he presented the information. At the very least, he might have sat me down and said, "Sarah, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who don't prefer to end their own life by strangulation with a rope, and those who do. Dr. Riley, well, he was more the latter."
Like a zombie, Dr. Grimm climbed back upstairs. I sat very still and waited the rest of the hour for my mother to come, my world lit only by the joint efforts of one small reading lamp and one flickering streetlight.
* * *
I Am Diagnosed with Not Having Enough Insanely Addictive Drugs Coursing Through My Veins
* * *
My parents took me to another counselor--a registered nurse in Boston whose husband was a doctor. They had a system where she would see patients, diagnose them, and then have big daddy write out the prescriptions. We would make the hour drive up early in the morning and be back by the time school started at 8:00 a.m. She kept me on Xanax but now at regular intervals, instead of just when I "felt bad." I continued not to improve, so each week she upped my dose. By the time I was fourteen, I was taking four Xanax four times a day. Sixteen Xanax per day total.
Although I never said it out loud, in my heart I thought, This cannot be right, so I saved each empty prescription bottle in a shoebox in my room as evidence if anything happened to me.
Freshman year of high school I missed three straight months in a row. I just couldn't go to school. I was paralyzed with fear. It was unbearable to be among other kids who were just standing around being fine. It was one of the many inconveniences of this paradox I lived with--the more people I was surrounded by, the more frighteningly alone I felt.
I still did my homework, but instead of my bringing it in, my mother would drop it off. It either speaks well of me, or, more likely, poorly of our public school system, that while attending almost none of my second semester, I maintained a 3.8 grade-point average.
My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the woodstove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like?" It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick." That still feels like the most accurate description--I felt homesick, but I was home.
My stepfather, John O'Hara
* * *
Convention Is Upended When a Man with a Porno Mustache Tries to Lure Me INTO a School Yard
* * *
Manchester High School West--the school I was not showing up to--was enormous. There were about three thousand students. It was not a bastion of tenderness and attention to individual needs. In my first semester alone, it had chewed up and spit out four freshman math teachers. The fifth one was named Mr. James. He reported for duty on his first day wearing a too-sma
ll three-piece brown polyester suit. He had a '70s porn mustache and feathered brown hair. The rumor was that he hadn't even finished high school himself.
After about two months of my not going to school, Mr. James started to show up at my house. My mom and I were actually both shocked that he was even aware of me--I'd been in his class only briefly before I stopped attending, and I was one of, like, 180 students he had. But he came every single day, never invited. We'd sit on the couch and he'd teach me the day's lesson plan, though I could have just as easily taught it to him. For some reason, being with him didn't make me feel alone the way being around other people did. I think because I sensed that maybe he didn't quite fit in this world, either.
Mr. James, his porno/Hitler mustache, and me
After a week of our daily unscheduled meetings, Mr. James asked me to think about returning to school. I said I didn't think I could. He said, "What about just coming to my class, Period C? It would mean so much to me." He was persistent, and couched it as a favor to him. Burdened with the necessity of being polite, I complied. I went just for Period C. Just what he had asked. It wasn't bad. I lived. After that first day I realized, "I could do this." So I went back the next day at Period C, and even stayed through to the end of the day. Within a couple of days, I was back in school full time. My depression was by no means lifted--to the extent that I could feel anything through my regimen of sixteen Xanax per day--but I finished out the year. Thanks to Mr. James.
The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee Page 3