by Anna Berry
Each year since, I’ve celebrated May 25—the anniversary of the first day I spent actively trying to change my borderline behaviors—as a second birthday of sorts. I’ve come a long way in ten years. I’ve gone from being broke, unemployed, abandoned, self-loathing, and homeless to becoming a happily married wife and mother with a stable home, a loving husband, two beautiful children, sound finances, and a successful career. I am here to tell you that no matter what anyone says, mental illness does not mean you can’t have a good life. You can, and I’m living proof.
When I put my kids to bed each night, I watchfully gaze over them, stroke their tiny foreheads, and say two little prayers. One, that they will never know the pain and anguish of the mental illnesses that have plagued their mother and her family for seven generations. And two, that if (God forbid) my kids ever do have to suffer under the weight of mental illness, that with my love and support, they’ll be able to find their way out of the darkness and into the light. I am not my parents, who were unable to help me because they were too busy dealing with their own struggles. But I don’t hold that against them. I was able to help myself, and I will teach my children to do the same.
I say these prayers knowing that many, if not most, of the people in this country who struggle with mental illness haven’t been so lucky. I say it knowing too well just how unlucky my own family members are in managing their own illnesses. To this day, my mother and brother struggle on—mostly in vain—to survive and thrive under the weight of their afflictions. The remainder of this book is their story—and my own, as both their survivor and their caretaker.
1. Not his real name.
2. Daniel Thomasulo, PhD, “A General Theory of Love, Part 1,” PsychCentral, World of Psychology, February 9, 2011, http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/09/a-general-theory-of-love-part-1/.
3. Janice Lloyd, “Many With Mental Illness Go Without Treatment, Survey Says,” USAToday, January 19, 2012, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/medical/health/medical/mentalhealth/story/2012-01-19/Many-with-mental-illness-go-without-treatment-survey-says/52653166/1.
4. Not her real name.
5. C. N. Alexander et al., “Transcendental Meditation, Mindfulness, and Longevity: An Experimental Study with the Elderly,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989): 950–64.
6. P. Carrington and H. S. Ephron, “Meditation and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of American Academy of Psychoanalysis 3 (1975): 43–57; Padmasiri de Silva, An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
Chapter 5
Mom: A Relapse
The thing I remember most about my early childhood is visiting my mother in the psych ward.
By age eight or so, I believe that all mothers spend at least part of the year locked up in psych wards. It’s that normal to me. At eight years old, my child’s mind begins to believe that all mommies are crazy, and the job of all daddies and kids is to help take care of their crazy mommies. It takes me a few more years to understand that mommies who are locked up in psych wards are not normal mommies and that the daddies and children who have to help take care of them aren’t normal either.
As any child of a mentally ill parent can tell you, there will always be a time when the traditional parent/child roles are reversed. It has come for me many times—the first when I was eleven years old and my mother threw away clothes and furniture in an obsessive/compulsive fit one day then collapsed into a zombie-like state the next. Back then, I’d “parented” by scolding my mother when she trashed my prized possessions and then cooking my own dinner and doing my own laundry. I thought that when I moved out of my mother’s house as a young teenager and into my dad’s home I’d be finished with that role forever. I was wrong.
In the spring of 2004, when my mother begins to relapse into her worst drug-addiction and clinical depression/anxiety pattern in twenty years, there’s little I can do to “parent” her from three hundred miles away. That doesn’t stop her (or the authorities) from relying on me for all sorts of supervisory intervention, though.
In early 2004, I am newly married and my husband and I have just purchased our first home, a three-bedroom two-bath rehab condo on Chicago’s North Side. My new husband George,[1] a hardworking immigrant to this country from Hong Kong, knows a little about my family’s (and my own) history of mental illness, but not much. George has made it clear he accepts my family’s many psychological foibles, but he also doesn’t want to get directly involved in any impending crises, either. As my mother begins a rapid meltdown in the months immediately following our marriage, however, I find it more and more difficult to shield George from what is going on back in Indiana.
At this time I have a job doing technical writing for a library-cataloging software company. The job is stressful and tedious and the company isn’t doing well financially. I know I have to find a better job soon, but with a marriage and a mortgage to consider, I can’t do anything to jeopardize even this crummy job until I have another one lined up. The Chicago economy is only starting to bounce back from a long recession, and I know it could take six months to a year to find anything at a comparable salary. In the meantime, I have to be on my best behavior at work.
Mom has trouble understanding this.
Every day for a week in mid-April, I show up for work promptly at 9:00 a.m. to find at least thirty voice mails on my work phone, all from Mom. Her voice changes modulation and speed every few seconds, like an old reel-to-reel tape that’s been heat-damaged on playback.
“Anna, it’s Mom. I j-j-just need to know if everything is g-g-going to be all right with my Social Security. I submitted the papers but now I don’t know. I don’t know I don’t know Idunnnnnoooo. Is everything going to be all r-r-right with my Social Security? I need to know. I NEED TO KNOW. Is everything going to be all right? Is. Every. Thing. Going. To. Be. All. Right. Iseverythinggoingtobe ALLRIGHT?”
I always delete everything after the first message, knowing full well there will be another twenty-nine just like it. It takes me almost twenty minutes to clear out my voice mail some mornings—Mom leaves me more than fifty voicemails on my work phone one night this week, the very same night that I call the phone company and have Mom’s number blocked on my home phone after she calls almost sixty times in less than two hours, frightening my husband and infuriating me.
When I come into work the next day, there is a Post-It note on my computer screen instructing me to go meet the head of HR in her office immediately. My desk phone rings as soon as I sit down. I glance at the caller ID screen and recognize my mother’s Indiana area code. I ignore the phone; it rings four times, then stops. A moment later, it starts ringing again, the Indiana area code back on the phone’s digital screen. The phone rings four more times, stops, then starts again. I switch the ringer off.
The HR department secretary walks sheepishly up to my cubicle, and hands me a pink slip of paper telling me I have to report to HR now (“now” is in capitals and underlined three times in red ink).
I know exactly what’s coming.
“Anna, we are concerned that you may be abusing your telephone privileges,” my employer’s HR director says after she shuts the door to her office and sits down. “The information services department tells me you have had an unusually large number of voice mails lately, and it’s been causing problems with the telephone system. And the receptionist tells me that whenever she transfers clients to your extension in the early morning, the line is busy and your voice mailbox is full. What’s going on?”
I fiddle with my hands. “My mother is mentally ill,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper. I say this without fear of retribution or judgment because it’s just a fact I’ve lived with and accepted since childhood. I say it as matter-of-factly as I would a remark about the weather or the Chicago Cubs’ current losing streak, and I think nothing about how my frankness about my mother’s condition could somehow come back to haunt me at work. And yet, I soon find out I will pay
a heavy price for my honesty.
“Mom’s having a—well—an attack of her illness right now, and one of the things she does when she’s having an attack is dial the phone incessantly. She’s been calling me at work. I’ve told her to stop it several times, but—” I sigh and stare at the floor.
The HR director just stares blankly at me. I notice with some amusement that the framed diploma behind her desk says she graduated college with a degree in psychology.
“I’ve told her several times to stop calling me at work,” I repeat. “But she’s just not listening,” I say. Trying to appear the model employee, I add a little white lie. “I was actually planning to come talk to you about this today. I want to get some more information about the employee assistance program. I remember from the brochures I got when I was hired that it has a support program for dealing with family mental illness issues.”
The HR director just keeps up her blank stare. She picks up a pencil from her desk, puts it down again, but says nothing.
“I’m also wondering if there is any way I could have my mother’s number blocked from the phone system,” I go on. “I was able to do that on my phone at home, and—”
The HR director blinks. “You mean to tell me that you blocked your own mother’s telephone number?” Her tone is cold, judgmental. “Why on earth would you want to do something like that? I mean, she’s your mother.”
“I know that, but—”
The HR director raps her knuckles on her leather desk pad like a schoolteacher. “You are just going to have to tell your mother that the calls must stop,” she says. “We don’t have the capacity to block calls here. We are a business, and as such we are in the business of receiving telephone calls from our clients and from the public. I don’t want to hear about any more inappropriate personal calls coming in after today, Anna. All right?”
“With all due respect, it’s just not that simple.”
The HR director—an attractive, well-dressed woman in her middle thirties; I’ll call her “Stella”—shakes her head and sighs. She receives a six-figure salary for processing insurance forms, mediating manager-employee conflicts, and discreetly escorting fired workers off the premises, so I’d think that if anyone at the third-rate software company I work for writing technical manuals and the occasional press release is capable of helping me, it’s her. But it appears that supposition is wrong.
“Frankly, I don’t see what’s so difficult about telling your mother to stop calling you at work,” she snaps. “Especially considering that our company policy is to keep personal calls to a minimum, and never to allow them to interfere with company business.” Stella’s perfectly waxed eyebrows raise, and her hazel eyes bear into mine. “And especially considering the complaints I’ve been getting about your abrasive, forceful personality, Anna. From what I understand, it hardly seems as if you have a problem ordering people around.”
My jaw drops. I have absolutely no idea what Stella is talking about. Sure, I’ve had problems with that kind of behavior before, but I’ve been going out of my way not to engage in it for years now. I’m so self-conscious of my past problems with my short temper that now, if anything, I go out of my way to be so nice to people that they find my upbeat, bubbly, and overly helpful nature annoying. I frantically think back, trying to remember anything I could have done or said that might even remotely have been misconstrued as rude, nasty, or unhelpful. The only thing I can think of is the fact that I turned down a coworker from the Java-coding department for a date (he didn’t realize I was married), and that I spend all my lunch breaks reading books instead of socializing. Do they think I’m a snob? Do they not like the way I dress? Did I look at someone the wrong way? Did I ask the lead programmer for the newest library software too many questions when I got a difficult proposal-writing assignment for a library in Bogota, Colombia? The possibilities race through my mind all at once, and my eyes glaze over.
Stella picks up on this. “You see, Anna? This is exactly what I mean. Your boss just told me about how you daydream in meetings too much. I didn’t believe her at first, but wow.”
Then a sinister thought occurs to me. I wonder if perhaps Stella has noticed I’m seeing a psychotherapist based on my medical insurance claims. I see the psychotherapist not because I’m feeling unstable or even mildly ill, per se, but simply because I periodically go back to therapy as a sort of “tune-up.” Just like your car needs regular oil changes and maintenance, so too does someone like me who has successfully overcome crippling mental illness. It’s just a long-term management strategy. My current therapist even asked me the other day why I feel the need to keep seeing her when I’m doing so well, but I told her it’s mostly to help me deal with the stress my mother’s mental illness is causing for both me and my husband, rather than my own issues.
Besides, it’s not like I get a lot of opportunities to “order people around,” as Stella says. I’m a low-level technical writer, for God’s sake—all I do all day long is read mind-numbing software code and translate it into intelligible English for use in sales and marketing materials. There are sometimes entire days when I don’t speak to anyone except to ask one of the programmers what a line of Javascript means. Where is all of this coming from? I take a long, deep breath before jumping to any conclusions, and instead I ask a polite question, just as my therapists have taught me to do. “I’m sorry, Stella, but could you please be a little more specific about what you mean by my abrasive personality?”
“Your supervisor will be talking to you more about that,” Stella says curtly. “But between you and me, you should really watch your manner around people, Anna. You tend to rub people the wrong way.”
I’m still drawing a blank, but I try to steer the conversation back to the positive. “How, exactly? Can you be specific? You know, so I can be aware of how I might rub others the wrong way? I can’t change my behavior if I don’t know how—”
Stella chuckles. “Frankly, if you even have to ask me that question, that’s a pretty big measure of what the problem is.” She takes a booklet on the employee assistance program out of a drawer and tosses it at me. “Now if you’ll pardon me, I have a new employee starting this morning and I need to go do an orientation. Good day.”
I feel as if I’ve been punched in the stomach. It’s clear to me what is happening here now. My employer has gotten wind of my family’s mental health problems, and they want me out the door because of it. They’re just looking for an excuse to fire me, and now I’ve given them one. I really need to find another job, and fast.
I go back to my desk and sure enough, my voicemail light is blinking. I log in to the voicemail system and discover that Mom has left me eight new messages during the ten minutes I’ve been in the HR office. I know they’re all from her because her home number is stored in my caller ID eight times.
I delete all eight messages without listening to them.
I try to immerse myself in my latest writing assignment, a business proposal to provide cataloging software services to a foreign national library. But I can’t concentrate. I keep bracing myself for the next time the phone will ring—and I know it will, it is only a matter of minutes—with Mom talking in her gritty, rapid-fire, drug-addled slur, a voice that sounds like a defective electric typewriter that won’t shut off.
I analyze and reanalyze the scolding I’ve gotten from Stella in HR, and I feel all the old anxieties and insecurities of my worst borderline personality disorder days creeping back. How exactly do I “rub people the wrong way?” What am I doing wrong? Am I not doing enough at work to hide the fact that Mom’s latest relapse is really getting to me? Has Mom perhaps started dialing my coworkers’ extensions at random and asking them if everything is going to be all right? Am I in the early throes of a brief psychotic episode myself? Have I verbally abused a coworker recently and somehow forgotten about it? Do my inescapable nutjob genes and resulting chemically defective brain doom me to fail at any nine-to-five job I undertake?
Or do
I perhaps just work for a crappy third-rate company staffed with paranoid, gossipy, and immature people? Is it that perhaps I’m abrasive at times, but that my coworkers are also highly sensitive, not to mention miserable at work? Maybe we’re all a little abrasive at times when we’re unhappy. It’s certainly possible. I glance over the top of my cubicle wall and see two of the other tech writers—both librarians by training, not professional writers per se—whispering and nodding in my direction when they think I’m not looking. Most of my coworkers at the software company are less than enthusiastic about their jobs, and I get the feeling during weekly staff meetings that my two cowriters resent the fact that I usually complete my assignments a full week ahead of deadline and then go off in search of writing projects from other departments to keep me busy until our managing editor assigns me something new.
I have, again, fallen victim to my own extraordinary efficiency—a skill I’ve developed over the years out of necessity because I’m never sure when either a family mental health crisis or my own depressive/borderline psychotic behaviors will kick in. It’s a skill I cultivated in college and grad school and mastered at my first job out of school as a financial editor at the high-pressure brokerage firm. Any day that I feel reasonably coherent and stable, I have to get all my work done at lightning speed because there is no guarantee I’ll still be reasonably coherent and stable enough to finish it the next day. (Either that, or I’ll have to go jetting off to Indiana to help my family deal with my mother’s or my brother’s latest nervous breakdown.) As a result, I can type over a hundred words a minute, read faster than 99 percent of the population, and copyedit complex, hundred-page documents written in the most mind-numbing technical jargon imaginable in an hour or less.