by Anna Berry
That monomaniacal efficiency worked well enough for me in school when it came to making sure I still got decent grades even when I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But it hasn’t worked so well in the corporate world, where I soon learn that the average office drone doesn’t like to be upstaged by the new kid on the block, especially when the new kid on the block is younger and prettier than they are. I’ve lost jobs because of it before, a Machiavellian victim of my own competence, and my own fear of relapse. And it appears that after only six months on the job at the library software company, it is happening again.
Mom isn’t helping matters. The phone rings again—Mom’s Indiana phone number appears on my caller-ID screen for the umpteenth time. I know I have to take this one, there’s just no avoiding it.
I pick up the receiver. “Mom, I know it’s you,” I say, not even bothering with hello. I make sure to keep my voice low, lest I give my meddling coworkers anything else to whisper or gossip about. “Listen to me very carefully. You cannot call me here at work anymore. You cannot leave me any more phone messages. You are getting me into trouble at work and if you don’t stop, I am going to get fired. Do you understand?”
“A-A-Anna, I just need to know if ev-ev-everything is going to be oh-kuh-kuh-kay—”
“Mom, I am only going to say this once. If you call again, I will call the local life squad and have them take you straight to the state hospital psych ward. And I know you don’t want to go back there.” The state hospital’s emergency psych ward is infamous. Mom stayed there once, several years ago when she had no health insurance, and the experience still gives her nightmares. Mentioning it is a cruel and manipulative tactic for me to use, I know, but she’s left me no other choice.
“Well, Mom? Are you going to stop calling?”
Silence. I take that as a yes.
“Good. I’m hanging up now.” I return the phone to the receiver without saying goodbye. Tough love at its best and worst.
With that, I’m able to shrug off the whole affair for the rest of the morning and actually get some real work done. I complete the bulk of my current writing assignment and send it to the managing editor for review, then take off for lunch. When I get back, I’m relieved to find no frantic, slurred voicemail messages waiting for me. I think that my tough-love statements just might have worked, and I picture my mother sitting alone in her two-bedroom bungalow in that cheap, gritty, working-class Indiana town, idly watching daytime television, drinking diet soda, and chain-smoking. Maybe she’s telephoned her therapist or perhaps her Social Security disability caseworker and they were able to calm her down. Whatever the reason for her silence, I’m thankful for it. I can’t afford to lose my job over her obsessive-compulsive, anxiety-laden telephone habits. Not now.
My relief is short-lived, however.
Shortly after I return from lunch and open the PDF file that contains my newest writing assignment—a request for proposal for cataloging services from a prestigious university library—my phone rings again. I notice from the caller ID that the number has an Indiana area code and exchange, but I don’t recognize the extension. I consider ignoring it, figuring my mother might have gone to her next-door neighbor’s house to make her call to try to trick me into thinking it isn’t her. But something in my gut tells me to pick up the receiver, so I do.
“Hello, this is Anna Berry speaking.”
“Ms. Berry, this is Officer James Caruthers.”[2]
I feel the bottom drop out of my stomach. “Yes?”
“Ms. Berry, I’m here at your mother’s house. She called us asking for help. We’ve got the fire department here as well. We don’t know what we can do to help her. She told us to call you.”
I swallow hard, willing my voice to keep itself low and businesslike. I glance across the aisle and see that two of my coworkers are eyeing me suspiciously. I have to somehow make this end of the conversation sound to them as if I’m conducting a business call. “Is ahhh, is your client well at this time?” I ask. I feel like a callous idiot referring to Mom as if she’s a random business associate and not my own mentally ill mother. Officer Caruthers must think I’m as nutty as she is.
I hear some muffled conversation in the background. “Ma’am, the fire personnel have paramedics with them on the truck and they’ve taken your mom’s vital signs. They say she’s fine physically, but—”
I cut Officer Caruthers off. “I would encourage you, sir, to advise your client that our company cannot assist her in this matter, and to thank her for contacting us.” I say this ridiculous statement loud enough for my coworkers to shrug off my phone call as business-related instead of personal; they stop eyeing me and get back to their work. As a bewildered Officer Caruthers hems and haws on the phone, I lean down below the level of my cubicle wall, cover the lower part of the receiver with my hand, and whisper, “Officer Caruthers, I’m very sorry about that just now, it’s just that I can’t be dealing with this . . . situation on the phone while I’m at work. I’ve already told my mother to stop calling me here. The only reason she called the police was to get you to call me for her. She’s just being manipulative, is all. I’m sure you understand.”
Officer Caruthers coughs. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t understand any of it. “Well, what do you want us to do, ma’am?”
“Tell my mother to stop calling me. Then leave.”
Officer Caruthers coughs again. “Can do, ma’am. But your mother needs to understand that she can’t call the fire department and the life squad and the police department out to her house all at once for no reason. That’s a false alarm, and it’s a misdemeanor. We’ll let her off with a warning this once, but if she does it again, there’ll be a fine, plus we’ll bill her for the officers’ time—”
“Tell my mother what you’ve just told me. Maybe then she’ll learn. If she calls you again, just take her over to the psych unit at the state hospital and let them deal with her. Good-bye, Officer Caruthers.”
I hang up.
That night when I come home, I tell George what happened. My new husband already knows that my current job security is shaky at best, and he can’t understand why my mother would do anything to jeopardize my job there even further. George—who grew up in a tiny three-room Hong Kong apartment with his parents, five brothers and sisters, and a grandmother; and who is the product of an Anglicized Cantonese culture that values hard work, a good income honestly earned, and family stability above all other things—can’t fathom the pathetic state my mother is in either.
“Your mom is very selfish,” he says that night at dinner. “Very, very selfish.” I can tell George is angry because his Cantonese accent always thickens to the point that he sounds just like Martin Yan from the PBS cooking program Yan Can Cook whenever he gets mad.
I sigh. “No, honey. She’s sick.”
He scoffs. “Well, then she’s in some kind of sickness that makes her selfish. She needs to stop. She needs to stop acting like a stupid selfish woman.”
I sigh again as I dribble too much soy sauce onto the shrimp lo mein George has so lovingly prepared for us in his prized Joycook wok. “I wish it were that simple,” I say. “But it’s just not.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” And if I did, I probably could have figured out by now how to permanently cure my mother, my brother, and myself of the illness that has plagued us all since the beginnings of our lives.
As I finish eating my dinner that night in silence, I think over the past several years of my mother’s life, trying to piece together where or when she might have begun her latest downward spiral back into clinical depression and obsessive/compulsive anxiety. Mom had done so well for so long, I took for granted that she would always be well.
But of course, I should’ve known better. You never really recover from mental illness. Like cancer, or alcoholism, mental illness isn’t ever “cured”—it merely goes into remission. Like a savvy cat burglar, mental illness always lurks somewhere in the depths and crevi
ces of the afflicted’s brain, and it can pick its time to jump out of the shadows and back into your life whenever it wants to. That’s why I continue to go to psychotherapy even when I don’t need to; it’s why I constantly meditate and study how mindfulness can manage your emotions; it’s why I constantly second-guess myself and my own behavior; and it’s why I tried to choose my polar opposite to marry too. George and his family seemed to me the picture of stability and wellness—they seemed everything that my family was not.
There are things you can do to keep the cat burglar at bay, sure. Psychotherapy, medication, meditation, a supportive social network, a loving spouse, a twenty-four-hour crisis hotline can all help. But just like alarm systems and deadbolts on a house, all these precautions can still fail. Especially when the cat burglar in your brain is a master thief, the kind capable of stealing a Michelangelo right out from under the nose of a team of armed guards. That’s the kind of cat burglar that lives inside my mother’s brain, and in the spring of 2004, the cat burglar very nearly manages to steal her brain away permanently—and her body along with it.
After spending much of the 1980s and early 1990s going in and out of psych wards, collecting disability checks, and taking loads of psychoactive drugs—interspersed by periods of brief lucidity in which she manages to hold down menial jobs (cashier in a bakery, assembly-line worker at a plastics factory, bank teller)—my mother makes a substantial step toward total recovery in the winter and early spring of 1994.
I am twenty years old in 1994 and finishing up my sophomore year of college. Mom and I were not very close during my high-school years—she was either too ill to see me or so clingy and smothering during our infrequent visits (my brother and I were then living with my father) that she made me feel like a coddled three-year-old. But we’ve gradually grown closer during my first two years of college. I take a cab from campus over to Mom’s tiny apartment (she doesn’t have a car) on weekends and spend the afternoon sitting at her kitchen table, gossiping about the boys from campus who have crushes on me and telling her about my English literature classes, a subject Mom has always dreamed of going to college to study herself.
Mom has spent the past two years living alone in a two-room apartment in a dilapidated, subdivided Victorian-mansion-turned-rooming house, where she shares an ancient bathroom with an elderly schizophrenic man who lives across the hall. She and her second husband Bob, a janitor at the local YMCA, are separated during this time, but they remain amicable and visit each other frequently. Bob soon takes the attic apartment in the same building to be closer to her.
Mom and Bob very nearly divorced following a major depressive episode in 1990–1991 that landed Mom in a hospital psych ward for an extended lockdown stay that rendered her completely dependent on a potent mixture of multiple benzodiazepines and sleeping pills. At the height of this period of illness, Mom and Bob got into physical fights a few times, and Mom also overdosed on a mixture of antianxiety drugs and alcohol—an event which brought about a second hospitalization that just increased her drug intake even more. She’d already been unable to work for almost a year when the breakdown happened, and the combined strain of their resulting extreme low income, Mom’s volatile behavior, and her massive, unpaid medical bills led to a near-collapse of their marriage, progressing as far as the filing of divorce papers and the hiring of attorneys. Mom and Bob remained estranged until late 1993, when they decided not to complete the divorce proceedings but to continue living apart.
One of Mom’s therapists thinks it will be good for her to try to live entirely on her own for the first time in her adult life. Bob agrees, and together they decide to be just platonic “friends” for a while, without necessarily having the ultimate goal of repairing their marriage.
The arrangement does end up being very good for Mom. Because she married out of my grandparents’ house almost immediately after high school and depended on my father financially throughout their marriage and then for alimony and child support after their divorce (all the way up to the day she married Bob, in fact), Mom has never been completely responsible for herself—financially, emotionally, or otherwise. She’s still unable to hold down a full-time job, but she can take on odd jobs and still receive her Social Security Income (SSI) disability as long as she doesn’t earn more than $900 a month. With the help of a caseworker, Mom collects and deposits her own disability checks, takes a bus to group therapy at the county Mental Health Department three times a week, and takes a cab to and from her private sessions with her new psychiatrist once a week. She finds a part-time babysitting job for the couple who lives next door to the rooming-house; they soon befriend Mom and use her as their primary source of weekend and evening child care for the next several years, even after my mother returns to full-time work.
Her psychiatrist at this time, Dr. Friedman,[3] is one of the few old-school Freudian psychiatrists left in her area and also one of the very few psychiatrists who ever treats Mom with total compassion, respect, and sound medical ethics. Dr. Friedman works for QCB,[4] a social-work agency contractor that does Mom’s case management on behalf of the Mental Health Department and administers her SSI disability checks. When Mom becomes a full-time staff member at QCB a few years later, Dr. Friedman also becomes her colleague.
The first thing Dr. Friedman does when Mom goes for her intake session is tell her she’s on way too many drugs. Mom tells me that when Dr. Friedman first reads her file after her hospital transfers him her records, he goes white as a sheet. “I don’t know who the hell put you on all of this shit, but they should be shot,” he tells her. And Dr. Friedman is right—given my mother’s family history of substance abuse, not to mention her own problems with prescription drug addiction and frequent alcohol abuse, she should never have been considered a good candidate for taking any psychoactive drug on the federal controlled substances list, let alone six or seven or even ten at once.
Dr. Friedman promptly reduces Mom’s meds to a moderate “little cocktail,” as he calls it, of two tricyclic antidepressants in relatively small doses. One will help with both her depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the other will regulate her sleeping patterns. Dr. Friedman’s “little cocktail” is a work of pure psychoactive genius, and it keeps Mom happy and healthy for several years. He then not only helps Mom get enrolled in the county’s intensive group-therapy sessions and a high-level case-management program for indigent patients, he also facilitates getting Mom registered for a government-supported job-retraining program designed especially for mental health “consumers.” This very progressive program trains mental health consumers (a politically correct term for psychiatric patients) for jobs in healthcare administration, drawing in part upon their experiences having to navigate a complex and often hostile healthcare system while seeking treatment for their own mental illness. The program’s graduates go on to good jobs in medical records administration, insurance claims processing, patient advocacy, and mental health social services. Dr. Friedman is able to see through Mom’s thick, bloodstained layers of emotional scar tissue built up by her years of mental illness to see that she is an intelligent, empathetic, and potentially capable healthcare employee.
Mom will have to remain on a waiting list for at least three months to get into the training program, but once Mom shows that she’s responding well to his “little cocktail,” Dr. Friedman gets her a volunteer position at a local hospital’s Psychiatric Department where he has admitting privileges and where she was once a patient herself. Mom volunteers there three half-days per week, answering phones, greeting visitors, and pulling charts. It gives her something to look forward to, and it also makes her feel useful—two key components to any successful recovery from advanced clinical depression and anxiety disorders.
One day in early spring I go over to Mom’s two-room apartment to find a woman living there whom I barely recognize. She no longer trembles like a quaking aspen. Her eyes are no longer glazed over and drooped, but look brightly out onto the world. Mom gree
ts me with a smile, a handshake, then a light hug, and tells me a funny story about the two neighbor children she babysits two or three nights a week while their parents work second shift. She tells me about all the interesting people she meets working behind the reception desk at the hospital. She tells me how excited she is to be on the government training-program’s waiting list, and she shows me notes she’s made in a spiral notebook on the kinds of jobs she’d like to have once she graduates from the program.
For the first time in almost fifteen years, my mother has hope. For all intents and purposes, Dr. Friedman and his “little cocktail” have worked a miracle.
Another miracle happens shortly thereafter. Someone drops out of the job-training course unexpectedly, and this makes room for Mom a full three months earlier than planned. She gets the call from her caseworker late one evening saying that if she wants the slot, she’ll have to agree to be at the training center downtown the next morning at seven; if not, it goes to the next person on the waiting list. Mom calls me at my dorm with the news, then asks if I can help her figure out which bus routes she’ll have to take and when. I throw a sweatshirt over my pajamas and go to the student union to get a bus schedule, then I call Mom back to tell her there’s a bus she can pick up two blocks from her apartment that stops right in front of the job center. But it’s a long, winding route that will take almost an hour to get downtown, and she’ll have to be on it no later than six in order to be on time.
“Oh, I’ll be on it at five,” she giggles in a voice easily twenty years younger than her actual forty-four. “No way will I risk being late. You never know with these city buses. I can just bring a book to read if I’m there too early.”