The two books (of the Bible) I can remember reading as a fifth-grader are Job and Revelation.
Both books have apocalypse in common, which is what starts me thinking on this topic now, when my dreams have become filled with tribulations and end-times, and I think that was part of the appeal. Job undergoes a terrible personal transformation, a complete negation of his life before God intervened (or let the devil intervene, I suppose, but let's not argue semantics); the churches and the world-at-large undergo an equally total annihilation and rebuilding in Revelation. When I was in fifth grade, my family was just beginning its apocalypse; I think I wanted a manual.
I can remember thinking, reading Revelation, that if this ever happened, if the horsemen ever descended and began to destroy the earth, I would hide under my desk. It was at least as silly a plan as living in the creek would have been, if my mother had been finally taken away, but it comforted me just by virtue of being a plan, period. I can't remember a time before I sought to prepare for contingencies.
In college, I remember crossing the street with Sharon, and seeing a backhoe on a flatbed that was hitched to another truck. I realized suddenly that without thinking, I had planned three escape routes in case the flatbed came unhitched and the backhoe rolled down the steep hill we were walking across. It was automatic, that I did this. I worried that it was a sign.
It would have been a sign that I still wasn't normal, which was the goal.
My mother has always had a way about her, the ability to warp reality and turn reasonable events and statements into insanity. Growing up, I could hardly tell the difference between what she said was true, and what was objectively true -- which is the case for all small children, so nothing special. But it continued beyond the point where I could see differences -- between her ways and others', her world and the real one -- and split my focus between the two. She created a kind of fantasy land, in which we were the ogres and she the maligned saint, or the imperious queen, or the put-upon, unrecognized, cinderellian princess.
We lived in both of these worlds, this one that she had created, and the one where we went to school and to church and had friends.
I learned to translate, probably before I could read, between these worlds. By high school, I was an expert. I could recount a story from home to outsiders, knowing exactly what sorts of words to use to convey the sense of the injustice or offense my mother had caused, despite her most spiteful, vindictive behavior making sense almost exclusively in the realm of her fantasy.
She helped, of course, by using English to abuse us: "You're lazy and manipulative," she said when I didn't clean the bathroom to her always-fluctuating standards; "you're a leech," she said when I talked on the phone with my best friend; "you can't manipulate me into saying that," she told Tyler when he asked her if she loved us.
Really, really ridiculous stuff. So radically ridiculous that even the most practical real-world dweller could see how stupid and wrong it was. This needed almost no translation.
I argued with her almost constantly, and epically. My arguments were never short; somehow, I always expected her to see how wrong she was, if only I could come up with the perfect way to explain. I would fight until she said something so outrageous that even she had to see its flaws: Once, after probably two hours of loud debate, she finally said (in answer to "Why won't you trust anybody?"), "I don't trust people because if you do that, they might want you to do things for them, like wash their car."
I waited, watched her face for any sign of recognition.
Nothing.
But there were things that couldn't be explained to outsiders without serious effort: chores, and why they were such a struggle; why "not doing chores" could mean anything from forgetting to deciding not to, to doing them but not "good enough," to Mom just being in a bad mood; how a person's whole self-worth could be tied up in chores; what it was like to be grounded for months, for no reason (literally, no reason); what it was like to have her barge into your room, yelling because you had been maliciously keeping her from the phone -- when she had never told you she was waiting to use it. These required stories and metaphor to be understandable to others.
There were other things that could never be explained. They needed to be translated into words or events with the closest available meaning in the real world, to encourage appropriate feelings and responses in real-worlders. Real-world people saw, when it started, that she was admitted to one psychiatric hospital after another, sometimes for weeks at a time. They saw that we were without our mother, guests in others' homes, and separated, with our schedules disrupted, with our family in pieces. They felt sorry for us, for that.
They felt sorry for that instead of for the times we were home and together, when it was worse. They felt sorry because of the hospitals, so I let them.
Mom being home and going to bed earlier every night, asking me to put the boys to bed, not making dinner, laying prone on the couch for hours, became Mom going into the hospital.
Mom being so angry she would choke out insult after insult, became Mom going into the hospital.
Mom accusing us of trying to manipulate her in irrational paranoia, became Mom going into the hospital.
Eventually, Mom passing out on the street, altering her medication, calling me crying from a psych ward, Mom asking, absurdly, what cars were in the driveway or where we had put her "special pencil, " Mom needing help to get to the bathroom, Mom driving while drugged, Mom taking the handsets off the phones when she went out so we couldn't call anyone, Mom hissing in my ear that if we talked to DCF we would be separated forever "and I would be glad," all became Mom going into the hospital.
People could understand hospitals. Hospitals were bad.
But I can remember coming home from eighth grade and approaching our back door, seeing the handle before I could reach it, holding my breath: If it turned, she was home, and it was another day with her. If it didn't, she had been admitted again, and I would need to call people to stay with, and get the boys' clothes together, and make some biscuits (the only thing I could make) for dinner. Both options were terrible. But I never breathed a sigh of relief when it turned.
My guidance counselor from the eighth grade kept us at his house a few times, after we had exhausted Grandma and Grandpa's ability to watch us, and most church people's, and I described this to him once, this coming home and turning the handle, blithely, as a small point of conversation. He turned to me from the driver's seat with shock and a kind of horror on his face.
"I always knew when it was coming," I said, in explanation. "When she was getting closer to going in again."
"Why didn't you tell anyone?" he asked, and I was taken aback.
"Well who would I tell?" I answered.
When she would go in was home-world knowledge. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone outside home would believe it. Tyler knew. Spencer probably knew, though he was very young. But I didn't expect anyone outside the house to notice the subtle changes in her voice, her appearance, her schedule, her speech. And it never occurred to me to ask for help, even when I noticed. I just started packing our overnight bags.
Staying at other people's houses was like a small personal apocalypse every time. Everything you had and had been was exchanged for something new. Each home had a different smell, a different layout, a different type of family, a new dynamic. Some people treated us like family; some people treated us like guests. I watched them from a polite distance, like an anthropologist, and imitated.
These erasures of us, of our home, annihilated the whole fantasy-world, at least for a time. They were revelatory. They were, in a sense, grand-scale.
And there was always the possibility, always disappointed, that this time when she came out, she would actually be better -- this time, the medications would work, and she would be cheerful and normal and praise us and love us and stay with us. Maybe this time.
It never happened. She never recovered completely, though she stopped going into the hospitals, and last year when I was finally told her diagnosis, I could see why. I immediately began checking books out of the library and researched, hoping to recognize us in these real-world volumes, in real-world terms. We were there. One book described my experience -- the fantasy-world, the alternate reality, the apparent mind-reading, the compensating, the translation, the metaphor, the contingency plans, the invisible and inevitable apocalypses.
I saw that I would never be normal. It was too late for that.
But what I am left with, now, from this past, is a sense of magic: That is, an understanding of the fantasy worlds that people can live in, and how they affect us. I empathize automatically. I see the truth about people. I see the complications and the greys. I translate. I explain. I understand.
My job is to reveal -- my clients to the community, to me, to themselves, out of their fantasy-worlds so they can see the real one, too.
And that is why I'm good at it.
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