Strange, this week I have had to be the sounding board for a young woman I know who suffers from bi-polar disease. She comes to our church, and is often struggling with her reactions to situations that arise. She takes offencse easily and has very strong reactions when she is upset.
Sometimes, when I am trying to bring her down from her intense anger, I hear my mother in my head. So far, I have been able to cope with these episodes of hers and I feel that in some way, I am validating my mother.
Sadly, she is wearing out everyone at church who has to deal with her. I'm afraid that before very long, I will be the only person who will be able to handle the situation. And when I wear out, what then?
In this most recent episode, when I finally got to her, she had already taken herself to her psychiatrist to see if her medication had to be adjusted. That's a very good sign. I hope she can now put to rest the situation that caused this blow-up.
To quote Brian Yorkey: "...there remains tremendous silence and shame around the subject [mental illness]. In part, we can probably thank our Puritan forebears and their Protestant ethic. But maybe there's more at work. Depression, unlike a disease with a virus that can be isolated or a germ that can be destroyed, is immensely complicated, and endlessly unique, and its outlines are often hard to trace. Because to seek to understand and treat depression is to try to grasp what it is that makes us human, what makes us love and grieve and behave the way we do. It's a noble and vitally important quest, and if there's no end in sight, the fight does go on."
Without going through all my previous archives, I have no idea if I've ever written about the following before. However, before I can discuss the musical, NEXT TO NORMAL, I have to put it into context, and that means reliving some of my childhood.
From early childhood on, I knew I was a bad girl. Even though most of the time I tried to follow the rules, I was always in trouble. And the difficult thing was, most often I didn't even know what I did wrong.
It seemed that those behaviors that were acceptable yesterday, would get me a whipping today; sometimes what was acceptable in the morning would get me a whipping in the afternoon.
I was sent from the dinner table so often I didn't know how to sit through a meal. I've wondered if my severe "restless legs", which have plagued me all my life and have become vicious as I age, came about because of all the whippings they received.
It wasn't until I was nine that I began to realize that my mother was different. Dad would come upstairs to my bedroom to console me after a whipping and tell me that Mom didn't mean it; she just didn't feel well.
The summer I was nine, Mom went into the hospital and my 2-year old brother and I were shipped off to a farm run by a childhood friend of my mother's. It was the happiest summer of my life. No matter what I did (and there were many adventures that summer, with my brother in tow), I was never scolded or punished.
I won't go into more detail, except to say that after a couple other hospital visits during the years, my mother died in the state mental hospital of viral pneumonia, a young 35. You see, she was bi-polar . I realize now that she was bi-polar when my dad met her when they were both 16, but then they didn't know why she had such violent mood swings.
I didn't know about the bi-polar diagnosis until after she died. I was 15, and the last time I had seen her, she had beaten me with my fife; she beat me because I didn't want the cookie she offered me. And it wasn't until I was around forty that I began to realize that I wasn't a bad child; I was a victim of a terrible mental disease that affected everyone in the family, as well as friends and neighbors.
Once I realized this, I began to find out whatever I could about this disease. I had heard the epithets, "crazy", "mental", "nervous breakdown", thrown at my mother when I was growing up, but I never related them to what was happening to me on a daily basis.
Even then, when I began to understand a bit about the disease, I looked at it from my point of view. I wasn't "bad"; I was just a normal child in an abnormal household.
It was a few years after reading Kay Jamison Redfern's wonderful autobiography, "The Unquiet Mind", that I realized just what hell my mother had gone through all her life. Her own problems were more than one person should have to bear, but she had the added pain of a bi-polar mother and grandmother.
The saddest part of my mother's illness was the era in which she was inflicted: she died in 1950, a year before the first tranquilizer came on the market, and 15 years or so before the medical community began to realize that this disease has a physiological basis. Now we know it is a chemical imbalance, and as long as the right medication can be found for a particular patient, and, most importantly, as long as the patient continues to take the medication, she can live a fairly normal life.
I thought I had put all this behind me. I knew my experiences have made me more open and generous to those who suffer from any mental illness and I thought I had laid all the old ghosts to rest, until...
Last Thanksgiving our family got together at my grandson's home for dinner. As a part of that weekend, my son, DJ, who is an associate artistic director at a major Washington theater, got us all tickets to a musical at his theater. The name of the musical is Next to Normal. "Mom, it's a musical about depression," he told me. Rather strange, I thought, but DJ said it was very good, so I joined the group at the theater.
Five minutes into the production, I realized it wasn't about depression, but a family suffering from the mother's bi-polar disease. And there was a 15 year old girl written into the story. I can't describe the emotions that gripped me throughout the entire production.
It is a great production; it captures the nightmare of this disease perfectly. It captures the fallout for the family perfectly. Too perfectly. The music is wonderful, and the lyrics are perfect. Too perfect. I felt like I was caught in a tornado of feelings, memories.
There is one song about half-way through the first act that struck such a chord in me that I could hardly breathe, "Superboy and the Invisible Girl". As this was sung by the actress playing the 15 year-old girl, I was transported back to the last time I saw my Mom.
The first act ended as the decision is made for the mother to have electric shock therapy. I couldn't stand it. Electric shock? My mother had been so afraid of this torture that my dad would try anything to keep her from having to go back into the hospital. How can I deal with this?
By the time intermission came along, I was a wreck. DB asked me if I wanted to leave and I said I had to see it through. I couldn't leave my mother, er, the mother in the play, on the verge of EST, which is the way it is referred to these days.
All through the play, inspite of the flashbacks I was experiencing, I had great respect for the lyricist/writer. The script captures all the nuances in this family's dynamics. "The Invisible Girl" and the song the mother sings to the father, "Why Stay", will remain me always.
Brian Yorkey wrote the script and the lyrics. I still wonder if he has lived with a bi-polar person at some time. He wrote a column in the program about depression and the cost in dollars and in human creativity and lives that demonstrates that he did a lot of research. But research alone would not have been enough to write such sensitive lyrics.
It was days before I could discuss this play and the effect on me. Finally, tentatively, I talked with a friend (not with family, or with DB), then in greater detail with my priest. Little by little I began to be grateful to DJ and to Brian Yorkey for helping me finally feel validated. Because for years, in my biological family I was the Invisible Girl.
Even after Mom died, because I was the oldest child, I was told I couldn't cry or grieve because the family was counting on me. I had to be grownup while all the grownups around me fell apart. My Dad, my wonderful Dad who had always stuck up for me, turned on me and for 20 years after, I wondered why.
Finally, I could talk about my reactions to this musical with DJ, via e-mail, and I knew I had really put the whole thing to rest when I could talk with DB. DB knew me in the difficult years right after Mom died. He was my rock and my sound post. He knew the night of the production that this was tearing me apart.
But now, I look back on my childhood with sadness for the young mother who endured such constant pain and fear, and I feel my experiences have been validated, on the stage of a theater. Especially they have been with the lovely song, "Superboy and the Invisible
Girl."
So, thank you son, and thank you Brian Yorkey. And thank you Lyra for the link to Jennifer Damiano singing "the Invisible Girl" on Youtube. I listened with sadness, but also with the comforting thought that I am strong and I am good.
What brought all this up now? The article about my son in our local paper, and the fact that Next to Normal is going to Broadway, with the wonderful cast that I saw in Washington, DC. Go see it; it will help you understand that relative's or friend's pain.
Life is good, precious, and real. Thanks be to God.
I'm going to begin this post, save it, and finish it tomorrow. I have a retreat this weekend, so it may take a couple days to actually complete the story.
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