Our Secret Life

It’s a Thursday night. August 1986. I have to pack a bag because Dad is picking up my brother and me tomorrow. Dad’s new place is weird. It’s called a duplex, which is like half a house with a garage in the back. We have to walk through the tiny backyard to get inside. Everything in the backyard is dead and every room inside is practically empty. There's a couch and a table and a few beds, but that's it. Nothing on the walls. Nothing on the kitchen counters. Dad doesn’t fit in that kitchen. It’s beige and boring and it smells like old cheese. The kitchen at home is peach and cornflower blue and smells like his Sunday roast. All we eat in the beige kitchen are sandwiches.

Also, Dad doesn't buy conditioner. The first time I washed my hair at his house, I asked where the conditioner was. Dad said I don’t need it. He sounded upset with me. I don’t know if it’s the conditioner that worries me or the tone of Dad’s voice. Probably it’s the conditioner.

Mom is acting strange. Maybe strange isn’t the right word. It’s the way she always acts when Dad’s weekend is coming up. She pretends to be sad but really she’s angry. I think she’s angry at me. She’s also taking more of her medicine, and sometimes it makes her sleep all day. She says the pills are from her doctor and that makes them okay, but I don’t think she tells her doctor about all the sleeping.

I know the problem. She doesn’t want my brother and me to go to Dad’s. He left us. That’s what she says, and I can tell by her tone that this requires punishment and that I’m expected to help deliver it.

I’m torn. I love my dad even though I don’t love his stinky beige kitchen or the tangles I get in my hair after I wash it without conditioner. But I love Mom too. I want her to get out of bed and be my mom again. I clean and I cook. I feed the dog. I try to take care of my brother, but he's eight and also pretty smart so he doesn't need much. We don’t talk about what’s happening. Mostly we just kind of tiptoe around our house, pretending everything is normal. Sometimes the neighbors help. They mow the lawn and bring us food. It’s kind of embarrassing.

Mom comes into my room as I’m packing. I say something about going to Dad’s, and suddenly she’s screaming. Tearing at her hair. She says she’s going to kill herself and runs toward the kitchen. I freeze. I don't know what to do. This has happened before, but Dad usually fixes everything while I hide in my bedroom. I run after her, my heart pounding, nothing in my head except that I have to stop her. I have to stop her.

She grabs a knife from the drawer and runs toward her bedroom. I chase her into the bathroom. She flops onto the stool she uses to do her makeup in the mornings. She's holding the knife and saying she's going to do it this time, she's really going to do it. I believe her. She’s crying hard like I did that time my brother found our dead cat on the front porch. Except that day I had tears gushing out of my eyes, and I don’t see any tears in hers. I can smell her Poison perfume and it smells like fruit and flowers and it's so sweet and strong I want to puke. The lights are bright. They glint on the metal of the knife. It’s a butter knife. I’m only eleven and even though I’m pretty sure she can’t do a whole lot of damage with that knife, I'm not taking any chances. It's not the only knife in the house.

What do I do? What do I say? She can’t die. I can’t go live with my dad in that smelly duplex with no conditioner. I beg her to stop. I tell her I love her. I tell her I need her.

She says she doesn’t want to live without my brother and me. That if we leave, she might as well be dead. So I say the only thing that will save my mother’s life.

I say we won’t go. We won’t go to Dad’s this weekend.

She calls Dad right after putting the knife back in the drawer. She’s smiling but her eyes are dark and angry, and she tells him that Ryan and I don’t want to spend weekends with a father who would leave his children. That’s not exactly what I’d said, but the knife drawer is still open so I don’t correct her. She hangs up and gives me a hug. It's a good hug and later, as I unpack my bag, I feel relieved but also very, very guilty.

On Saturday afternoon, I go into Mom’s room. She hasn’t come out since the Butter Knife Incident. I climb into the bed and lie down next to her. She turns to face me. I want her to get out of bed, to take care of Ryan and me. I’m tired of eating cereal and worrying about her. But she is fragile. I don’t want to say something wrong. I choose my words carefully. Because maybe I can fix this. Maybe I can say something or do something that will make her happy again.

Please, Mommy. Just get out of bed. It will be like riding a bike. It will be hard at first, but every day you will get better and better at it and before long, you won’t be sad anymore.

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I was born in 1975. My mom said it was the perfect birth. The doctor administered the “twilight sleep" and when she woke up, the nurse placed a living doll into her arms. I was a perfect baby – didn’t cry much, slept through the night quickly, always happy. To hear her tell it, everything about me was perfect.

The day I was born, I entered a world dominated by my mother’s mental illness. It was our secret life, the one we tried to hide behind lies and fake smiles. It cloaked us in shadows even as it lay dormant, disguised as the perfect family in the perfect four-bedroom house with the perfect dog and the perfect roast for Sunday dinner. It followed us to work and school. It sat with us at the dinner table and in the pew at church. It even tagged along on family vacations. And I was the blond-haired, green-eyed doll that mental illness could dress up and present to the world as living proof of the perfection my mother so desperately sought. From hairbows and frilly dresses to matching mother-daughter outfits to a perfectly coiffed bouffant at the age of nine, I was an atonement for every failure, every fruitless dream, and every insecurity Mom’s mental illness could throw at her.

Mom and me, 1978

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That day I laid in Mom’s bed trying to counsel her out of her depression was the day I officially became codependent. I spent most of my sixth-grade year in the nurse’s office, sick with anxiety because all I wanted was to go home where I was in control. Away from home, I was vulnerable. If something set Mom off, who would be there to make sure she didn’t grab an actual knife this time? Who would crawl into bed with her and remind her that finding her sanity was as easy as riding a bike? Who could fix things better than I could? No one, that’s who. Mom would die and it would be my fault because I was in Mrs. Lockamy’s English class learning how to diagram sentences.

My brother and I never spent another night in our Dad’s sad little duplex or the slew of apartments that came after. He fought until the court system failed him, and then he faded into the background for more than a decade. As the oldest child, I was quickly initiated into managing the mental illness and narcissism and emotional beatings that he had spent eleven years shielding me from.

I launched into my teens and began to recognize the manipulation – the subtle ways that Mom tried to mold me into the big-girl version of that doll the nurse had placed in her arms in 1975. But I didn’t fight it. Allowing myself to be manipulated heightened my sense of control. I knew how to make Mom happy and if it meant letting go of my dreams so that I could fit into hers, at least I avoided the nuclear fallout that resulted when things didn't go her way. Taking care of Mom, anticipating her moods and desires, making her happy – it didn’t cure her narcissism or stop the bouts of mania and depression, but it sure helped make life more livable.

The thing was, making Mom happy didn’t make me happy. It pissed me off. The more time she spent in bed not being a mother, the angrier I got. I was certain that “depression” was just an excuse. How can someone be so sad that they voluntarily bow out of motherhood? Had I done something wrong? Was it me? It had to be me. She didn’t love me enough. I didn’t try hard enough. Somehow I just wasn’t enough.

I hated her. I hated depression. I hated how she’d play “Mom” at a Friday night football game, only to come home, pop some pills, and sleep through the rest of the weekend. I hated the slurred words and the stumbling around the house. I hated that I had to make excuses for her missing out on important events in my life because she was too depressed or too high to get out of bed. But most of all, I hated myself for always, always doing what she wanted.

So I self-destructed. As high school ended and I entered college, I used alcohol to numb the desperate pain of never being enough. Raised in an emotional desert, love was my oasis, a mirage that appeared in the distance, only to fade into nothing as I gave myself up to it again and again and again. “Normal” men were boring and soon discarded. I knew what to expect from addicts and manipulators and liars and abusers, so that's who I chose. Love wasn't patient or kind. First Corinthians had it all backward. It was chaotic and unhinged and volatile – that's what life had taught me, and I was a very good student. I became the opposite of the perfect doll Mom had groomed me to be. It hurt her, and there was a wicked satisfaction in that. But I was also knowingly and purposely hurting myself.

Her mental illness lived in me. It fed on me. Its claws were so deeply embedded in the scar tissue of my heart, I no longer felt the fresh wounds they created as they dug deeper and deeper into my soul.

It followed me into marriage and children. It refueled itself on infidelity and divorce. Its words dripped like venom from my mother’s lips.

Slut.

Bitch.

You’re a horrible mother.

No one will ever love you.

Mom’s mental illness chased me into the depths of rock bottom just as I'd chased her into that bathroom so many years before. It sat with me in the darkness, but it didn't tell me I was needed or loved like I'd told my mother that day. It told me I couldn't get out. That I belonged there. That I would never be enough. That it was useless to even try.

Three little faces said otherwise. Three little faces knew nothing of the secret life I'd lived as a child. Three little faces just needed me to be their mom.

Three little faces, Christmas 2008

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As I pulled myself out of the pit and into recovery, the most important question I had was:

How do I parent my kids when I have no idea what healthy parenting looks like?

The answer is the same as any other parent’s. Day-by-day. It’s a struggle. Sometimes I over-parent in an attempt to keep myself from turning out like my mom. Sometimes I under-parent to avoid my tendency to control those around me. Sometimes my temper flares, and I hear my mom's voice coming out of my mouth. It’s a constant battle between the adult who is in recovery and the little girl who believes she has the power to make the people she loves happy.

So what do I think I’m doing right? I talk to my children about their grandmother’s mental illness. I tell them how it affected me and the choices I’ve made in life – the good, the bad, and the ugly. I explain the things she did and that they hurt me but that I still love my mom and it’s okay for them to still love her, too. I tell them about my struggles to parent them differently, and I encourage them to tell me when my words or actions hurt.

I told my Al-Anon sponsor once that I’d said something to my daughter that I shouldn't – that I sounded just like my mom and I was scared. He asked me what I did after I said those words. I told him I apologized, and he asked if my mom had ever apologized to me.

It was something I’d never thought of before. Did she ever apologize? Did she ever admit that her words and actions cut me into pieces that never got put back in the right places?

No. Never. Not once. Her mental illness wouldn’t allow her to acknowledge that she was at fault. Her insecurities were too great to believe that the emotional beatings she doled out were anything but deserved.

Mom died in 2016. The years of numbing the pain with prescription cocktails finally caught up with her and on May 20th, she got up and got her nails done and took a nap and didn’t wake up. Maybe it’s unfair of me to unload when she’s not here to defend herself, but I don’t blame her anymore. It wasn’t her. It was never her. There was a mother inside her who wanted to love her children unconditionally and be there for every dance recital and swim meet and hockey game. There was a mother inside her who hated the words she said and the pain that she caused. There was a mother inside her who was struggling to get out and be a part of her children’s world. There was a mother inside her imprisoned by mental illness.

I know this because the mother she wanted to be was the grandmother she fought to be, and I think that in some way, that was her apology to me.

Ganna/Nina/Gigi with the three little faces who only remember having the best grandmother in the world, 2015

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I miss my mom. But I’ve found that her death was a catharsis. I’d missed having a mother for 40 years with only this intangible, can’t-be-real thing called mental illness to blame. When she died, I finally had a concrete reason to grieve. Now I realize that I don't have to just grieve her loss in death; I can also grieve the mother that she couldn’t be in life.

So that is what I’m going to do.