Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (19 page)

Rosie, born after Rocketship, got a mother incapable of anything but the most shocking indulgence, who gave her everything she wanted, spoiling her rotten, and protected her from any and all sensations of displeasure and disappointment, no matter how educational they might have been. It is possible that the reason Rosie didn’t walk until she was eighteen months old was that her tiny feet could not bear the weight of her rolls upon rolls of delicious chub (you have never seen such a fat baby), but it is also possible that it was because her mother, so grateful to have her, couldn’t bear to put her down.

Abie’s mother was at once much more strict and distracted, by her worry for his health, by having to pump breast milk, by her deadlines, by the sheer technical effort involved in getting four children from point A to point B.

It is hard to say which of the four got a better deal. Abie never had the pleasure of holding his mommy’s hand during the field trip to the children’s museum, and he was only ever allowed to have playdates with the two boys whose sisters had been in school with Rosie and whose mothers his own had thus made friends with when she still had the energy and spare time to do so. But his mother wasn’t afraid so much of the time, or at least not of such silly things. He is also indulged and appreciated, even savored, because he’s the baby. For all that he suffers from being a fourth
child—his mother’s preschool passivity, the paucity of photographs of him as compared with his oldest sister—he gains something from being part of a large family. It’s easy to see what the benefits are while watching the four of them gleefully construct a fort out of living room pillows and cardboard boxes.

The little boy formerly known as “the baby” started kindergarten this fall. We have both, Abraham and I, graduated from preschool. No more Shabbat sing-alongs. No more preschool picnics or teacher appreciation breakfasts. It has only been a couple of months since we cleaned out his cubby for the last time, but already I’m waxing nostalgic. Remember Water Day? Remember that weekend when the class mouse decided, without notice, to go live on a farm in the country? Remember Friday afternoons in the park with the other kids in the class when I tried to pretend I knew everyone’s names, but confused Parker with that other kid—was it Adam?—with a regularity that I know was perceived as intentional. What
was
that boy’s name?
Was
it Adam? Or was it Jonah? Wait, I think Jonah was a kid in Sophie’s class.

Come September, I’ll have a whole new group of parents not to get to know. Sophie’s mother might have considered being a room parent, and while Abe’s would rather have her eyes plucked from her head, she is making a New School Year’s resolution. She is going to try not to be the mom that no one ever sees.

Unfortunately, all the kids except Sophie started a new school, which means three classes’ worth of children and their parents, three classes’ worth of picnics and potlucks, three classes’ worth of field trips and garden tours. I know that even if I approach this with all the goodwill in the world, there will come a time when I hurt Parker’s mother’s feelings or fail to recognize Adam’s father when we bump into each other at Peet’s Coffee. Whatever my intentions, I am probably doomed to become once again that
mother to whom people say, “You’re here! What a surprise. We never see you.”

But the kids are older now, and many of even the most diehard stay-at-home mothers have gone back to work, at least part time. When one of them comes up to Abe’s mother and says, a note of hesitation in her voice, “You’re Max’s mom, right?” Abe’s mother will just smile and then maybe suggest they go out for coffee. You can always find at least one kindred spirit, even in kindergarten.

R
osie and Zeke have Michael’s eyes. The shade ranges, depending on mood and weather, between the color of cobalt blue glass and a paler, sweeter robin’s egg blue. Sophie and Abe have my eyes: sea green with splotches of hazel. The girls’ eyes are deep set and a little close together, like those of everyone on Michael’s mother’s side of the family. Abe and Zeke have long, tangled eyelashes, just like my younger brother, lashes so long they brush uncomfortably against the lenses of their sunglasses. The girls’ lashes are short, like mine, an injustice, according to Sophie, of near-monumental proportions. “What is the point of
them
getting Uncle Paul’s lashes?” she says. “Nobody
cares
how long a boy’s lashes are.”

We know where the children’s eyes come from, just like we know where Rosie gets her little shiksa nose—Michael’s mother—and where Sophie gets her short waist and endless legs—also Michael’s mother; those are some seriously dominant genes. Sophie and Abe have their father’s lips, Rosie her grandmother’s, and Zeke mine.

Each of our four children is a conglomeration of features and characteristics easily traced back to one of their immediate ancestors. The parts that seem to have sprung from nowhere, like Rosie’s waist-length blond hair or the fur on Abe’s back, are just legacies of relatives whom we have forgotten. Our genetic legacy is like a drawerful of Legos, hundreds of tiny pieces that can be
snapped together in near-infinite numbers of ways. One of the delights of genetic parenthood is seeing the different unique and fabulous constructions that spring from that drawer of building blocks.

But there are pieces of our genetic legacies, ugly brown blocks in the jumble of blues, yellows, reds, and greens, that I watch for not with excitement but with dread. Bipolar disorder so dominates my father’s side of the family that I fear there is little chance of all four of my children surviving unscathed. Of all my Bad Mother anxieties, this is the worst. The idea that lurking in my DNA is something that could hurt my children so profoundly is terrifying.

In the scheme of genetically linked illnesses, bipolar disorder cannot compete with the pros. Unlike Huntington’s chorea or Marfan syndrome, it probably will not kill them. They won’t spend their young adulthoods waiting for a lung transplant like sufferers of cystic fibrosis. But bipolar disorder can make you terribly unhappy, so miserable that the rate of suicide is fifteen to twenty-two times that of the normal population.

My family came to know bipolar disorder under its original name, manic depression, when one of my relatives succumbed in a manner that forced us out of our state of ignorance (or denial). One of the many miseries of bipolar disorder is that it causes you to do things that humiliate you and the people around you. It makes you ashamed of your behavior and of yourself.

Suddenly things made sense, the way the right combination causes the workings of a lock to snap, tumble, and click into place. We understood the source of my father’s mercurial personality. While it was frightening to confront this truth, it was also a tremendous relief to give our experience a name.

For most of his life my father cycled through moods at a dizzying pace. Even those of us who know him best were never able to
get used to it. When I was a kid, my father seemed to exist on a schedule of alternating days. One day he was energetic and lively, full of stories and opinions. He would make you a cup of tea for breakfast, drive you to school, and slip you a few bucks even if you hadn’t asked for it.

When he was up, my father was magnetic. He’s a small man, no more than five feet five even before age lopped a good two inches off his height. But although he might not have had the actual inches, he had the stature of a much taller person. No one looked down on him. He was funny and fascinating, the kind of man other men liked to listen to. And other women, too, it turned out.

But on his down days he was impossible. Wrapped in a cloak of impenetrable silence, he would sit at his end of the kitchen table, his head bent over his plate, slowly and methodically eating his dinner. Only an idiot would risk talking to him when he was in one of those moods. While his flashes of rage were rare, they were terrifying, much worse than my mother’s more frequent fits of temper. But most of the time he didn’t get angry. He just sat there beneath a dismal cloud of gloom that made its inexorable way over the rest of the table, so in the end we all felt nearly as miserable as he did.

Despair was a virus working its way through the house like a pernicious flu in the wintertime. Before the diagnosis we had no words to describe my father’s moods, and because we didn’t understand them to be endogenous, we accepted his judgment about the state of the world, and of our family. In a sense, we suffered from bipolar disorder along with him. When he was happy and optimistic, we were happy and optimistic, too. Things were going swimmingly; the world was a delightful place, and we were the happiest family in it. His job was great, my mom’s job was great,
my little brother and I were gifted students with rosy futures. When his mood plummeted, when he could barely rouse himself from his bed in the morning, we understood that we were fucked. All of us. We had no money, we’d never have any money, my brother and I would never live up to our potential, if we even had any potential. For years—no, for
decades
—we all cycled back and forth, unknowingly caught in the sway of his disease.

My father was put on lithium, a common treatment for bipolar disorder. There was an improvement, although hardly as dramatic as we all had hoped for. He seemed to cycle less—his lows were not quite as devastating, his highs nowhere near as much fun. Without those regular bouts of hypomania, he was much less productive and took to spending more and more of his time sitting on the couch immersed in a book of Soviet history or a biography of Abraham Lincoln and drinking glass after glass of that toxic concoction of Coca-Cola and orange juice that I sometimes wondered might not be in part to blame for his troubles. (Surely something so foul can’t be regularly ingested without noxious repercussions.)

Psychiatric medication is not a panacea, although it can be critical to keeping most bipolar patients from spiraling into an unconquerable despair or, worse, flying into a mania that, if left unchecked, ends up with them handing $100,000 checks to bankroll the lawsuits of heirs to Nigerian fortunes and donning foil hats to keep the government from using microwaves to insert thoughts into their heads. The various SSRIs and mood stabilizers rarely work as well as they should, and every one has side effects that often seem worse than the ailments they are trying to treat. What’s an aluminum hat when compared with morbid obesity, diabetes, and a loss of libido so complete that you can no longer remember your sexual orientation?

After my father’s diagnosis, it became clear that at least some
of his six children inherited the genetic aberration, the as-yet-unmapped bit of DNA that causes the disease. Two of my siblings have struggled both with mania and depression and have consequently led disappointed lives on the periphery of society and even their family.

On this evidence alone I would be terrified that my children would also fall prey to the disease, but of course it is not the fact of my family’s diagnoses that wakes me up in the night and sends me to stand over my children’s beds, searching their smooth brows and sleep-flushed faces for signs of melancholy or euphoria.

I’m scared for them because I am bipolar, too.

Like my father and my siblings, I resisted diagnosis at first, denying the inevitable, until I realized that I was doing to my own children exactly what my father had done to me. I was terrified that, like me at their age, my children had become little mood rings on the fingers of my hand, constantly calibrating and recalibrating my shifting temper. When I was happy and calm—which was most of the time—they allowed themselves to relax: life was good, all was well with the world. But when I lost control, when I yelled at the poor clerk behind the counter at the dry cleaner’s because of a burn mark on a shirt collar, or shut myself in my room and cried at the hash I had made of my life and career, they inched closer to their father, looking to him for reassurance that things were not as dire as they feared.

My children are luckier than I was. Michael has a far sunnier disposition than my mother, he is by nature optimistic and cheerful, and the force of his goodwill has kept them from losing their faith in the world or in their mother. But there is no doubt that I can be scary, especially when I lose myself in what psychiatrists call a “mixed state,” when one’s mood is low but one’s energy is high. In a mixed state, a red haze of anxiety and rage takes over
my brain and makes me say and do unforgivable things, until my better nature shakes off the demon and promptly sinks into depression as I realize the damage I have wrought.

After a lifetime of struggling with my moods, of cycles of rage and euphoria, of bouts of optimistic productivity alternating with pessimistic despair, I finally went to see a psychiatrist when I realized that things had gotten to the point where they threatened the stability of my marriage and my family. I had to get treatment, for the sake of my kids and my husband.

I began taking a low dose of an SSRI, and I noticed the change right away. I no longer found myself exploding with unwarranted anger at Michael, at the kids, or at bank tellers. I did not wake in the morning and consider my life, my family, and my work with a morose and helpless gloom. On the contrary. I felt
light
. It was as though the acrid gray fog that had been poisoning my perception simply blew away and I could finally see and be myself.