I skipped my daily entry yesterday not because of any sickness, or being to busy or anything... I skipped it because I'd spent the past two days being sick and busy and, after writing 14 pages of research papers, reports, and response essays, words were not coming easily to my mind. Not that I consider this journal "work," but I do consider it an exercise in thinking -- well, sometimes -- and that wasn't something I was equipped to do.
But I'm back - with a vengeance. Hold the applause please.
I want to talk about my mom today. I mean, I've got to get around to talking about her sometime; she carried me for nine months, screwed me up for a few years, made amends for a few years, and deserves at least the courtesy of one journal entry...
I'm listening to R.E.M.'s "Automatic For The People" right now. Sometimes I can just tune out the music, so to speak, but sometimes, like now, I remember where I was when I first got this tape... Well, suffering from the stomach flu over Christmas and too sick to listen to ANYTHING, but I mean, when I first began listening to this tape compulsively... I was twelve years old - the last year I considered myself a "kid." I used to lie on the floor of my bedroom in the dark with my ear pressed to the speakers, hoping the volume was low enough so that my dad wouldn't come check on me and find me awake.
It was all about my mom then. EVERYTHING was about my mom. She was the sick one, she was the one who needed taking care of. I don't remember how old I was when she announced at Sunday lunch (it was pancakes - I remember it was pancakes, because her pancakes are always wonderful...) that she was going to Syracuse for a month or two: voluntary hospitalization for her eating disorder. Eating disorder? What eating disorder? I was just a kid - I didn't know she had an eating disorder. I mean, I knew that people should eat more than a cup of cottage cheese and half a peach every day, but she was on a diet... right? All women go on diets, right? But she explained it all, pouring forth the humiliating confession that she was, indeed, fucked up...
(I have never called my mother crazy. I've never called her STABLE, exactly, but she isn't crazy... Fucked up is a generalized term I use for everything from people being wasted on marijuana to the severely mentally ill to whiney depressed teenagers, or anything slightly abnormal by society's standards -- so PLEASE no one jump on me for bashing my mom or eating disordered people or the mentally ill or anything...)
We visited her in the hospital every weekend and on holidays. Her stays never lasted much more than a month, as I recall, but there were a LOT of stays... We visited on Thanksgiving (we didn't have a traditional turkey dinner or anything; we had burgers at the Ground Round, because noplace else was open but Denny's which my dad hates...). We visited my mom on my birthday one time, and she'd forgotten about it, so she gave me a t'shirt from her closet that she'd dyed herself in Art Therapy. That was the most disgusted I've ever been with my mother: when she forgot my birthday and pretended she hadn't.
I looked forward to the visits, even though I hated them. It was always good to see my mom. It was weird not having her around the house. It was almost like being a divorced kid, only my parents still loved each other. I'd share stories with her, and she'd share stories with my brother and me. But I still hated going. I hated those awful soccer games that my mom's stupid anorexic friends would initiate in order to run around and maybe lose some weight. I hated sitting in the lounges weekend after weekend while 20-year-olds bitched about their lives and the whole hallway smelled suicidal. I hated those damn Cray-paz we used to make "art." I hated my art. I hated seeing it pasted to my mom's closet. I hated having my "gifts" taken away by nurses - a little statue of a pig, because it was ceramic and could be used for self-destructive behavior; a piece of chocolate because the eating disorder unit wasn't allowed to receive food from "outside." I hated seeing my mother's eyes sunken, begging us to take her away from herself, to give her a reason not to be fucked up anymore. I hated the bare walls and the "we-want-to-HELP-you" voices of the doctors and nurses. And most of all, I hated that goddamn t'shirt.
For two or three weekends in a row, the family project was a circular-shaped jigsaw puzzle instead of stupid pastel drawings. It was a beautiful picture. I'll never forget that puzzle. Someday, maybe I'll go back to the hospital and look at it. It was a dark grey castle with a firey dragon in it. We worked on that puzzle for what seemed like eternity: hour after hour, visit after visit. And in the background, R.E.M. was always playing: either "Automatic For The People" or "Out of Time." Sometimes when I listen to them now, I can still smell that hospital, still see that dragon's eyes reflected against the dark grey cobblestones. Everyone in that hospital thought they could relate to R.E.M. I could see it in their eyes, my mother's included.
"I will try not to burden you. I can hold these inside. I will hold my breath until all these shivers subside, just look in my eyes..." --that was "Try not to Breathe," and it scared me when my mom sang along... No, I thought, you don't want to kill yourself, you don't need to kill yourself, life is happy...
"40,000 reasons for living... 40,000 tears in your eyes... I would give my life to find it, I would give it all. Catch me if I fall..." -- that's "Texarkana," my favorite. I used to fantasize about flying away straight across a desert, like Thelma and Louise, never looking back at that hospital and that sickening smell of depression... I imagined my mother coming along, and the two of us never looking back at all.
"I was central... I had control... I lost my head... I need this..." --I never understood that one, "Country Feedback."
Yep, Michael Stipe understood my mother, all right. His voice is as familiar to me now as my mother's voice; most of the time, his voice was the one I heard in that lounge with the dragon and the castle, not my family's voices. He sang to me, he told me what the fuck was wrong with my mom: what she felt like, how she wondered if she had ANY reasons for living, much less 40,000... He told me she wanted to die, he told me her family was the only thing that kept her alive. He told me through the look in my mom's eyes when he sang. He told me through the lyrics she scrawled across her drawings from Art Therapy. He told me through scraps of paper my mother left in her garbage with "Losing My Religion" and "Near Wild Heaven" written on them. He told me that my mother was not my mother anymore; that *I* was the one who would catch her if she fell, not the other way around.
The doctor people poked at her brain and they prodded at her feelings and they guarded her while she went to the bathroom to make sure she wasn't barfing up breakfast. And I watched. I wasn't disgusted by my mother. I was scared for her, but rarely disgusted, other than that t'shirt thing. I loved her. I wrote in my journal about trying to help her, trying to be enough for her to live for. She'd told me her family was the only thing keeping her alive sometimes, and I took it to heart. My brothers were too young to do anything, to even understand what was going on. But I read up on eating disorders and depression. I read everything I could about mental illnesses and psychological treatment. I read Jung, Freud, everything, although I didn't have the foggiest what half of it was talking about. But I studied, I learned what to do, what to say, everything... It wasn't enough for me to exist as the perfect daughter; I was the perfect daughter and the perfect 12-year-old psychiatrist as well.
My mom eventually ended up in a hospital in Maryland. Her walls were still decorated with R.E.M. lyrics. So I knew I wasn't really helping anything.
She's stable now -- I mean, relatively stable. And relatively sane, considering her past sanity levels... And she's more into the Indigo Girls and Sarah McLachlan than R.E.M. And we aren't mother and daughter anymore; we go out for coffee, we go out for Chinese food, but she's not my mom... She's someone I look like, and someone who knows me AWFULLY well, but she left me to my own devices long ago. Now that she's capable of taking care of her kids, I'm too old to be taken care of.
Sometimes, though, I like to sit in my room listening to R.E.M.'s words of wisdom. I like to hear Michael Stipe challenging me to catch everybody when they fall. I like him to comfort me with his reminders that my mom isn't dead -- maybe it's because of me, and Michael seems to say so. I like him to remind me of becoming a grown-up at 12 because I had to, because it was my responsibility. I like to remember that I COULD grow up at 12 years old, that I was capable of understanding - objectively - my mom's problems. I like knowing that I didn't focus on my own problems, that I gave her everything I had.
I still do that: search out people with all kinds of problems. People who aren't always capable. People who need me. People who let me take care of them instead of the other way around. I never let people take care of me; I'm the strong one, the one who gives strength to others.
...Or at least that's what R.E.M. seems to tell me...
Love,
~Helena*
" The world is collapsing around our ears. I turned up the radio but I can't hear it..." --R.E.M., "Radio Song."