Blog essays
Disruption of life
To dream of dreaming is sometimes the best that I can do. When the sun is shining bright I can dream of getting out of this one stoplight town, I can get away from my mother, fall in love and get married or be a writer in a fabulous SATC apartment with a closet Carrie would die for and an ass that fits the perfect size two. But when it gets dark the truth comes out. I fall asleep and dream every truth that paralyzed me. I am alone. I am a failure that sleeps five feet from my mentally ill mother to watch her through the night. Even in dreams the love of my life isn't mine to have.
Small town crazy lady
Small town crazy lady. Drunk manic depressive, oops bipolar stumbling down the street for one more six pack of the most god awful cat piss beer. Forgetting to get dressed, forgetting to bathe for weeks and wearing a see thru nightgown size 2XL. Other days it was strange combinations of out of place clothing. Sandston in the 1970's was not the place to be fashion forward, but she wasn't trying to be fashion forward, just weird. Psychedelic, hippy, country bumpkin West Virginia general store where she was from, hillbilly, and yard sale out of date combinations that were too strange to gawk at. Sandston 23150 got real good at turning a blind eye at my Mama even in her tie dye Muumuu. Of course it made it easier to ignore the crazy lady so you wouldn't have to address the fact her face was covered in bruises. A black eye here and there, with other bruises everywhere. When no one talked about the black eye on her face, the also didn't talk about the small child that saw it all, every single time it happened. That small child was me. In the 1970's no one talked about mental illness as a disease you couldn't prevent, or spousal abuse as a crime.
So there goes my Mama, she was the crazy lady of small town USA. One stoplight and one small mind in the middle of a shit kicker nothing town 23150. There was no intervention, oh you poor thing do you need a place to stay? Nope it was hush hush, turn your head, don't say a word. Wonder what they thought of the little girl walking with her everywhere? That was me. I was the normal little girl in a bad situation, that everyone ignored. But I couldn't just ignore it, I was right in the middle of it, living it. When she was dressing me just as crazy, I know that what the kids at elementary school were saying what the grownups were thinking. Just out loud and mean. On nights she was too drunk to even handle my dinner, I had to walk after dark to the little store Trio's. I was just a little girl scared of the dark and I knew no one was looking out for me.
That was and is the stigma of mental illness. My father beat my mother, but he had his own demons. He was a police officer that had been stabbed 60+ times by a drug addict high on PCP. Shooting that man in self defense, and the violence of his attack on my father haunted him the rest of his life. Even when my mother wasn't always crazy she was still the crazy lady. When she was normal she was a hard working and highly functioning registered nurse. Her fashion taste was still bad, that was ingrained. She lost more than one job as soon as a supervisor found out her diagnosis. Even in the hospital setting when she was in critical condition in the ICU she was just the crazy lady. I remember how absolutely rude the doctor was when she was informing me that I should have taken her to the psych hospital forty five minutes further away. After all they weren't equipped to handle a psych patient. To that nasty woman it didn't matter that my mother was critically ill and I brought her to the closest emergency room. My mother had such a strange infection that she was hypothermic with a temperature so low she almost died. To that doctor all that mattered was the one second snapshot picture, that on paper my Momma was just another mentally ill patient. Perhaps she had crazied her way into hypothermia. I was worried that my Mom would die, and here is this doctor chastising me that I had the nerve to pick her emergency room. My Monday-morning quarterback wishes I had cursed that woman every which way I could have. I didn't and she wouldn't have cared anyway.
My mother recieved that stereotype frequently when she was medically ill. No matter how many years of college, or how many degrees, some staff members are either gun shy, scared or just too judgmental to have compassion for the mentally ill. Those are not statistics, random numbers on a page. It was my life from 1988 to 2011 when she died. Out of all the emergency room doctors only one stands out that was kind and treated my mother as a human being. Out of all the General Practitioners, just two. All of the dozens of med surg nurses over the years? One. Just one. And for all of the years my Mom battled mental illness, from her teens until she died in her sixties, she died of cardiac arrest.
No comments:
Post a Comment