Karma Chameleon

Pay back is a bitch. My parents used to tell me this would happen, “just wait until you have children of your own, then you’ll know what we’re going through.” I didn’t believe them. If I had, or if I’d had any real clue as to how difficult I was to raise, I would have had my lady parts discarded as soon as I turned 18.

But I didn’t and so now I am reaping my karma. I am raising a child just like me. It’s a wonder my parents didn’t kill me. Again, my elementary principal, whose name I can’t remember but who must have been a very astute man, told my parents I needed to see a psychiatrist. Apparently he knew I was not right in the head. He’d also had my manic-depressive sister before me and she had struggled in school as well. She struggled with academics. Academics were the only thing I was good at.

I’m not sure how normal my insides were while growing up. How much of the chaos and confusion was due to being a child, an adolescent, a young adult and how much was being bi-polar. I know I felt anchorless. I was desperate for some way to stop my ever-changing and intense emotions. But no one talked about these things then and my parents, out of shame or pride or fear, never did take me to a psychiatrist. Instead they sent me off to a distant relative the summer before I started high school to “babysit.”

I was in a deep, deep depression that summer having coming off two wildly unsuccessful junior high years. Those years were absolute torture. I had no friends, boys made fun of me constantly, we moved from my childhood home to a snotty neighborhood and Tom Stratico shot himself.

Tom Stratico had his locker right below mine –since my name then was Servies – otherwise I would have never known him. He was also in my homeroom but we ran in very different East Whittier Jr. high circles. Tom was tall, the cutest boy in school, captain of the basketball team, dating the cutest girl in school (she later became homecoming queen in High School) and had friends, followers and worshippers. I was in the last category. He deigned to tease me but it was mild teasing and I’ve come to think we had more in common than I ever thought. Certainly it takes some deep psychological problem for a 7^th grade boy to take a shotgun, lie down in his bathtub and shoot half his head off. 

I’d never known that kids could die. I had been lucky and no one I knew had died except my grandfather. It was acceptable to me that my grandfather died. He was old and I never really liked him much. Although he was my mother’s father he was an older version of my own father; critical, perfectionistic, and alcoholic. He may have even been worse but that’s another blog.

When Tom killed himself, the rumors swirled. He had been heartbroken because his girlfriend had dumped him, he was being sent to military school, his parents were getting a divorce, he was dared to do it. But no one really knew. Just as no one knows what goes on inside most people’s inner world. Tom looked good on the outside but he wasn’t. No one takes their life if they are mentally well, it is the instinct of our species to survive, after all. 

I think we were all affected by the tragedy, though I remember my mother talking about how shameful it was that one girl wore a purple dress to his funeral. I remember clearly thinking that was the absolute most evil thing I’d ever heard. What I don’t remember was any counseling. No one talked to us –well, not to me –about how we were feeling, what we were thinking, what were we going to do with this new information. The information that children not only die but take their own lives. My Dad had a gun. I knew where it was. No one talked to me.

I’ve taught at three High Schools in my short teaching career and in each one a teen took their life. Not only were the kids given extensive counseling, we teachers were too. There was a lot of concern about copycat’s and how we as teachers should handle each incident. How we were to model sane behavior to our students. We’ve come a long way and for that I am grateful.

If I had to guess what Tom and I had in common was that we were both bi-polar. I remember his ups clearly and obviously his downs were above the average adolescent angst. What made it even worse, if that is possible, he had spent the day telling everyone he was going to do it. Only one girl and our homeroom teacher believed him enough to contact his parents. Apparently they didn’t believe him. Still, the rest of us wrestled with the guilt that we had done nothing, some had even laughed at him. I’ve never forgotten it, obviously.

Now my son is struggling, really, deeply struggling with his disease. He’s off his meds and spinning out of control. I know bipolars are more likely to commit suicide and he’s talked about it several times. I’ve taken him to hospital emergency rooms, psychiatrists and counselors but in the end I’m not in charge of whether he lives or dies. He’s 22 and it is his decision. He can stay on the meds, but he doesn’t like how they make him feel. Like a lot of creatives he likes the mania. It feels like he gets a lot done then and he is inspired. But then, an abnormal amount of creatives die young. Read . Darkness Visible by William Styron about his lifelong struggle with mental illness. He wrote the brilliant Sophie’s Choice, won the Pulitzer for The Confessions of Nat Turner and then committed himself to a mental hospital for electro-shock. He chronicles, in this slim volume, the heavy weight that mental illness has on writers especially. He speaks the names of all those he lost to the struggle. It is a daunting loss.

 Still, I get it. I really do. Art is the most important thing in my life after him and I have had to learn other ways to become inspired but I sure do miss those manic days sometimes.  My medication makes me a little sluggish and lazy and is a great excuse for my poor housekeeping. I want to clean but my meds say I don’t have to today.

But just like I did after Tom Stratico’s suicide, I keep wondering and searching for things I can do to stop another person’s slide into madness. For that’s what it is. I lived with the madness in my head my whole life. I clung to anything or anyone I thought would stabilize the vertigo. I made bad decisions because I didn’t know of any good ones.

So, I wonder – did my parents suffer watching me? Did they feel helpless and hopeless like I do now? Did they ship me off to relatives because they thought it would do me good or because they couldn’t stand having me around anymore, making them feel inadequate as parents? Have I been horribly unfair to them?

God knows I wasn’t easy. Neither was my sister. God knows it was hard to like me let alone love me, I’m just getting around to it at 60. But if they suffered then they must have loved me because it is only the deep love I have for my child that causes the kind of pain I am feeling.

I called my oldest Al-Anon friend last night. I told her I just needed to talk to someone who loved me and she does. She was honest though, telling me I needed to prepare for my son’s slide into the darkness because it is happening and the only one who can help him – isn’t me.

She also reminded me that he has his own Higher Power and that he is on his own journey. True. All he has to do is ask and his God will come through for him.

Just… what if he doesn’t want to ask?