In an age before Prozac and Xanax, an age before ordinary people began to think of depression as a disease, when mental illness made you a loony or a nuthead or a psycho who hid in dark rooms and not a regular person who happens to go to a specialist for treatment, my mother was very sick. Some of my earliest memories are of midnight rides in our family's station wagon down the dark Alabama backroads to my grandparents' farm because my father needed to leave my younger brother and me somewhere safe—and private, far from prying neighbors' eyes—while he took my mother to the nearest hospital with a mental ward, three hours away. I was 4 and 5 and 6 then, still wearing footie pajamas and clutching a satin-edged blanket to my cheek. My brother slept on the seat beside me, but I lay awake, silent, and listened to my slumping mother's sobs in front.
The real horror of those midnight drives only hit me once I became a mother myself. In a contest of miseries, the frightened kid in the backseat has nothing on the sobbing mother up front. What did she endure when she got to that hospital? What kind of psychiatric help could possibly have been available in Montgomery, Ala., in 1965? I mean, besides her usual heaping helping of electroshock therapy. She will not talk about it—not even now, years later, when her condition is well under medical control—and I think it must have been horrible.
I tried very hard, always, to be a good little girl in those early years, as though my mother would be less likely to fall apart if I caused no noise, required no attention. She would walk into the kitchen, look at the dirty glasses on the counter and burst into tears. After she had retreated to her room, I would drag a stool up to the kitchen sink to rinse Kool-Aid from the glasses, tiptoe around the house to put toys and books away.
My mother's ever-cresting waves of sorrow meant that I was also, from my earliest days, at least partly responsible for my brother and, later, my sister, too. "Shhhh," I would tell them. "Don't bother Mom. Ask me. Don't bother Mom." I was, I am sure, the only 6-year-old in our neighborhood who knew how to change diapers without sticking the baby with one of those giant safety pins with little plastic ducklings glued to the ends.
I don't think I fully understood how unacceptable this arrangement was until I had children of my own. Mine are spaced much as my mother's were—three kids in six years. And, sometimes now, I am truly enraged to remember what I had to manage, what I was responsible for, when I was so young. I look at my 6-year-old, and I think, "What kind of mother would leave an infant in the care of a child like this, even to go into another room to take a nap?"
But having children has also made me forgive my mother for her inability, at times, to behave remotely like a mother. When my second child was a year old and I finally had to give up teaching because I couldn't manage two kids' worth of ear infections and stomach viruses with only the five allotted sick-leave days I had each year, I had my first real taste of unwilling stay-at-home motherhood. Until the freelance assignments started flowing, I had no childcare at all, not even part-time; I wrote at night and on weekends and stayed home all day with the kids. I couldn't believe how enervating and isolating it was. Suddenly, I understood a little of how my mother must have felt. If it was this hard for me, healthy and supported by my husband and my very culture, how much harder it must have been for her, struggling with depression and small children in a very different world and with a puzzled husband, my father, who didn't understand what she was going through.
My mother never chose to stay home with children; mothers in small-town Alabama simply didn't work, and she was fired from the job she loved as soon as her first pregnancy—that's me—became visible. Nor had she chosen the pregnancy itself; reliable birth control, too, was for another generation. In another age, or in another place, I think my wildly creative mother—a woman who once designed and made her own clothes, who loved to jitterbug and could dance all night long—would have turned out very differently. I like to think she would have gone to art school, moved to a big city, thrown ecstatic parties. Instead of retreating every day into darkened bedrooms of despair, she would have been able to take care of herself. She wouldn't have needed her little girl to rinse out the drink glasses in the morning.
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