A Promise Made

As a child, I often heard my father say, “A promise made is a debt unpaid, in the code of the frozen north.” I never knew what that meant. Even now at the not-so-old age of 44, I’m still not sure I know exactly what he or that phrase meant, and he’s been dead for nearly 20 years, so asking him to clarify the meaning won’t solve the mystery. What I do know, is that he tried to instill in his children that when you make a promise, you keep it, because if you aren’t credible, you aren’t anything. And sometimes your credibility is all you have to carry you.

My parents and I had a challenging time—especially during my adolescence. I was fearless, and I was a hellcat. I had a temper that could bring darkness and misery to our home without warning, and a tongue that could eviscerate anyone in my path. On my bad days, I could make Shakespeare’s shrewish Katherine seem angelic. But, on my good days, I could be gentle, gregarious, charming, and witty.

As horrible as I could be, I wasn’t without a conscience. In fact, I often felt such repulsion and remorse for my violent outbursts that I would sink into a deep depression. Once, my demons persuaded me to ingest every pill in the house. And, countless others, they coaxed me into fantasizing about finally succeeding in my attempts.

As I got older, the distance between my heaven and hell seemed farther, but I still managed to visit them both—whether I wanted to or not.

About six months after my father died, I found out that I was nearly 12 weeks pregnant, which terrified me; a baby was never in my plans. I had a difficult time caring for myself, and I feared that I would be even more incapable of caring for a child. However, I also knew that conscience would not allow me to terminate the pregnancy, and there was no way I could carry a child to term and give it up. For me, there was no other option but to try my best to do right by the life that was growing inside me.

The following six months were horrible. I was often sick, and I spent the last two months of my pregnancy confined to bed, until two weeks before my due date when my doctor induced my labor for fear that I might have further complications that could harm the baby and me.

After more than 22 hours of labor—more than six of which I spent pushing to get what felt like a basketball out of me—my son was born. When the doctor placed him on my abdomen, I looked at him, and in my exhaustion, I thought, “He looks like a purple Yertl the Turtle,” but before I could muster the energy to touch him, a nurse snatched him away. I figured they were taking him to clean him, but then I saw her running for the door. I told his father to follow them. I didn’t want my baby to be mixed up with someone else’s.

I don’t know if it was denial or delirium, but it didn’t register what was going on. It wasn’t until I asked to see him that they told me my baby was in the neonatal intensive care unit. He wasn’t breathing when he was born, and he had an infection and a broken clavicle.

By then, all I wanted was to see and hold my baby, but the nurses said I would have to wait. They couldn’t roll a gurney into ICU, and they said my epidural made it impossible for me to stand and walk to a wheelchair. I insisted that the epidural didn’t work and that I could completely feel my legs. That was a lie. I was so exhausted, and my legs were so numb that it would have been easy for me to believe that I had been born with just a trunk, head, and arms. Yet, I knew that if I wanted to see my baby, I would have to try to make my legs work. As I slowly swung them around and tried to focus on lowering them to the ground, I feared that my legs would snitch me out and reveal me as a fraud. But, they remained ever faithful, and I stood and walked the couple of steps to the wheelchair.

The nurses rolled me into the ICU and showed me my blotchy, puffy-faced, cone-headed baby boy, who was resting under an oxygen tent with more wires and cords attached to him than an old-time telephone switchboard.

I placed my finger in his tiny hand and began to cry. At that moment, I realized that I never knew love—not the kind of love I felt for him, and if he didn’t live, then I had no reason to either.

They kept my baby in the hospital for about a week. In that time, they pumped him full of antibiotics and ran myriad tests on him, and I visited him daily—as soon as I woke, and I stayed until the nurses ordered me to go home to rest.

When the time came for us to bring him home, his doctor assured me that while his broken bone would take some time to heal, he was healthy and would grow to be a hearty boy.

It was the first time my baby and I were alone that I made my promise to him. I cradled him in my left arm and held him close to my chest. I felt so blessed that he had been sent to me, and even more blessed that he was alive and healthy. I looked into his blue eyes, ran my fingers over his soft fuzzy auburn hair, gently kissed him on his fat little cheek, and very softly whispered to him, “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone and more than you will ever know, and I promise I will never hurt myself. I will be here for you for as long as I can. I promise.”

Countless times after his birth, my old demons visited me, but I kept my promise. Keeping that promise felt like it often worsened my hell, because in those darkest moments, I felt even more trapped. But, I made a promise, and a promise made is a debt unpaid, in the code of the frozen north. I knew that while death would be an escape, it was not an option for me. Death by my own hand might bring me peace and end my hell, but it would only be a beginning for my child—the beginning of a life of pain, emptiness, and questioning.

Four months after my baby boy celebrated his 13th birthday, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. As I learned more about the disorder, my life began to make sense: the never-ending emotional rollercoaster ride, the suicidal ideation, and the self-defeating actions. I’ve often questioned if I’ve done right by him. I fought like hell to try to present myself as sanely as I could—at least when he was around—and I’ve always tried to keep my promises to him—all of them—but I still wonder if I could have done more or if I could have done it better. At times, I’ve even questioned if he would have been better off without me as his mother.

My baby boy is 17-and-a-half years old now, and he’s starting his senior year in high school. He is an amazing person. Not only is he strikingly handsome at 6’ 2” with chiseled features, but he’s mystical and brilliant. He’s also incredibly compassionate, and he tries hard to keep his own promises. People love him and say he’s a very special person. I agree. It was because of him that I was able to stay as stable as I did before my diagnosis, and it’s because of him that I aggressively sought treatment to be as healthy as I can.

I am grateful for many things, but I’m most grateful for him. If he hadn’t come into my life, I never would have made that promise, and it turns out that life is good—very good—and I’m glad I’m here to see it—with him.

In Very Good Company

Sometimes when I sit down to write, I think to myself how happy I am that my mother isn’t sitting next to me as a co-author.  If she were, she would insist that I mention what a spunky, independent, smart alecky, and determined child I was and how crazy I drove her and my father.  Nevertheless, she is a mother, so she would also throw in a few subtle praises—just enough to let you know that despite how much I exhausted her, she loves me and is very proud of me. 

From what my mother tells me, I’ve always had an I-can-do-it-by-myself and you’re-not-the-boss-of-me attitude.  If she told me to take a nap, I would get up and down from my bed, sing, go potty, read, get a drink of water, and do anything else except sleep.  However, if she told me, “Angela, I want you to go lie down and rest, but I do not want you to go to sleep.  Do you understand me? ” I would be unconscious before my head hit the pillow.  Common scare tactics also didn’t work on me.  I didn’t care if she told Santa I wasn’t behaving.  I knew I was a good kid, and if Santa couldn’t see that, then I didn’t need his stinkin’ presents.  And, I questioned everything.

As a kid, I also learned how to disarm my mother when she was angry with me, or at least diffuse her anger.  My weapon?  Humor.  I learned early on that humor can help you through many of life’s difficult situations.  Think about it, it’s really hard to be angry with people and yell at them if you’re laughing.  It’s even difficult to be angry when you’re smiling.  It’s also really tough to dislike people who make us laugh.  Don’t believe me?  Try it sometime.  Other people learned how to fight with their fists, I learned how to disarm with humor—it made punishments much less severe. 

My Childhood took its natural course and led me to adolescence, which was, as it is for many people, a tumultuous time.  My mother still says she is convinced I was possessed by demons during those years.  And, adolescence eventually led into young adulthood, where I became as my mother says, “human”—at least most of the time, she notes. 

The truth is she was right about something.  What I fought vehemently to keep from everyone was that not only was I possessed by demons, but they never left.  Sometimes they behaved better than other times, and sometimes they even went into hibernation, but they were always with me.

Throughout my adulthood, life delivered its ups and downs to me.  That’s the nature of life, right?  I felt that life must have liked me a lot, because it dealt me more ups than downs.  It wasn’t until I was 40 and sought help for depression that I was told that my ups weren’t part of any fortune, but instead they were part of a silent disability—my demons.  “Angela, normal people need more than one to three hours of sleep each night,” my doctor said.  “Angela, slow down,” she told me as I quickly bounced my leg and talked with the speed of a seasoned auctioneer.  “Depressed people don’t have the energy that you have.  It’s often difficult for them to even find the will to get out of bed.”

“Well if I’m not depressed, then what’s my problem?”

“We (she had another doctor working with her) think you have a mood disorder.”

“I know."  No shit, I thought to myself.  "That’s why I’m here.  I’m depressed.”

“No, we think you have bipolar disorder.”

“Oh.”  I replied nonchalantly, while I cursed her silently.  She didn’t know what she was talking about.  I was not crazy.  I earned my bachelor’s in psychology; I knew plenty of manic-depressives, and I certainly was not one of them.  I was angry with my doctors.  They didn’t know what they were talking about, and I was determined to prove them wrong.

I started to read everything I could find about bipolar disorder.  I had a basic understanding of it from when I studied it in school, but unlike when I was in school and learned about the disorder from a clinical perspective, I read stories written by people who were living with the disorder.  In many of the books I read, one book seemed to be referenced more than any other: Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s, “An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness.”  I decided to read her book so I could finally prove that I was not crazy.  After reading less than five pages, I was sobbing when I realized I had violently thrown the book: I was reading the story of my life.  It was as if Kay Jamison had lived it with me—the good times and the bad.

It took about a week for my shock to dissipate, but once it did, I felt a sense of relief.  Suddenly my life of ups and downs made sense.  I also went back and read years of my personal journals.  In reading my own writing, which dated back to when I was 10 years old when I received my first diary, I could clearly see that the disorder was always there, and at times, I knew something was wrong, even if I had no idea what to call it, although I had sometimes referred to it as madness. 

I’ve always had a fighter’s spirit, refusing to let myself be defeated.  Bipolar disorder was going to have its hands full with me, just as my parents did.  I refused to let it be the boss of me.  I had no fear of my demons, but I did have some fear.  I was terrified that with this label, people would think I was different, and not in a quirky way.  It wasn’t the fear of being ostracized for being “crazy” that scared me.  I mean if I didn’t care what Santa thought of me when I was a child, do you really think I would care what anyone else thought of me?  No, my fear was that the people who knew me and loved me would suddenly think that I was incapable of taking care of myself, that I would lose my independence.  That’s what scared me.  I didn’t want to be treated any differently than I had been or than they would treat anyone else.  Different can be good.  We are a world of very different people, and that’s what makes life so exciting and beautiful, but treating people differently because they are different is not good.

When I began treatment for my disorder, the first thing I did was tell everyone close to me.  Why?  It’s harder to hide in plain sight.  Not only that, if I suddenly started needing less and less sleep, or I began spontaneously calling people at 2 a.m., my brain was probably driving the wrong way on a one-way street.  If I came up with some of the cockamamie ideas I was famous for—like my plans to rid the world of all its ills, live out of the trunk of my car, and “home school” my kid from the road, then those close to me would know it was time for a road block—whether I liked it or not. 

In the beginning, some of my friends and family members tried to be sensitive to my illness, and I appreciated their respect.  They were very careful how they treated me or how they referred to my illness.  But, I’ve always felt that life really isn’t that serious; it goes on with or without us, so why make it more difficult than it has to be?  I told them, not to walk on eggshells around me.  I explained, “you’ve been calling me crazy my whole life, and I have even called myself crazy (although we usually meant it more as quirky than mentally disabled), there’s no reason to stop now that I have the pedigree papers to prove it.”  Some people may not take it so lightly, and I respect that.  Everyone has his or her own attitudes and experiences, and I want to honor that, especially since I know firsthand the torture that bipolar can inflict.  I also know that it is very much a silent disability, because many people who knew me said that they never would have suspected that I had such a disorder.  I was good at hiding my misery when I was depressed, and my brain tended to spend most of its time traveling in the hypomanic lane.  I know that many of those “disbelievers” meant well.  They wanted to be supportive, but sometimes in denying my disability, I felt they were trivializing my challenges. 

My personal choice is that I don’t like the word disabled.  Although bipolar is a disability because has the potential of disabling me, I refuse to be disabled by it.  I spent about a year working with a team of doctors to learn how to live my life with bipolar, and I spent a lot of independent time learning as much about the disorder as I could.  My biggest challenge was learning how to travel “in the middle lane,” instead of riding the bipolar rollercoaster.

Don’t get me wrong, bipolar disorder is a very serious illness.  Some people spend their entire lives battling it.  Some people’s disorders are such that their bodies don’t respond well to many of the medications, or it’s difficult finding the correct dosage for their treatment.  I’m lucky.  Very lucky.  I responded well to the first medication my doctors prescribed, and I’ve had no problems.  It’s been several years now, and I’ve become used to a “normal” life.  A very peaceful life.  Enough time has passed that while I remember that I enjoyed the amazing highs that came with the manic moments, and I remember that I felt so incredibly hopeless during the down times, I can’t remember exactly how they felt.  I only remember whether I liked them or not.

My point of sharing this with you is not to solicit your pity, sympathy, or praise.  My disorder is what it is, and I’m only doing what most people would do when faced with a challenge in their lives: deal with it.  What I would like you to take from this is the following:

As annoying or strange as some people may be, we never know what may be going on beneath their surface.  We all have our own challenges, be they cultural, physical, mental, or emotional. 

Not everyone who has a mental illness is scary or dangerous.  One of my friends once told me, “You shouldn’t tell people you have bipolar disorder.  It might scare them.”  I confidently told my friend, “I’m not going to hide or deny who I am.  Society wouldn’t think anything was odd if I were diabetic or had high blood pressure.  Besides, I’m not the person they need to be afraid of.  I take my medicine, and I am under the regular care of a team of doctors.  They should be more scared of the people who deny that they have any problems.”

Some of the world’s most brilliant writers, poets, composers, and artists suffered from manic-depression: Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Michelangelo.  The way I see it, I’m in very good company.

Signed,

A pedigree crazy person who is surprisingly sane.