Living Hidden

Something is hidden when it is not acknowledged by those around it. My mom's mental illness was completely hidden up until the time she checked into the psychiatric hospital and received a diagnosis when she was forty-three and I was fifteen.

And even after those days mom spent in the hospital in the summer of 1984, when she came home with a new label which described what she "was", everyone in our family tried to side-step the implications of her having "manic-depressive illness". We had almost no information about the disorder or what it meant to either my mom or to anyone else in the family. We just tried to go on as if it weren't so.

There wasn't a single person who explained the situation to me, other than my mom. She at first told me she had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, then, on my visit to the hospital a few days later, she told me the diagnosis had since been changed to manic depression.

Years before, when I was a littler kid, apparently no one called what my mom had "mental illness". I could see that we, my mom and I, were a bit different from other families. From my child's perspective, our different-ness was both that there was no dad in our family and that mom was a little "wacky". It's quite possible that adults we knew had private thoughts about what "wacky" meant. But none of our friends, or anyone else, ever mentioned the term "mental illness" within my earshot.

It is likely that, to some degree, people we interacted with in our various milieus looked at us and decided to keep a distance from a family which looked a bit unstable. Luckily, I found a cohort of friends which responded well to my mom. My peers were accepting and would joke in a friendly way about my mom's quirks: her very loud laugh and occasional odd statements. Mom was always very friendly when they were around. I don't remember a time when she was irritable and my friends were present.

Pretty much all of my friends had professional parents, both moms and dads. This meant that our parents had little contact with each other; they were just too busy. And none of them were paying very close attention to what the kids were up to. I am reasonably certain that whatever conversation they had was about the weather, rather than sharing perceptions about how, and what, the kids were doing.

So because my mom can pass for "normal" to the superficial observer it appears there were few who were in a position to see that there were some problems. She had one or two friends who visited her in the hospital when she had a "nervous breakdown" when I was ten. But they didn't talk to me about it or try to give some reality to what was going on. My mom didn't talk about it. She raced back into her life and tried to pretend that she hadn't been in the hospital. "I'm back, every thing's fine, why dwell on the past?"

The every-day family life that developed over time had a teetering quality to it. I never really relaxed in my life as a child, because my mom never really relaxed. There was a low-level feeling of anxiety which permeated into each day. As I look back it was likely because my mom felt very insecure about whether she could sustain the life she had created: a professional job and a middle class lifestyle. I believe that inwardly she felt that it could all come tumbling down like a house of cards. And in fact, it did. When it did in 1986, she was exceedingly fortunate to have a soft landing, compliments of the family.

Part of every day life was that mom was swinging between high and low moods. She did not see herself as having a condition. No one communicated to her in so many words that the swings were unhealthy. As far as I know she had zero insight about her moods. She was in the moment with them. When she was up, the world around her had to meet her there. When she was down, the world had to adjust.

Since I was the person who was by far the closest to her, I was often the "world" adjusting to her ups and downs. I did this adjusting as a matter of course, rather than thinking, "she's up now so that's what we're doing." I adapted at the level of my personality. I was ready for her to go either way. And I would help smooth the road for her, and for both of us.

A big part of my survival mechanism, which in earlier posts I have termed "The Bubble", was smoothing out the edges of our life and helping us to present to the world as normal. First of all, I needed to be very steady. That was the basis of my instinctive strategy. Because my mom passed as normal enough most of the time, usually I just had to "round the edges" a bit. If a friend was over, I had the whole downstairs to myself, so I could limit his contact with her. She could come across as nice, if a bit nutty, and we had plenty of space away from parental presence.

When I was younger it was like mom and I were a team. It was the two of us who were making it in the world. She was the adult and I was her child companion. I was smart and could talk like an adult to some degree. People always thought I was several years older than I actually was. I was her confidant in certain ways. She never shared about her love life, but she did share other things that normally are part of adult conversations.

It was just the free flow of thoughts and feelings that she likes to share with someone who is a willing listener. I was the most willing listener she had so she depended on me as a primary person she could share her thoughts with. We still have the habit going today where I call her once a week and, for the most part, just listen to what she has to say.

My mom usually has a lot to talk about. She can talk for hours at a time about things she's interested in. And someone who wants to have a two-way conversation really has to assert his/herself. I did a lot of listening as a child and was not listened to very much at all. Honestly, almost not at all. Back then as well as today, if I say something out of my own experience, my mom will reference it to something she is familiar with and sort of change the subject to that, rather than explore what my thought was. At those moments I feel resignation come up and go back to just listening to what she has to say, keeping my own thoughts to myself.

I had a friend in high school who said to me one time, "Do you realize that your mom sharing all of her thoughts and feelings with you like you're an adult is a form of abuse?" I was shocked by her statement. I could sort of see what she meant but inwardly I said to myself "If this is the price of having a more-or-less stable life, so be it."

My friend who made the statement was no longer living with her mother, who had used my friend as her child-confidante as well. In fact, she was 90% estranged from her mother. This same friend was also getting into heroin. I wasn't about to take her advice as the gold standard. But I also never forgot what she said.

About the time I turned eleven, life had a certain stability to it. The shocks of sex abuse and my dad leaving were beginning to fade and life was becoming predictable and pleasant enough. That was until I reached puberty.

At puberty I began to explore, as my friends were, the taboo realms of tobacco, beer, pot and sex. By the time I turned thirteen I had tried out all of the items on that list and was ready to develop my interest in them. And because I had had years of "smoothing the edges" around my mom, now I was able to very smoothly keep much of my activity out of parental view. Not that it was very hard to do. It was pretty easy to create hidden realities in my life. After all, I had had years of practice keeping up a certain image.

When I was thirteen, my mom's boyfriend moved in and a new regime took hold. All of a sudden there were more rules. He had no idea about my mom's mental illness. Neither did she for that matter. He was on the rebound from the end of his previous marriage of fifteen years and having lost his job in the military.

Perhaps mom thought that a more "law and order" kind of presence in the house would help us develop the structure we needed. In my view, one aspect of my mom's untreated bipolar is that she would have knee-jerk reactions which would override her intuition. If she had been tuned in to her intuition, she likely would not have married the guy. It seems to me that the illness has had a way of largely burying my mom's connection to her intuitive sense. I am pretty sure she felt a large degree of desperation when she married him.

Mom was grasping at something that could give more stability to her life. She had been a single mom with untreated bipolar for years. As I came into adolescence she likely just couldn't imagine coping with it all by herself. And it seems clear to me now that her solution was to find a husband.

Now there were three of us invested in the pretense that everything was normal. For a while that seemed to go ok, but my dad's suicide, which happened a few months after boyfriend moved in, threw it all for a loop. About a year after dad's death they were married. A few weeks after their marriage my mom became psychotic and was checked into the psychiatric hospital. We didn't really talk about it. Mom's husband especially didn't want to talk about it. No doubt he was asking himself, "What the **** have I done?!"

Now the striving to appear normal took on a more intensive form. Mom and her husband were not able to communicate about her disorder. No doubt they both were very freaked out about it. So as best as I can tell they tried to go on with their lives without bringing up her bipolar as a subject. They argued a lot, and often put each other down using angry and hurtful words.

He and my mom were married for eight years. My guess is that he decided to ride it out for a while and not leave my mom in a desperate place. She made more money than he did so the financial benefits of forming a household also seem relevant. His business meant that he spent about half off his time away from home. It seems like he made a decision to, at least to some degree, lie in the bed he had made for himself.

My mom's illness was such that she could come roaring back from being in the hospital or other setbacks. When she was in a more manic stage she could be filled with energy, enthusiasm, optimism. She could also be quite brittle and short-tempered.

Everyone in the family was invested in her condition remaining a secret. My grandparents were, mom's husband was, and I was. Maybe if we ignored it would go away. If it ever came up as a subject it would be in hushed tones, like it was shameful even to be talking about it.

One of the symptoms of mom's illness is "lack of insight". Before she received a diagnosis, she was not aware that she had a mental illness. And when she ended up in the hospital with a "nervous breakdown" she seemed able to forget about it and move on with life as it had been. "What nervous breakdown?"

Once she had a diagnosis her complete denial changed to 99% denial. Now she realized that she had a disorder and needed to take meds and see her psychiatrist fairly regularly. But even then she didn't talk about her condition within my earshot.

I didn't talk about it either. It was much easier to acknowledge that my mom was "a bit nutty" and ignore the reality that she had a debilitating medical condition. And perhaps I unconsciously understood that if people thought of her as 'That mentally ill lady" then it would be easy enough for them to tack on, "And her damaged son."

Remaining hidden and rounding off the edges seemed a lot more advantageous than being judged in that way.

If your parent has a chronic medical issue like diabetes, or chronic fatigue syndrome, it seems more likely that the condition will be talked about. With my mom's mental illness there was never any talk of it until diagnosis. Then she would refer to her medication and its side effects but to speak of her illness as an objective fact was not something we could do.

Even after her diagnosis I sort of knew she had this illness but couldn't connect it to anything tangible. From the time I was 16 (when she was diagnosed) to only a few years ago I only had a vague notion about something that was clearly a major factor in my upbringing. Looking back I really don't know why I did not seek out information about mental illness. I could have read a lot more on the subject. I could have tried to empower myself by becoming informed.

But I didn't. I was invested in denial because it seemed like it would be easier for me. And perhaps, in a certain sense, that is so. If I had read about bipolar running in the family, about the age on onset being the age I was at that time of my life, I might have become intensely freaked out. As it was, my denial bubble lasted well into my thirties, past the time of likely onset were I to suffer from the disorder myself.

Like my mom, I deeply wished to build up my adult identity as if everything were fine. And like mom, I could present pretty well so maybe I could just be ok on the inside as well. The idea of delving into the topic of mental illness just didn't occur to me. I didn't take psychology courses in college until I had to for my teaching degree. I guess it must have been just too frightening to look at. I had built up my identity as a child as smoothing the edges of our life. My studying mental illness could very well blow apart all of those nice, smooth edges I had been working on for so long. I would have had to challenge my own personal myths as well as those of my mom and family.

It was one hell of a lot simpler to just pretend all of the issues away. Except that it doesn't work that way--not for long.

By the time I reached my twenties I was hiding as best I could from the reality of my own upbringing. I didn't want to face its implications to me and my life. Better to place as much of it as possible in a drawer and leave it there. Maybe my present life wouldn't be affected so much by mental illness. Maybe I could just side-step it all. I wanted to hide what was true for me and present an outward identity which was well-adjusted and successful.

The problem is, I had to carry the hidden parts all of the time inside of me. And because of my denial, they were largely unexamined. The hidden parts began to fester like a wound under the skin and became increasingly heavy and disruptive to the life I was trying to lead. Taking the Family to Family course from NAMI was the first major step in my acknowledging the facts of my upbringing. Since then I am hiding less and less and the burden feels steadily lighter.

It seems understandable how invested I was in having my life seem normal-ish to outside observers. I wanted desperately to be normal. But what I have realized is that I have to be honest about basic reality. If I don't do that my whole life will become enshrouded in a fog of unreality, with lightening strikes of my unconscious behavior zipping out of it. I have to look at the truth even if it makes me look weak or stupid. I owe it to myself to be honest about who I am.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben