The Phone Call

The last few days I've been feeling depressed. I started feeling burdened and sleepy and cranky and like I wanted to cry every twenty minutes or so. I can get lost there if I don't do things to pull myself out. Sometimes I go to the gym. Sometimes it just passes after a few days. My wife has been trying to help me see what the trigger was, if any. It seems like this time there was definitely a trigger.

My mood started to drop very soon after my mom called. I was sitting at our dining room table talking to a colleague when the phone rang several times in a row. I had turned the answering machine down. It seemed like there was an urgency of someone trying to contact us, so the next time the phone rang I picked up. It was my mom. She was speaking in an urgent voice. I asked if I could call her back in ten minutes as the person I was talking to was about to leave. She said yes but also had pressure in her tone.

When I called her back I was fully expecting her to tell me about some kind of family emergency. Basically, mom was just in a manic state and was spinning around a relatively minor family issue. She was also projecting fantasy thoughts around a friend of hers. I spoke with her for about fifteen minutes and made a number of points which she found to be very reasonable and calming for her. Her mood began to wind down. She was still caught up in the fantasy thinking but the elevated mood was coming back down to a stable place.

The whole thing was really not that big of a deal. It's something I have done countless times. It has been a fairly regular part of my life since I can remember. I had to be the adult because, in that moment, she was not able. My adult thinking had to replace the manic and fantasy thinking she was in the midst of. I've been doing this since I was a child.

That conversation seemed to be the trigger which made me sullen and cranky for about 48 hours. My wife wondered aloud if I was suffering from "learned helplessness". What often happens for ACMIs is that, as children, we see our parent in a state of chaos and try to take control in some way. They way we do this depends on where the deficit is for the adult.

In my case, I tried to take control in a few places.

First, I tried to calm my mom and offer a rational view-point. Over time this dialogue evolved into a situation where she and I had quasi adult conversations and even presented as "peers" in public rather than parent-adult. An example of this is that from the time I was 13 or 14 waiters would often bring me the check in restaurants rather than her.

I also tried to be very capable at all the aspects of running a household. I knew how to cook, clean, mow the lawn, etc so that daily life could keep moving along. I took on a lot of mental responsibility for the running of things. I would remind her to get the oil changed in the car. I got my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday because driving with my mom was often very stressful.

A big problem with "taking control" however, is that children really aren't able to save their parents from the symptoms of their illness. So at some level we take responsibility for our parent's well-being and then circumstances unfold which show us how powerless we are over the situation. No amount of my cleaning the house, cooking meals or speaking to her in a calm tone was going to keep my mom from having a manic swing or becoming psychotic.

That's how I learned that no matter what I do, it won't be enough to keep the train wreck from happening, if that's where the train is going. Since I was experiencing this from a child's viewpoint, it just seemed like all my efforts were for naught. I was powerless in a world which could swing quickly from intense boredom (my being neglected) to an emergency which mom's mental state was causing or contributing to.

For some reason, another piece of my story has also been bothering me as I loll about in my crappy mood.

When I was fourteen and my mom's future husband moved in I felt like I received no credit at all for all of the adult responsibility I had taken on up to that point. Boyfriend asserted his dominance over me by repeatedly slapping me down when I cursed at him under my breath one time. My mom sat there looking on and let him do that. This was about four months after my dad killed himself.

You'd think she would have had me in counseling or something. But my mom was less than a year from having a psychotic break which would have her in the psych hospital for several weeks, when she first received a diagnosis. She was focussed on her new relationship and was also becoming less and less grounded.

The manic state apparently is able to take in a lot of impressions and sort of "forget" the ethical context around them. My mom had a very strong philosophy of "no spanking" with me. She talked about this often. It was a badge she wore proudly. But somehow she was able to let her boyfriend smack me down right in front of her and not say a peep. Mania was able to come around that and justify it. "It's the kid's fault. He's unruly. He deserved it." That's still what she says to this day.

Mom and her boyfriend went on to get married and have a mutually abusive relationship (mostly verbal) for eight years. Mom still speaks poorly of him even though they've been divorced now for almost twenty years.

But she didn't stand up for me then. She just sucked up all the energy I had to give and then was perfectly willing to have her boyfriend use violence on me to "help me learn my new place in the pecking order". She had no idea what I was doing for her all of those years. She was completely oblivious to what my feelings were during my entire childhood. And how could she understand my feelings today if she was chronically unaware of them during the time I was growing up? I do not share my feeling life with my mom. I never have. Today she will ask me about my life in a perfunctory way. I share as little as I can. There is a force inside me that will not allow me to share my feelings and true aspects of my life with my mom. I just bottle right up.

This is why I find it extremely difficult to even know myself what my own feelings are. I am often stoic because no one ever acknowledged my feelings when I was a kid. Mom often shared with me what her feelings were but she never asked me what I was feeling. So we built up a pattern where I was the one listening and empathizing and she could go on and on about what she felt and what she needed to process. I am able to be very tuned in to the feelings of others. But not my own.

So after I spoke to her on the phone yesterday, deep layers of frustration, anger and despair came up for me. First was the despair from my past when I sacrificed a lot of my childhood in order to help keep her afloat. Second was my deep resentment that I still play the role today of helping her maintain a more or less even keel. And third, because I will never be entirely free of this burden until she dies, and probably not then either.

And, of course, I share none of this with her. In fact, I hide it from her. She has no idea I've been in a mood these past two days and that she was the catalyst. In my mind I have to be the strong one and suck it up. She is the weak one and needs my support.

So my mood skulks around in the basement. It ranges from wanting to cry to wanting to punch someone to wanting to go back to bed two hours after I woke up. I know it will pass. My wife asks me when the group counseling is going to start.

I am hoping to start that soon. The group I am slated to join (facilitated by my counselor) is supposed to have an opening within the next several weeks. I wouldn't mind starting sooner rather than later. I have a huge amount of anger and sadness which I need to process on my path of healing. The group counseling seems like a good next step for me.

If I do this work maybe the next time my mom calls needing me to talk her out of a state I won't need 48 hours to recover from it.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben