Maybe it is Me
“She’s depressed and I’m worried about her.”
I overhear my mom say this to her brother who is visiting, the funny, soft-spoken one with the tall, charming son, and the brilliant daughter I never quite measure up to. It is the first time anyone has ever used the word depressed to describe me. I’m ten years old and I’ve been going for long walks in the backyard, or spending hours hidden in the blanket fort I’ve built in my room, reading The Hiding Place, a book about the Holocaust.
“She isn’t doing well with the news about my health.”
Over last winter and this spring, diabetes mellitus Type 1 has continued its inexorable march across my mother’s body and the already ravaged landscape of our home life. She might have to have her leg amputated, but she’s worried about me.
“You don’t have to be around me for a while after it happens,” she said when she told me. “You can go stay with Grams and Papa.”
I got angry with her.
“What do you think I am, Mom? I don’t care, you’ll still be you.” Of course I feel weird about it, but way weirder is her thinking it would change how I see her.
A few weeks pass and instead of getting the amputation, she has two massive heart attacks. The first one happens at home and an ambulance comes for her. We say our goodbyes inside of it, very calm, because we know the drill. We’ve said goodbye lots of times, since our first, when they took me straight from her body to the incubator, to this, our last, a stretcher and an oxygen mask. I watch the ambulance drive away from the porch, wrapped in my rainbow-colored windbreaker against the chill breeze. A few days later she suffers the second heart attack and betrays me. She has always come back, but this time she dies. And what happens to you when the person who loves you most is gone for all time? You become some sort of symbol for them, and their absence is like a brand.
My mom leaves behind three younger brothers. They will all try to help me in their own way, but the harshest truth about children like me is that they can’t be helped, they’re a sort of experiment for misplaced good intentions.
Two years later, it’s lunchtime on a Saturday and I am crying into my pizza. My cousins keep eating their pepperoni and cheese, unfazed by my strange preteen behavior. They’re the children of my mom’s middle brother, and I live with them.
“What do you want?” My aunt hands me a tissue. “Do you want to go live with your dad?”
Her voice isn’t unkind, but there’s an edge of exasperation to it, because I’m an exasperating twelve year old—sad, sullen, bookish, withdrawn, and occasionally cruel. I got into trouble for bragging earlier and I can’t seem to get over the sting of it long enough to stop crying, not even to eat my pizza.
Do I want to live with my dad? He is gruff, affectionate, short-tempered—a man of simple pleasures; steak, sweet tea, and beautiful women. I think of the hours of isolation and loneliness, trading a sedate 20th century home for a trailer, becoming the brunt of his easy frustrations. I shake my head. No, I don’t want to live with him. I am not a fool.
“I don’t know how to help you then, how to make you happy.”
Neither do I. It’s a question I’ll ask myself, and try to answer, but it’s an unsolvable puzzle, the vacuum at the center of me that never quite seals. It will influence all my decisions, some of them foolish, almost all of them based on how I feel, on what is least trying, on what staves off the fear, the anxiety, the darkness, whether it’s a quick fix like taking a nap or eating a sweet, or something more detrimental, like quitting a job I hate or not opening a past-due bill.
Sometimes I have dreams where my mom shows back up, and 21 years later, I’m still pissed at her. “How could you?” I demand. “You missed everything. You made me terrified to leave my daughter. What if she ends up like me?”
My mom’s youngest brother, the evangelical youth pastor, will try to tell me during my teens that mine is a spiritual conundrum. If only I grow closer to God, everything will heal, and I’ll be truly fulfilled. It’s what my mother would want, after all.
As an adult, I’ll read about chemical imbalances in the brain, how mental illness runs in families, and how common lifelong depression is for bereaved children. I’ll frown at how something that has affected my life so profoundly comes down to simple facts. I’ll marvel at the stark contrast between my even-keeled self on antidepressants, and the negative, volatile creature I become when not medicated. My brain is broken is how I put it (forgive the ableist language), and that's a bad feeling some days, even if there are ways to help. My partner always tells me: “This isn’t you, and it’s not your fault.”
That's kind, but maybe it is me. Yes, I am the woman who loves to laugh, the wry-humored writer who enjoys nature and is gentle to young children and animals, but I am also the sad, tortured little girl, impulsive, easily jealous. and alone. I can never leave my mental illness or my loss behind, but I can name it, admit that I've made mistakes because of it. Not all of them were my fault maybe. It's difficult and a waste of time to identify which ones were, although god knows I've tried. Mainly, the sadness is not my fault. I'll probably spend the rest of my life learning to accept this.
