Being Here
By: Jazzy Danziger
Tags: Relationships, Mothers, Mental Health, Alcoholism, Suicide

My parents had a difficult marriage.

They met in Creve Coeur, Missouri, in the Westchase Apartments off of Olive Boulevard. Their balconies faced each other, separated by a small parking lot.

1983, St. Louis

He was a resident in psychiatry at Barnes Hospital. She was a cosmetics sales representative who had recently left Campbell Soup Company. He was taking out the trash when he saw her for the first time, driving past in her Thunderbird. They met a few weeks later during a resident mixer at the club house, to which she’d brought her boyfriend. His name is lost to history. When the boyfriend walked away to get her a drink, my father introduced himself. She told him she worked for L’Oréal, to which he replied, “As a model?” In 1982 this would have been a killer line.

Their first date took place later that night at a T.G.I. Friday’s within walking distance of the apartments. She tested him by showing up an hour late. They moved in together after a week, were engaged in two months, and married in six.

They were madly in love. They could be terrible to each other. He had a temper, he was immovable, he inadvertently held his intellect above her, he worked long hours at the hospital and the office once he entered private practice, and our home videos consist of him sighing at her, telling her to turn the camera off. He came from an upper-middle-class, Jewish, Miami-by-way-of-New York family and had a bachelor’s from Harvard; she grew up poor and Protestant in rural Illinois.

1984 or 85, St. Louis, with a book and Sam the basset hound by her side

She laughed big, tilting her head so far back you could see her molars. She became fast friends with waiters, strangers at baggage claim, people that few others would want to approach. We were always pulling her away from conversations. She was playful. She had a bawdy sense of humor. She walked dogs at the Humane Society. She slept in late. She sometimes mixed her Crystal Light with vodka. She had borderline personality disorder and a mysterious history of sexual abuse.

She kept her illness relatively dormant until two years into the marriage, after I was born. Major Depressive Disorder with postpartum onset wouldn’t show up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for another decade.

She called my father late one night during his hospital rounds to tell him she was in distress.

I went out for a walk, she told him.

What did you do with the baby? he asked.

I left her at home.

She was granted one-day leave from an inpatient mental health clinic to attend my first birthday party.

1985, St. Louis

There were beautiful days. We moved to Florida when I was two, fleeing St. Louis snows. Disney World annual passes were a given; we shared a love for Epcot’s Maelstrom log flume dark ride and the Norwegian pastries sold at the Kringla Bakeri next door. She was the fun mom on field trips, playing her music loud and sneaking carloads of kids through the McDonald’s drive-thru. She threw extravagant birthday parties. We read in bed together, sticking our noses deep into our paperbacks and flipping the pages, inhaling new book smell. She taught me how to cut plastic six-can rings so turtles wouldn’t get caught in them. She made “sunshine chicken” with rice, curry powder, and orange juice, and dyed our pancake batter blue, purple, green.

There’s a video of me and my friend Andrew standing in the kitchen, both of us wearing fringey, sequined dance costumes with heels borrowed from my mother’s closet. Six-year-old Andrew turns to the camera and asks her, “How do I look in this?” She replies supportively, sincerely: “Gorgeous.”

My father called her Pickles the Firecat, misquoting the book. “You are not all good. You are not all bad. You are Pickles the Firecat.”

It was a childhood of extremes. I’d watch my funny, vivacious mother decline with minimal warning. When I was seven and Max was two, she tried to overdose on pills. Thinking she was playing, we giggled as she fell onto the carpet next to the laundry basket. She crawled to the guest room and called my name. From the bed, she handed me a pen and a yellow legal pad and dictated a letter to my father, falling asleep before we could finish.

Max and I put ourselves to bed. I remember my father coming home late from the hospital, and then some commotion. I see myself lying in the dark. I see ambulance lights through my curtains. My father insists there was no ambulance.

She went away. I wasn’t told where, but we picked her up a few weeks later from a squat, nondescript clinic in Bunnell, a town that sounded like my second-grade science teacher’s last name.

My parents, still very much in love, held on as long as they could. Tired of fighting each other, they filed for divorce in 1996.

I lived with my mother at first. We never clawed our way out from that year. I had scars on my body that outlived her.