Fifty-One, Forty-Nine and a Half
By: James Sarah Madison
Tags: Bpd, Nonfiction, Memoir, Mothers, Mental Health

The phone rings. I’m standing in the kitchen of the blue house on Monterey Lane. Bare feet slapping the tile, I walk over and pick up the receiver. The phone hangs on the wall. It’s rotary, avocado green.

I hear a crackle of static, as though the caller is far away.

“Hello?” my mother croaks.

I hesitate.

I almost hang up. Not slam the phone down in anger, for that would let her know she had reached someone, but just hang up quickly and quietly as if the call never connected.

A breath.

I don’t.

“Hi, Mom.” I say with no inflection. As neutral as I can make it sound.

After an incident a few years before, when I was 15, I’ve had it with my mother. I don’t want to see her, don’t want to spend time with her, and I most especially do not want her to talk to me about the inner workings of her life. I don’t want to know. From then until I left for college I bided my time, getting through the court mandated visits every Tuesday evening and every other weekend with as little contact and talking as possible.

I’m done.

I’m out.

I’m going to dance on this woman’s grave.

She’s taken my not-so-subtle hints, and doesn’t press the issue. Looking back, she never once brought it up, not directly, regardless of how awful it must have been for me to treat her like that.

The silent treatment from her only daughter.

When I move back home to my Father and Step-Mom’s house after the debacle of my freshman year of college I don’t go see her. I’m nineteen, and there are no more court mandated visits. The only times I see her are when I pick my brother up or drop him off, go to one of his sporting events or school functions. No holidays. I celebrate nothing with her. I’m not even sure I gave her a card or gift for her birthday. Probably not. Mother’s day? Not hardly.

It’s as close to no contact as I can get.

“I need help.” Her voice is feeble over the phone.

You have to understand, this was not teenage rebellion, or, not that alone. I had good reason to want my mother out of my life. A string of reasons, like pearls. A whole goddamn necklace. A fucking jewelry box of sparkling, gem-like justifications.

Her mental illness went sometimes treated, sometimes untreated, during my childhood, for a variety of reasons, among them lack of funds and BPD’s evasive nature as well as the stigma it had even within the mental health professions. The therapies and treatments we have today didn’t exist then. Psychiatrists were still treating BPD with often ineffective medications designed to counteract chemical imbalances and psychologists often viewed the condition as untreatable or were warned that treating the disorder with traditional talk therapy could exacerbate the illness and create a dangerous co-dependency between doctor and patient. Add a few other conditions, sort of a grab bag of mental disorders — the exact diagnosis of which was always in flux, and my mother became a patient no one wanted. An incredibly volatile force, she was addicted to rage, and the remorse that would follow it. We were never struck, mostly never, my brother and I, and for that I’m grateful. Paranoid in an insidious, subtle way that would only make itself known with the odd non sequitur, a sudden veer far away from rational thought, my mother’s psychosis had a lot of religious symbolism to it. Which is really ironic given that she was an avowed, and outspoken non-believer. The best way I can describe her faith, or lack thereof, is that she was an atheist who was angry at God for not existing.

Go ahead, laugh. It’s pretty funny, really.

I grew weary of always being an angel or a devil, and never anything in between. And, nothing I did would ever change things. No matter how long or heart wrenching our talks were, the system seemed re-set itself by morning, no progress was ever really made, no lasting change, just the same spiral over and over again, with spike points of red, hot rage.

As a young child, it was easier if the rough patches were closer together, because then I could be on guard. I could anticipate the situation going sideways at any moment. What was dangerous was long periods of her doing well. If weeks went by, or even months (which is a long time for a kid), I’d relax. I’d forget. And then, when things came crashing down I wouldn’t be ready for it. Those were always the worst.

There were a bunch of times my mother *should* have been 5150’d. I probably don’t even remember all of them. In California, that’s when you’re deemed a danger to yourself or others, and are taken into custody for an involuntary psychiatric hold. But, who was going to call the police? Not me, certainly. There was the persistent idea that being in the foster care system would be worse, that being taken away from my mother would only lead to even less good options for my brother and me. I was frightened of that. I’d be fine, of that I was certain. I will always be OK. But my brother? Four years younger than me, what would happen to him if we were ever separated? How would I protect him? It’s a lot to wrestle with when you’re in grade school.

“I need you to come see me.”

Despite the heat of the July afternoon, I go cold, it’s like ice through my veins. Then, I am immediately overtaken by a flash of heat, burning, a blinding surge of adrenaline. Standing here in the kitchen, knees locked, celadon plastic handset to my ear, dripping with sweat even though all I’m wearing is a tank top and cut off denim shorts.

“Where are you?” The words come out of me, unbidden. If I could have, I would have snatched them back, plucked them from the air and placed them in my pocket, silenced.

“I’m at a hospital in Rosemead.”

She gives me the name. It’s a state psychiatric hospital. I know it, I remember it, and I can already feel my skin crawl with dinginess, with the despair of those institutional walls.

“What do you need me to bring?” More unbidden words.

She tells me where to find what she wants, and I go, right then, to her shabby, little, rented back house in Temple City. I still have a key, after all.

I’m in time for visiting hours that evening. I sign in, and wait. I sit for long, sticky minutes on an orange vinyl chair in the waiting room, her package of clothes and a few personal items deemed harmless by the nurse who inspected them balanced on my bare knees. My mother shuffles out, lethargic, dressed in tan scrub-like pants and shirt, formless and beige.

I thought I wanted to dance on this woman’s grave.

There were so many times in my teen years that I’d wished her dead. Wished fervently that she’d succeed on some ill fated attempt to take her own life. And, of course, immediately taken it back with just as much internal fervor. It would destroy my brother.

Something has shifted, though.

I’m different than I used to be.

I can’t say that I understand, not fully. But now I know what it’s like to be out of control, to feel like someone else is operating my body, know what it’s like to desperately want to regain my mental footing but have nothing underneath except smoke and quicksand.

We’re awkward, both of us, and it will take me years, take me years even after her death to fully forgive.

I open my arms, and she walks into them.

She’s so little.

I haven’t hugged my Mother since I was 15, and I’ve grown a couple of inches in that time. Maybe she’s shrunk some, too.

I hold her, and feel her sigh.

Her daughter has come back to her.