Who am I most days?
I wake up to a mental checklist. My shoulders are already tense.
I numb out the dread I feel upon waking.
I execute my morning routine quickly and efficiently.
I walk fast wherever I go, even if it’s from my cutting board to my toaster oven.
I eat my breakfast at my desk, in front of my computer, while I work.
I am the only child of a single, mentally ill mother.
I have always been the only child of a single, mentally ill mother.
It’s been me and her, forever.
Even when I got married, had two step-kids in my home, and then two more of my own kids in my home.
It’s always been me and her.
Not because I wanted it to be.
I’ve tried to escape her so many times.
But my body keeps the goddamn score.
In the immediate moments that follow waking,
before my adult consciousness comes online,
I am the child I was,
and I am first scared,
then numb,
then resolute.
I will get through my day, even if I don’t enjoy it.
I will survive until it is time to sleep once more.
I will do what is asked of me and I will not complain.
I will disappear.
I grew up in Sherman Oaks.
I loved my elementary school.
I played, and laughed, and taught myself to read in English.
On the drive home from school one day, I taught myself to breathe quickly.
Breathing in and out distracted me from the nausea, which crept up on me at the stoplight of Kester and Ventura.
Every day, from the passenger seat of my mom’s car, I stared up at the AT&T building and inhaledexhaledinhaledexhaled.
I did it quietly so my mom would not hear.
I’ve always lived two lives.
1 — The me I cherished and hid away from her.
2 — The me that lived for her.
They had to share my body.
My body has never felt big enough for both of them.
There were times in my early twenties when I nearly blacked out.
Sitting at Andrew’s desk in the back of Diedrich Coffee with an In-N-Out burger in my hand.
Driving home from Behnam’s apartment at sunrise, the freeway mostly empty at that hour but not completely.
Reading Nietzsche in my dorm room before an afternoon class.
I thought I was just falling asleep.
When I was in the hospital recovering from the birth of my daughter, I went to the bathroom to relieve my bladder. I was escorted by two nurses who helped me sit down on the toilet. I peed, and everything went black. When I came to a few moments later I apologized.
“Sorry, I just fell asleep for a second,” I said.
“You passed out, honey,” the nurse on my left told me. She was holding me up so I wouldn’t fall over.
In my last year of college I needed birth control pills. The doctor at the clinic insisted I get labs done. It might have been the first labs I’d ever gotten. I didn’t understand why anyone would make such a bother over me.
He told me I had elevated TSH.
I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t really care. I was fine. No one needs to worry about me.
My second year of law school wasn’t as hard as the first, but I was struggling to keep up with all the reading. I kept falling asleep.
I had labs drawn for the second time in my life. My TSH came up elevated again. I was told to find an endocrinologist, which I immediately confused with an oncologist.
I was scared.
Also during my second year of law school, I got a call from a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. My mom was being treated there.
In New Jersey??
The story took awhile to piece together.
The psychiatric hospital told me what they knew. The NJ police found my mom wandering out on the train tracks. When they spoke with her, she initially refused to open her mouth. When eventually they convinced her to, she revealed a small rock that she claimed was a charm.
The hospital could hold her for two weeks. She was receiving medication.
My mom called me the following day. She said she was fine. She did not mention what was to be done with all of her belongings in Southern California. I asked her if she would be returning. She talked about needing coins for the pay phone.
I drove eight hours to Huntington Beach, to pack her apartment into storage. At a rest stop, I called the hospital to see if they had a release date. I was told they could no longer release information to me regarding my mother.
That was the first of several public psychotic episodes.
For nearly a year, my mom wandered between Northern California and Southern California, homeless, carless.
I heard from her whenever she chose to call me. She was rarely coherent. She did not ask about me. Eventually I stopped picking up the phone. She left me voicemails about the important work she was doing chasing down rapists. She visited me once for a couple of hours.
Each time she disappeared, I grieved.
I made an appointment with a therapist. Her office was dim.
I took a seat on the dark leather couch. She introduced herself.
The tears came before I even said my name.
“I feel like I don’t have a mother,” I wailed.
The therapist asked me in our third or fourth session, after I had relayed all of the NJ events to her: “Would you say you feel more stressed than usual?”
I had just told her I was having trouble concentrating on my reading and felt anxious about the upcoming finals.
“I don’t think so,” I answered.
Stray Sentences 