A reader sends us this moving story:
My 94-year-old mother has a lot going on in her brain that would have remained hidden had it not been for COVID.
COVID opened up cracks in just about everything related to human beings. For my mother, the COVID-enforced isolation at her Ottawa retirement home left her alone with her brain, widened cracks that were already there, made everything that was already wrong with my mother’s brain a thousand times worse. She has always been prone to furious outbursts, to crazy accusations involving me the accused that seemed to come out of nowhere. I told her one day after a particularly irritating session that I’d had enough. “Get help if you want to see me again.” I stood my ground and stayed away for 2 years.
Cue Dr. P, my mother’s psychiatrist.
It took Dr. P most of the 2-year COVID lockdown to figure out what was wrong. “Your mother is very very good at faking normalcy,” he tells us. Tell us something we don’t know. Dr. P stuck it out, saw through the “act”, witnessed our mother’s meandering and often violent imaginings, until he saw enough to tell us with a degree of certainty what the deal was with our mother’s brain.
“For starters, your mom is well into the steep downward slope of Alzheimer’s decline. There’s no going back up that slope.” My sister and I nod. Even before COVID, we’d been driving ourselves batty re-explaining the simplest instructions (mom, push this button on your phone to call out…)
But Dr. P isn’t finished.
“Your mom also suffers from a form of bipolar disorder called cyclothymia. She’s likely been dealing with that her whole adult life. Unpredictable mood swings. Periods when she’s manic. Periods when she’s depressed. Periods when she appears to be what we in “the business” refer to as “normal”. Her condition is often associated with high creativity.”
Our mother is a talented painter so all of that fit.
Then the punchline: “It runs in families. There is a strong genetic component.”
He goes on. “As if that isn’t enough for any one brain, on top of that she suffers from delusional disorder. Your mom is paranoid. Her delusions are real to her. In her imagined world, everyone and everything is out to get her. She’s living in a space the rest of us can’t imagine.”
“Like being on a bad trip,” my sister suggests.
Dr. P nods. “Pretty much.”
Everything Dr. P said made sense to me, the feisty daughter. My mother and Lady Macbeth share the same mothering playbook. My sister, the suck, got the other mother, the nice one from the Brady Bunch.
As a child I got used to my mother’s capricious mood swings. A child can get used to a lot. One moment we’re giggling at the same jokes and baking Christmas cookies, the next a demon only she can see is telling her to scream at me because I’m evil, a bad seed (after we’d watched the 1953 movie by that name) or stupid or accusations far worse that were beyond my capacities as a child to fully absorb, thank goodness.
When our dad died eight years ago, our mother gave up the Brady Bunch act with my sister and went full-on Lady Macbeth. My sister saw then what I’d been seeing since my earliest childhood: “I guess he was keeping her sane.”
This multiplicity of havoc-wreaking mental disorders explains why my mother had so much trouble letting go of the fantasy that one wintry night my 68-year-old arthritic self had scaled the outer wall of her retirement home, wriggled my way into her room through a small window and stolen her purse while she was asleep.
“How did I manage that?” I had asked her. “You live on the second floor.”
She raised a sardonic eyebrow then rolled her eyes: “Well my purse is gone, that’s a fact. Obviously you had a ladder.” As is often the case with the mentally disturbed, the logic is sound; the premise not so much.
Thank goodness for Dr. P, 2 years of talk therapy and 6 months of high strength Risperdal, a potent anti-psychotic. Our mother is now a stable and happy lady. She is a kitten so when the claws come out as they sometimes do they are kitten claws, easily retracted and leave no mark.
My sister lives near Toronto so I’m the one caring for our mother in Ottawa, and I must say we’re having fun. We’re working our way through her photos as I prepare to move her to a long-term care facility. We go down memory lane together, she telling me of her life before children, describing a woman I never knew but can now imagine, a rebel in her time, a rule-breaker who married my father twice. The first time to legitimize in their own eyes the pre-marital sex they were already enjoying. The second time to legitimize their relationship before family and friends.
Learning who my mom really is, the woman she’s always been, is a great way for us to end whatever time we have left to share. I feel peaceful now as I get to know her and I believe she shares the same peace getting to know me. I’m no longer her assailant. I’m her daughter. I will remember all of this on the day she no longer remembers my name and forgets who I am.
At 94, my mother deserves every kindness I can give, relief at last from the tumultuous mood swings that infected every part of her life with unfathomable periodicity.
At 68, I deserve the mother I now have, the funny tender-hearted woman who opens her door and smiles, astonished, when she finds me standing there. The mom who raises that sardonic eyebrow, gently shakes her head and softly giggles at the absurdity of our human lives, the mom who was always there though hidden from me in that terrifying space we once in our terrible ignorance called crazy.
