"for my mom, because it has everything she likes," by my daughter

This post completes a sequence that began with this post. If you haven’t been following this story, reading Why I Wrote the Bipolar Child Story will give you the context.

 ***

I'D THREATENED to have my my daughter taken forcibly to the psych hospital, and the threat seemed to have paid off. Even though she’d refused treatment, going through the evaluation seemed to center her—and me. We agreed that she could continue living at home if she stayed in the basement. She could come up to take a shower or to fix herself something to eat. And she’d otherwise abide by the contract I’d made her sign before moving back home. I had no choice. There was nowhere else she could go.

And then, over the next few weeks, I saw her getting  . . . better. She quit talking to the sociopathic boyfriend. She had a part-time job at a grocery store, and when I shopped there, I'd see her in her checkout lane, working her charm on the customers. She'd made a few friends who seem to be going somewhere in their lives, and one of them was a girl.

If you took a snapshot now, it wouldn't show anything that out of the ordinary. You'd have a picture of your basic 19-year-old who moves out, makes some dumb decisions, then lands back in your basement.

So there is hope.

But there is also history. Bipolar isn’t monolithic—it can have vastly different outcomes for different people. Some do quite well, and some don't. Some do well and then don't do so well. And as as far as pediatric bipolar goes--we just don’t know that much about what these children’s lives will be like when they're adults.

In my heart, I'm certain that my daughter will struggle. I just don’t know exactly how.

THE ORIGINAL STORY, the metaphor about the puppy, was brutal, snaking up and down and then twisting as it did to its dreadful conclusion, but to my surprise, many people who read it thanked me. They recognized themselves and their own child, a brother or sister, a parent, a spouse—even people who had bipolar seemed appreciative.

Apparently, I’d said something other people wanted to say but couldn’t . . . or wouldn’t. I began to think that telling the story, my daughter's and mine, might have some value beyond being just a way to offload my personal pain--maybe even an audience beyond OS. But the story belonged to us both, and when I thought about writing more, or under my own name, I got stuck. Had I been disloyal to write about her at all? What would she think if she knew?

So I showed her the story.

 But what about the story?

She was silent for a minute, then she laughed and said, “That’s cute, Mom.”

What could she possibly find cute?

“You know, the puppy.”

She wasn’t throwing my laptop across the room, and believe me, I was grateful, but the meaning of the story had gone right by her, like a shard of shrapnel, missing her outright. I felt relief but also . . . disappointment. Why didn’t she have anything more to say about it? Actually, why hadn't she slapped me across the face?

Here's what I know, or at least suspect:

At 19, she is immortal and invincible. Oh, sure, she’s had some bad breaks, and people have been unfair to her, but in her own eyes, she’s fine. And it’s possible she’s right.

On a bell curve, most of us bunch up around “normal.” But she and others like her trail off the edge on a narrow peninsula, a piece of real estate where it's possible to have a certain, sparkly quality—and she has it. Her artwork is sublime. Her poetry is unfocused, but she writes lines I never could, lines that drop you four floors before you can recover. I would be happy to have half her passion and instinct for survival.

I'd held up the story like a mirror for her to look in, and she saw something, but in shadows. I've seen a few cracks in her facade: After I took away her 15-year-old brother's Xbox and he threw a fit worthy of a two-year-old, she asked me, “Is that what I’m like?” And recently, in an offhand way, she said she hopes the medication she’s taking now doesn’t stop working . . . like everything else she’s tried.

IF LOVE IS DEFINED by sheer expenditure of psychic and tangible resources, then there’s no question that I love my daughter. But as a parent and a person, I am perilously flawed. She has pushed me to the edge and off it, forced me to learn things I never, ever wanted to know about myself, slammed me up against my own limits and proved my pettiness and capacity for rage. She’s taken the person I thought I was away.

But in the end, what I’ve lost or how I feel is not important:

So today, the puppy comes running up to you and wants to play. The puppy is all “Throw me the stick! Throw me the stick!” and wagging its tail. So you take it to the park, and you throw the stick, and the puppy, really a dog now, runs full out, back legs in perfect rhythm with the front, like a beautiful machine, and it is truly a lovely sight to see it so free. It catches the stick in its mouth, effortlessly, and carries it back.

Its eyes bright, it drops the stick at your feet. And you throw the stick again.

 A    P O S T S C R I P T

The other day, while my daughter and I were standing at the kitchen sink, I was thinking about how she’d read the story,  and I worried that some of it, the part that meant I was a bad mother, might actually have hit her a glancing blow.

So I asked her, stupidly, “Do you know I love you?”

She looked at me with a puzzled expression, but her answer was clear enough. She told me, “Sometimes.”

The answer was so perfect, so crystalline in its honesty that I laughed out loud. She knows I love her--sometimes.

As I did. And as I do.