[Warning:  not my usual light fare.  Regular programming will resume shortly.]

 As a girl, I always loved Nancy Drew mysteries.  Sometimes I’d read them in bed with a flashlight, under a tent of blankets or, if it was summer, I’d sit out on the porch, munching absent-mindedly on cold cereal straight from the box while I followed Nancy and her little blue roadster into the captivating world of jewel thieves and kidnapped heiresses, and moss-covered mansions with secret underground tunnels.  Nancy had a father, the dashing criminal lawyer, Carson Drew, and she had a servant, the plump and kindly Hannah Gruen, but Oedipally-charmed creature that she was, Nancy did not have a mother to spoil her fun.  Thus, Nancy’s life, unlike my own, remained essentially uncomplicated by problems maternal in origin.  There was no one around to criticize her posture, and no one to embarrass her with unwelcome confidences about the birds and the bees; there was no one to stop her from ironing her hair or piercing her ears, or going to school in hip-hugger jeans.  Above all, in Nancy’s carefree, well-ordered world, there was no one likely to run outside in the dead of winter dressed only in the thinnest of bedclothes, waving a used sanitary napkin in the air and shouting the names of obscure Old Testament prophets.

 My mother suffers from what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders refers to as Type I Bipolar Disorder, a tidy little term for a Pandora’s Box of symptoms, ranging from catatonic stupor to hallucinogenic religious euphoria, with miles of uncharted territory in between.  It is often said that creativity and manic-depression, as the disease used to be called, go hand-in-hand; van Gogh had his paintings, Byron his poetry, Hemingway his pen, Beethoven his music.  And my mother, during her first spin ‘round the ballroom with the demons of mania, had her knitting.

 Her first psychotic break took place in January of 1967, when I was in the seventh grade.  My two older brothers were grown by that time and living on their own, so it was just Dad and me, manning the front lines as best we could.  The engine that drives the manic mind, whether fueled by the finest oil-based pigments or three-dollar skeins of Red Heart Four-Ply, is pretty much the same, I imagine, and a force of nature to behold, in whatever form it chooses to blossom.  By late ’66, every nook and cranny of our house overflowed with the fruits of my mother’s rapidly clicking needles, from reindeer stocking caps and Fair Isle cardigans to elaborate popcorn-stitched pullovers and mock mink stoles that emerged almost overnight from balls of fuzzy beige mohair.  Her output would no doubt have dazzled even the most enterprising of spiders.  Our miniature poodle Suzette gradually amassed an impressive hand knit wardrobe of her own and, though I’d long since outgrown my Barbie dolls, they, too, were the beneficiaries of Bipolar I’s wondrous productive phase.  If my mother hadn’t finally cracked, I fear we’d all still be in there somewhere, trapped like houseflies in some gigantic acrylic web.  

 Though we didn’t have money, mom was always fashion conscious, no matter how deeply she sank into the throes of her madness.  The first time she was admitted to a psychiatric facility (after putting one of her hand knit afghans over the TV to stop it from spying on us), she wore one of her most impressive creations:  a fully-lined Chanel-style suit with matching beret, knit in kelly green tweed on #1 needles, an ensemble so stunning, even the depressives on the unit managed to lift their weary eyes in mute admiration.

 At the time, of course, I had no idea how wonderful she was in her way.  The episode in the front yard with the Kotex mortified me to my adolescent core; the two of us were like trains on opposite tracks that were destined to collide, me bumping along in the direction of puberty and her wildly careening towards a very rocky menopause, both of us tugged by the unseen pull of ancient lunar cycles, with my poor father stuck in the middle, wondering what to do next.

 During the three months that mom was hospitalized, he held down the fort pretty well, all things considered.  Every morning at six, as usual, he’d head for work at a cross town Chevy plant with a couple of fellow hillbilly Detroit transplants:  Slim Beatty, who generally started each workday with a nip from his flask, and Tom Parton, a bashful Tennessean who liked to hunt possum and raccoon, which he’d pass along to us on occasion, though my mother never had much success when it came to cooking up varmints; she was originally a Grosse Pointe girl, and Chanel suits were much more her speed. 

 I’d get myself off to school, guiltily enjoying the relative serenity of our house now that my mother was temporarily out of the picture, though some of her mania still lingered busily in all the knitting that she’d left behind.  Something about her creations seemed oddly alive, not so unlike those swirling skies in van Gogh’s “A Starry Night,” and it troubled me to look at them.  She hadn’t been sleeping much in the weeks leading up to her admission to the hospital and it had been a rough time for all of us.  Some nights she’d be excited, wanting to talk about all the plans she was cooking up with God to bring knitting to the inner city.  Other times she’d collapse into a heap on the cold bathroom tiles, sobbing about the sins of her youth, mostly sexual in nature and often luridly graphic.  I would lie in my room, pressing my fingers to my ears in an effort to block out the sound of her strangely deepening voice, while my dad tried with limited success to coax her back into bed.

                                               *    *    *

 “Miss Dorothy, look, your family is here to see you.”

 A kind-looking African-American nurse was guiding my mother towards the table where Dad and I sat in a quiet corner of the visitor’s lounge.  Mom looked up, smiling wanly, and slowly made her way towards us. We were only allowed to visit her on weekends, and the shock of seeing her that very first time still saddens me when I dwell on it.  She was wearing another one of her creations, again a suit, this one knit in a black-and-white hound’s tooth pattern, with a gold circular broach pinned to the lapel.  And she’d still managed to put on lipstick, Tangee Crimnson Joy, a color she’d stuck to religiously since its heyday in the 1940s, despite the fact that make-up styles had long since moved on to a more subdued palate.  Subdued was never really her thing.

 It was like looking at a burnt-out marquee on a once-grand movie palace, or seeing a merry-go-round that had suddenly ground to a catastrophic halt.  All the juice was gone out of her, though technically, it turned out, the opposite had been true.  The juice had actually gone into her, in the form of Electroconvulsive Therapy, seizure-inducing sine-wave currents administered via a pair of electrodes, one on each side of her head, fifteen seconds a pop, three times a week.   Of course, she’d been heavily drugged as well.  On the way home from the hospital that night, dad and I stopped for a bite at Kentucky Fried Chicken, both of us too broken-hearted to talk. 

 And so the time wore on that year, January snow turning to March slush, as the first crocuses poked their pale green tips through the stubborn remnants of Michigan winter.  Bipolar disorder is by its very nature a cyclical condition; even now, more than four decades later, with the brain mapped and the DNA code cracked, its physiology remains an elusive thing to those who study the fathoms of the human mind. All I know is that by early April, my mother was back home again, a little wobbly, but normal, more or less, at least by our family’s admittedly lax standards. Turns out there are mysteries to this life that Nancy Drew never imagined.  My mother, like spring, had managed to come around again.

 It wasn’t long, however, before she began to talk about getting into macramé.