I WAS STUDYING for midterms during my senior year in college when the phone rang.
“Leslie? Ah, I’m a little confused.”
“Mom? Where are you?” Her voice sounded distant, like she was talking into a soup can.
“I’m on a pay phone at a gas station. Can you come get me?”
Now I was confused. “Why?”
“I was driving to my therapist’s appointment, but I think I got off at the wrong exit. I’m not sure I can drive myself home.”
When I picked her up, she seemed oddly subdued. But by the time we returned home things seemed normal enough, and I wrote the incident off to a strange morning. Later the same week we gathered to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. Dad baked his famous lasagna. I was hurt. This was Gwyn’s favorite meal, and his. I didn’t particularly like lasagna. Mom had always asked me what I wanted her to cook for my family birthday dinner, but this time she hadn’t. Adding insult to injury, she had been withdrawn throughout the evening, damping down the energy in the dining room like an empty glass over a candle. Why wasn’t she happy about my birthday? Is she mad at me?
In the den after dinner, I was confronting Dad with my grievances when I heard something that sounded like sniffling. I looked across the room at the oddest sight. Mom was mechanically wiping the large coffee table in front of the sofa with a rag, back and forth, again and again. Tears rolled down her cheeks. In that instant I realized just how unusually she had been acting over the past week.
“Leslie, I’m sorry. I just didn’t feel up to cooking tonight,” she said, through inconsolable sobs. She rarely apologized. And I had never seen her break down crying like this. My hurt feelings instantaneously vanished.
For days afterward, Mom lay in bed crying. I didn’t know how to help her. I didn’t understand what was wrong. I wondered whether her state was tied to the challenges her store was facing. Five years after it opened, the large retail bed and bath chains that had come into vogue were giving her a serious run for her money. I usually knew the right thing to say to make Mom feel better, but now my words fell on deaf ears. Mom would tell me that she knew I had other things to do, that she didn’t want to keep me from my life. But then, when I would get up to leave her bedside, she would tell me that she felt like a small child being abandoned.
Miraculously, within a few weeks Mom’s despair lifted, and like a painful bout of stomach flu that disappears from memory as suddenly as it arrives, it quickly escaped my mind. Three years later, when I was ready to graduate from law school, Mom’s depression resurfaced, hungrier and fiercer than before. She had suffered a few recent setbacks. She had been forced to finally close her store and was faced with the question of what to do next.
Convinced that she was meant to have a meaningful career in business or mental health, Mom had enrolled in community college courses. The turmoil she felt in high school, however, churned up again as soon as she stepped back in the classroom. Concurrently, Dad was unceremoniously let go after twenty-five years at his company, in order to create a position for the owner’s son. Both of my parents took it very personally. For months, Dad pursued jobs by day and worried at night, until he joined his brother, Buddy, in a thriving video security business. This crisis churned up painful memories for Mom of all those years when Dad had been sick and when her own father had been treated poorly at work. And there was one more thing. Although I had remained at UCLA for law school, in love with the university and still hesitant to venture far away, there was no denying that my life was increasingly busy and less centered on home.
Day after day, Mom lay in bed, in tears, not asleep but not entirely awake either. She felt intensely deprived, she later revealed, just as she had as a child. She thought that she was slowly dying, that her sense of self was coming to an end. She didn’t want her children to see her in this condition, but she also didn’t want to be alone.
“Mom, let’s go for a walk,” I would say as I stood beside her bed. “Lying there all day would make anyone miserable.”
“Maybe later, Leslie. Not now. I feel numb.” She seemed powerless and could barely string her words together.
“You’ll feel better if you just get out of bed.”
“Leslie, it’s not that kind of thing. I haven’t slept. I can’t think straight. I need to rest before I can go for a walk.”
I felt like a schoolteacher clumsily struggling to motivate a troubled student. “Let’s at least think of something positive. Something that will make you happy.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I just have to go through this.”
I felt that if I could only find the right words, assemble the Scrabble tiles on my rack in the proper order, I could beat Mom’s depression. But I couldn’t. I was frustrated by my lack of cleverness. I wished I could magically extinguish her sorrow and we could both get back to real life. One afternoon, as I sat by her bed, I thought back a couple years, to my first semester in law school, when I decided to apply for a summer clerkship. The deadline had fast been approaching. I could not find the time to make follow-up calls while studying for my first set of finals.
“Do you need my help?” Mom had asked, sensing my frustration one evening.
At first I just shook my head. But she persisted.
“Really. I can make the calls for you,” she said, confidently. “Maybe I’ll get myself a job at the same time,” she added, half joking.
“They’re law firms, Mom. You’re not a lawyer.”
“Well, who knows,” she said.
I had studied for finals while Mom placed the follow-up calls to law firms. She sounded uncharacteristically businesslike. Not only was I proud of her, but she was proud of herself. “We got a job!” she told Dad when I received a clerkship offer. Now, I looked at Mom, lying in bed. I could not believe that she couldn’t will herself out of this state, the way she had three years earlier. And I found myself wishing that she had at least chosen a better time. I wondered whether she had subconsciously synced her breakdown to coincide with my bar exam studies in order to keep me with her for a while longer.
After sitting by her side in the dark master bedroom for a couple of hours, I convinced myself that I had to leave. I didn’t have more time. Time was so precious to me, always. I had to get outside, disentangle myself from the webs of melancholy. Besides, thank God, it’s not like she has a terminal illness. She’s sad, she’s not dying. Surviving was the ultimate goal. Mom was a survivor. I remained convinced that ultimately she would will herself back to health.
I bent down to hug her. “I have to go back to school,” I said gently.
“I know. Don’t worry,” Mom said, forcing a pathetic smile.
“I promise you’ll get better. I love you,” I said, kissing her again before I left.
“I love you, too,” she said in a barely audible voice.
I left home that afternoon in a fog, sucked into Mom’s despondency. Each time I departed, I felt that I should have stayed longer, holding her hand and making her feel more comfortable. Mom would have done that for me, or for anyone in our family. Knowing that my sister and brother, by then undergraduates at UCLA, also were not at home did not make me feel any less guilty about departing. I recently asked my sister whether my intense relationship with Mom ever made her feel bad. To my surprise, Gwyn told me, “No, it’s a relief.” Gwyn, who at the time had been serving as UCLA’s student body president, also thought about Mom much of the time. “But you’re like me on steroids,” she said. My constant devotion to Mom took the pressure off my sister and even allowed her, later on, to briefly live in other parts of the country and the world.
I regretted that Mom didn’t share news of her illness with one or two friends. For Mom, there was always a distinction between friends and family. The time she spent with her friends was often confined to dinners out with spouses or an occasional lunch. She rarely revealed to them her personal problems or intimate confidences, at least as far as I could determine. Thus, our nuclear family made up her inner circle. And I felt like her best hope for a cure. Yet here I was, once again leaving her, going out to dinner with my boyfriend or back to the library to study. I fled to restaurants and libraries, where lights were on, air was circulating, and people were living, even laughing. The outside world was full of possibilities, at least for those who weren’t constantly looking back.
Mom took pride in the fact that she was able to attend my law school graduation, even though she later said that she felt like she was going to collapse. As connected as I felt to her, I still had no idea of the extent of the torment she was experiencing.
In desperation, Mom had found a psychiatrist who specialized in psychopharmacology. Because of the trauma she had experienced, he told her she probably had a chemical imbalance that could be treated with an antidepressant containing serotonin. Mom disliked taking medicine, but she would have tried anything by that point. Dad convinced me to go ahead and take the post-bar-exam trip I had planned with my boyfriend. I called home every day, dreading the same news that Mom still had not improved. Then one day, Dad sounded different. The antidepressants had begun to take effect. On the telephone, from my shabby hotel room in some province of China, I took a deep breath. For the first time in weeks, air came to me easily. That was when I began my vacation in earnest.
Mom slowly began a new chapter in her life. She had been to hell and back but emerged stronger. She told Dad and me that she had been disappointed by our level of support and empathy during her weeks of desperation. We could deal with this. At least she was back, healthy and relatively happy. I was on reprieve, once again free to enjoy life. Still, Mom’s depression would leave its mark. I had witnessed an agony that had enabled me to better imagine the horrors that had imprinted themselves on my mother’s mind. I had seen firsthand how devastating depression could be. I would work even harder to stay busy, to be successful, to keep options open, to maintain friendships, and avoid any life choices that might contribute to Mom’s next deep, dark descent.