“I thought you were just taking a group of girls skating,” my husband said, trying to understand how this could have happened. “I didn’t know you were skating, too.”
“Yes, well, I’ve been skating for forty-five years,” I said, “and I’ve never shattered my wrist. So I didn’t plan on it.”
We were in the emergency room, my wrist suspended from a barbaric device designed to straighten it out of its current “S” shape. The pain was excruciating, and I silently ranked it up there with childbirth; despite a lifetime of halfhearted attempts at hurting myself—of wishing, sometimes, for physical pain because it was more quantifiable than the pain in my head—I was surprised at how much I could hurt and still live.
I’d taken my tween daughter and her friends to a nearby ice rink for a fun Friday night out, something I’d done often when my children were younger. As they grew older, there weren’t nearly the opportunities to spend time with them on weekends, and if spending time meant ice skating with a bunch of middle-schoolers, then I took what I could get. I helped the girls get skated up, got myself ready, and followed them out onto the ice where strobe lights were flashing and dance music playing. I watched them take off, arm in arm, got out on the ice myself, and promptly fell. I knew immediately that it was broken, even though I’d never broken a bone before. The pain was excruciating, and the “S” shape of the wrist within minutes confirmed my suspicion.
Once at the hospital, I was put in a room where the fracture could be “reduced,” or straightened back out. It seemed like a very long time before the dripping medication began to make any sort of difference in the pain level, although it was hindered by my persistent need to vomit. My allergic reaction to narcotics does nothing to quell my desire for them when I’m feeling like this—though, in fact, I’d never felt this much agony without a baby being on the other side.
Suddenly, I began sweating profusely. The room started spinning and I knew I was going to faint; my blood pressure had dropped dangerously low. One nurse raised my feet so they were above my heart while another grabbed a cloth and started mopping the sweat that was pouring down my face and into my eyes. At one point, as medicated as I was, I saw a strange look on her face and realized that she had just mopped off my eyebrows, which were penciled in daily with Revlon Color-Stay Brow Liner and Brush. She must have been startled when they disappeared, and I was mortified. As far as I could recall, I’d not been seen, even by my husband, without eyebrows penciled in for more than thirty years.
In those thirty years, I didn’t swim under water, despite my love of swimming; I always found a way to keep my head out. Taking the kids to water parks when they were younger was easy because they liked water slides and splashing pools, but I was careful not to let them splash my face. Taking them to the community pool when they were older was a bit trickier, but I think I managed pretty successfully to keep my head above water. It became second nature to protect my eyes—to protect my penciled eyebrows—at all cost, through college and swimming with friends when I was single, through getting married, having kids, and watching those kids grow up. I was hobbled by my refusal to get my face wet because of the damn eyebrows—because of OCD that I never allowed myself to acknowledge, discuss, or treat.
I carried an eyebrow pencil like other women carried lip gloss, or like men carry a wallet; I always had one with me.
It didn’t do any good that night, though. When I was finally released, encased in a heavy cast and shivering under the blanket around my shoulders, I was transported in my wheelchair back through the
ER and past reception—with no eyebrows. I got in the car and rested my arm on a pillow as my husband drove me home—with no eyebrows. It was the most emotionally excruciating hour of my life. No amount of pain medication was going to dull the humiliation of being exposed. And the next day, I remember thinking, This has got to stop.
MY BOYFRIEND ASKED ME TO MARRY HIM ON A ROMANTIC CHRISTMAS MORNING BY A ROARING FIRE.
He also bought me a piano, because my old upright didn’t fit through his door, and a golf cart just for kicks. We started planning our wedding for the following fall because I’d always envisioned a crisp, cool, fall wedding that would not involve a lot of sweat. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that it would be any other way, and, by God, it wouldn’t.
Two months after getting engaged, I got the phone call I knew would one day come: The ex-boyfriend was in the hospital. His brother was telling people he had brain cancer, and, of course, I went along with it. After all those years, I went right back to being the lying, deceiving, guilt-ridden girl I used to be—protecting him.
I went to see him at the hospital, and he already looked dead. He’d gone from his robust 170 pounds to about 120, and there were just sticks where his legs used to be. He’d aged forty years in the nine years since his diagnosis, and something told me he never did start taking care of himself.
I started crying when I walked in the room and saw him, and he said, “Aw, Mag, don’t. We always knew the bug was gonna get me.”
I pulled myself together and sat on the side of his bed. “Does it hurt?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “not really. They’re giving me some pretty good drugs.” And he tried to laugh, knowing I’d appreciate the humor in his response. I smiled, because I did, but that was about the best I could do.
“How’re you doing?” he asked me after a few moments. It seemed neither of us could find our tongues.
“I’m good,” I said. “I’m getting married in the fall. Finally, huh?” I managed a smile.
He did, too. “Glad to hear it. I always hoped you’d be happy.”
I wanted to say, And I always hoped you’d tell me how in God’s name you got this, but what came out was, “I always hoped you knew that I loved you.”
He squeezed my hand, and at that moment another friend came to visit. I said good-bye and that I’d visit again, and made it out the door of the hospital before I began sobbing—sobbing for him, for me, for everything that used to be but was no more. Sobbing for how he hurt me, how he killed a part of me even if he hadn’t given me the virus, and sobbing for how sad I felt for him, dying like an old man when he wasn’t an old man at all. Sobbing for the love and sense of belonging I’d had with him, that I’d never had before or since, which he’d destroyed—which we had destroyed together—which, in fact, needed to be destroyed if I was ever to have a healthy, loving relationship.
And I did find that healthy, loving relationship. We were married on a gorgeous fall afternoon surrounded by friends and family who, I think, were simply thrilled that it was finally happening, for both of us. The carnage that had become my face in the weeks leading up to the wedding was masked with professional makeup because the stress had kicked my OCD into full bloom. We honeymooned in the Caribbean, and, for ten days, I did not go underwater.
UNTIL YOU’RE A PARENT YOURSELF, YOU CAN’T REALLY SEE THE TOTAL IMPACT OF GROWING UP.
Especially, it seems, when an addicted parent and mental issues are involved. But even if you try to understand—do all of the reading, identify all of your baggage—there are some parts that come back to haunt you after you have kids of your own: leftover issues that you simply couldn’t have addressed in advance because they’re not exposed until you have kids. Or maybe it seems that way because, until you have kids of your own, you can simply pretend your own childhood was normal. Once your own kids come, you can’t do that anymore because pretty much every single thing you do and say passes first through that filter in your mind that always tried to screen for what a normal response would have been in any given situation. And the only way you know how to find it is to remember.
When my child would drop something or break something, my very first thoughts were, How would a typical parent handle this? And how would a typical child handle this? I would think back to my own childhood, reflexively, and remember how things were handled, and decide, in those few seconds while my children awaited my reaction, whether those ways were helpful. Not unlike any new parent in any given generation, I was trying to find the best way to parent with the tools I had and the only basis for comparison that I knew: How would I have preferred my parents to handle this kind of situation, and how would I have preferred to handle it myself? Everything is a function of these simple questions: How did I feel as a kid when that happened? How should a kid feel when that happens?
I’ve always just wanted so desperately to be normal. It’s as simple and, actually, as complicated as that because you can ask twenty different people what “normal” is and get twenty different responses. And yet almost everything I’ve ever done in my life has been driven by that need. When I finished school early to get a jump on life, I thought, this is it. Now I can start over and be happy. When I quit bartending and started working at the law firm, I thought, this is it. Now I can start over and be happy. When I quit drinking, I thought the same thing. When I joined karate, finished grad school, and met my husband, each time, I thought—again—this is it. Now I can start over and be happy. And every single time, the demon caught up with me: the demon that is my mind, that is the OCD that I could not fix because I could not acknowledge it, because I didn’t know what it was.
Then I had children and thought, no, this is the cure: the unconditional and absolute love of these little people for me, no matter my flaws. I’d discovered the cure for this cancer of my mind, I was sure of it. This is the end of the rainbow. And again, beyond rational thought, it wasn’t.
I tried to ignore the shadow of doubt that continually nagged at the back of my mind: the one that reminded me that I hadn’t yet fixed the flaw in the system. I was successful for just-long-enough periods of time to think that I had, until the old, familiar pangs of self-doubt and self-disgust resurfaced with such force as my kids grew older that ignoring them would take more effort than embracing them. So, this was my epiphany.
The problem is me, and it is inside, not outside. If the problem is inside, then the solution must also be inside. And it is not finding the elusive Prince Charming, or having the perfect parents or a sober father. It is finding me; I’m the one I’ve been searching for all of this time. There is something about me that I don’t understand, have never understood, and have spent way too much of my life pretending I don’t need to understand in order to be happy. And as long as I don’t know what’s wrong—or know but don’t talk about it—I will continue searching and I will continue to hide my issues in shame.
I also needed to let go of my steadfast belief that mental diseases and disorders don’t happen to intelligent, successful people; I blame this limiting belief for much of my inability through the years to recognize that I needed help. And, of course, that paradigm is ridiculous; mental diseases and mental illness don’t discriminate any more than physical diseases do. The discrimination comes about when people who have mental disorders are made to feel ashamed of them because of fear and lack of communication. And then it’s not the disease doing the discriminating.
I needed to admit to myself that I was still often compelled to pick and pluck. And that even after fifteen years of marriage and two children, losing a few pounds—for any reason, including having the flu—prompted me to starve myself so I could lose more. The obsessive thought was always right below the surface, awaiting an invitation. And it came down to whether that invitation was extended or not.
I KNEW AT LEAST PART OF THE ANSWERS I SOUGHT WERE GOING TO BE FOUND IN MY CHILDHOOD.
Six or seven years ago, in an effort to jog some memories when I started writing all of this down, I started driving by my old house with the barn every time I went home to see my parents. My family hasn’t lived there for thirty years, and yet seeing it again brings both a comfort and an agony that makes me want to be twelve again so badly that I physically ache. I’ve never lost the fantasy of going back to childhood and having a chance to do it again, to be happy this time.
When I first started going back, I would drive very slowly past the place and then turn around down the road a bit and drive slowly back. I was trying to remember what my life there had felt like and couldn’t; all I had were photographs in my mind.
Eventually, I just parked out in front and hoped to God no one called the police; I would just sit and stare, trying to conjure up those years that were, in their absence, causing me such grief. But even that wasn’t enough, and one day I found myself walking up to a man pulling weeds next to the shed. I explained who I was, and we were both thrilled to realize that he remembered my family. His family had owned the farm for twenty-five years or so, he said, and he welcomed me to look around. I didn’t even know where to start.
I went from the shed to the garage to the stable, taking it all in and pairing images with the picture frames in my head as I passed through them. I lingered at the place where the big barn gate used to be, envisioning the horses hanging their heads over it in search of sugar cubes from our hands. Then I moved on.
I walked into the barn and inhaled. Immediately, I got light-headed and started, in true panic-attack form, to hyperventilate; the sensations were overpowering and not just to my nose. The hay, the lingering smell of the manure, the loft, the thickness of the air—all threatened to suffocate me. I came out sobbing for everything that used to be but is no more: the childhood I couldn’t do over and the parents who couldn’t do their part over either. What a cruel irony, I remember thinking; I came back looking for validation for how screwed up I am, and what I’ve realized instead is how hard it was for all of us. Not just for me. Not just for my siblings. For all of us.
I headed down to the pond to try to collect myself, only to be overwhelmed by the sights and smells of the field, the water, the stream, the pasture. I had an overwhelming sense of desperation, of grief, of frustration, of fear, of sadness. Maybe when there aren’t enough acceptable ways to turn these feelings outward, we learn to turn them inward instead. They have to go somewhere, right? Otherwise, our heads would explode.
OCD tormented me long before I was old enough to understand what it was: a quantifiable, recognized mental disorder. I was aware enough to know something was wrong with me, and I believed for whatever reasons that I couldn’t discuss it, and I internalized the attendant shame long before I was old enough to understand what that was. Because the obsessive thoughts and corresponding rituals—which weren’t always present, making it even more confusing—changed and morphed and evolved and devolved through the years, there was little continuity for me to focus on, even if I wanted to try to define what was wrong. There were always new kinds of crazy popping up, leading me to the “lightning rod” self-image that haunted me all of these years. I had no way of knowing that almost all of those bad things were, in fact, one thing—one thing that other people had, too: a thing that could actually be helped with therapy and anti-anxiety medications, and that did not, in fact, have to rule my life.
I grew up believing I was different in a bad way, and, while I would not change a thing about my life as it is now, if I’d known at ten or twenty—or forty even—what I know now, I know my life would not have been nearly as painful and shameful and lonely.
I FINALLY WENT TO A DERMATOLOGIST FOR MY “ADULT ACNE” IN MY LATE THIRTIES.
I was the mother of two young children. He was a pompous, arrogant man who did not address me but rather dictated his notes as he was examining me. This made it quite awkward to ask a question, and it gave me the sense at all times that he wasn’t aware I was listening. He told me he needed to remove two or three pre-cancers from my face, scowled as he asked about my history of sun exposure, and proceeded to zap me not two or three but nineteen times with liquid nitrogen. He then had the nerve to ask me how long I’d been “scratching” at my acne.
“Oh, I don’t know—I guess about, oh, thirty years or so . . . ,” I answered, tears stinging my nitrogen-burned skin. What I wanted to say, but couldn’t, was, “How long have you had trouble with math? You said ‘two or three’!” And then I wanted to follow it up with, “How long have you had such a successful bedside manner?” But I’ve never been able to say things like this because it could make someone mad. That’s never left me either.
“Well, stop doing it,” he said, ignoring my crying. “Picking at your skin makes it difficult to see potential problems.” He then went back to dictating around me, while I sat there fuming. What I wanted to say, but couldn’t, again, was something like this: “Oh, stop? That’s all there was to it all this time? I just needed some horse’s ass to tell me to stop, and that would be the end of it? Oh, my God! All this time! And I just needed you to tell me to stop? You stupid, arrogant, son of a bitch.” “Just stop,” he says. Like I can.
I went to a different dermatologist after that, one who took a slightly different approach. Whether or not she knew why I did what I did, she figured out that I truly couldn’t stop and put me on drugs to stop the acne, which left me with nothing on my face to pick at. Problem solved—at least on their end.
I’ve been to many different doctors in recent years, as a matter of fact. After my kids were born and I realized what it felt like to want to live, I spent many hours at many doctors’ offices making sure I had done no permanent damage to my body in my pre-children, pre-wanting-to-live days. My OCD still convinces me on a daily basis of my imminent demise, and I admit to spending hours on the Internet sometimes, researching my symptoms and assigning various fatal diseases to them. Yes, I know I’m a hypochondriac, but guess what? Even hypochondriacs eventually get sick. And I’ll be ready.
I DO HAVE A GOOD LIFE NOW.
It will never be a perfect life, but it is far better than it certainly could have been, given some of the choices I made along the way. Fortunately, in spurts of sanity, I often managed to propel myself one step farther up from the bottom of the pit, one step closer to full-time light. The exertion, of course, would force me to “rest” for varying amounts of time, but then, one day, it would happen again; I would somehow muster the energy to submit a resume, or enter recovery, or join karate, or find a better place to live. And I’d be a step closer to normal, yet again.
Even though it’s not perfect, it’s close enough to perfect in all the ways it needs to be; I know I can live with the struggles because I’ve done it all of my life. I do the best I can with my kids, in terms of being fair and honest and never giving them reason to doubt my love for them. I try to do the same with my husband, although sometimes I go out of bounds with my need for love and attention, and he tries his best to understand the reasons behind it.
I’ve always tried to control my sarcasm around my family because, even though my husband accepts it as the defense mechanism it is, I can’t expect my children to understand. And it often comes out when I’m frustrated or angry, which is not how I want my kids to learn to manage those emotions. I’ve been reasonably successful, I think; while both of my children demonstrated a gift for humor at an embarrassingly young age, their sarcasm is without anger. It is simply an appreciation of irony.
My dad and I have a great relationship these days. He’s still everything he used to be—opinionated, passionate, somewhat loud-voiced—but without the alcohol. He is something of an extreme couponer; his indulgence of this quirk enables him each month to buy bulk toiletries that he then donates to homeless shelters. My mom is, in her mid-seventies, a certified lifeguard, and my dad is her helper. And on the morning of 9/11, as I sat in front of my TV watching the end of the world as I knew it, he’s the one I called. I needed him to make some sense of it, reassure me somehow, and tell me if I should go get my son from preschool—because he is my father.
The OCD, of course, never goes away permanently, but it does take sabbaticals on occasion. I trim my nails from time to time, in an effort to stop plucking, like how I used the Band-Aids to help me quit sucking my thumb. Sometimes it works for months at a time and I think I’m finally over it, but then I’ll be watching television one night and, before I know it, they’re all gone—eyebrows and eyelashes alike. I start over the next day, trimming my nails, and it’s like those months in between never happened.
I watch my weight, although I don’t weigh myself four and five times a day anymore. My pregnancies were challenging, to put it mildly; I gained sixty-five pounds with each child—no easy trick, considering I actually lost ten pounds the first five months of my second pregnancy—and it took a supreme effort each day to eat well and put the best interests of the babies first. I realize how ridiculous this must sound to someone who doesn’t have this problem, particularly when we’re talking about the miracle of pregnancy and childbirth. But just as knowing I’m too thin can make me euphoric, gaining weight, for whatever reason, can send me plummeting into a depression from which it could take months to recover. It’s not logical; it’s just the way it is.
I take antidepressants for the mood swings and anxiety attacks, and they seem to do the trick. I call them my “happy pills,” and I keep waiting for the “self-confidence pills” and “self-esteem pills” to come on the market—although I know, on some level, that the OCD is what caused those deficits in me in the first place, and that they may not be entirely recoverable. I also know that there’s a hereditary tendency for many of these mental disorders and, fortunately for my kids, what to look for in them. That—my knowledge—I can give them.