SENIOR YEAR WAS filled with activity.

The summer before senior year, I met Jerry. I had boyfriends before him, but this was my first relationship. We were introduced by a mutual friend. When we met, he told me he had first noticed me at St. Ambrose. He and his older sister usually sat on the side of the church where I served as an usher. I was impressed by this smart and attractive college sophomore who appreciated my intellect.

We shared the classic first love where you stay on the phone at night until one or the other of you falls asleep. I was usually the sleepyhead. Jerry provided emotional support for me and encouraged my love of theater. He was my first thought and only love for many years. My father and Lloyd do not count.

Loving performance, I was delighted to be cast in the school’s fall drama, Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. The director, Rosemary Knower, a first-year faculty member, had held auditions for Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding. I noted the play had been changed when my friend, Bernice, and I saw the posted cast list. Bernice joined my class at Park in ninth grade, boosting the number of black girls in the class of 1977 to two. Having bonded over time, we rushed to the school library to find a copy of the play and see what size my part was.

To my delight, my character, Grusha Vashnadze, a young Russian peasant woman, was the lead. During the rehearsal process, Mrs. Knower, the director would sometimes take me home for dinner with her family so I would have a ride back to school for evening rehearsals. One night at dinner, she shared how difficult she had thought Brecht’s plays would be for high school students to perform. She said to me, “Your audition changed my mind.” Coming from Mrs. Knower, an artistically insightful director, I was thrilled. Maybe with time, the acting thing could work out for me.

The play was well received. My entire immediate family attended the Saturday night performance, including Aunt Nellie and Uncle Vernon, my surrogate grandparents on my mom’s side of the family. Jerry came to every performance. He and I skipped the cast party to celebrate my performance alone.

I experienced something unusual, for me anyway, in mid-October of 1976. In my whirl of activity—rehearsals, applications, college visits, and home-life—I felt exhausted. Then came the crying.

I had stopped crying in school in third grade after several instances in which Sister Frances Ann had sarcastically instructed one of my classmates to “get a bucket from the coatroom, and hold it near her to collect her tears.” The nuns never seemed to understand the negative effects of public shaming on children’s psyches.

I was sitting alone in a classroom during my blue period when a fellow senior entered the room. Seeing tears on the face of one of her fellow upbeat classmates, she attempted to cheer me up. In tenth grade, one of our American history classmates had dubbed her, “the little bubble that never bursts.” She reminded me of my academic prowess, asserting with positivity, “Everything is going to be alright, and as smart as you are, you’ll definitely get into a great college.” As seniors, we were focused on finding and being admitted to the school that best fit. I regained emotional control.

A few days later, I began to cry uncontrollably again, for no apparent reason. Bernice led me from the library to the classroom of my advisor, Kenneth Greif, during his free period. He agreed with her suggestion that she drive me home. I went to bed and slept so many hours I missed school the next day.

I needed somewhere more quiet than my house to rest the nerves that seemed to be unraveling. At my request, I spent the following week with my Aunt Nellie and Uncle Vernon. They were like grandparents to the Cole siblings. Aunt Nellie, my grandmother’s sister, raised Mama when Granny Ruth became too ill to care for her. Their peaceful home was nearby, and I could get to school easily from their house.

Within the next few weeks, I was back to my normally energetic self, reenergized, like a toy with a fresh battery. After that episode, one of the girls in the Caucasian Chalk Circle cast told me, based on my inertia, “I thought you might have been dying.”

Though encountering my first bout of severe depression, I was still responsible for completing my college applications. One day, in order to make sure I completed my National Achievement Finalist application on time, Mr. Greif had me sequester myself in a classroom. I forced myself to focus and plod through the essay which resulted in my eligibility to receive scholarship money.

Depression never frightened me. I saw it as something one could recover from.

My mother had suffered a bout of depression when I was around twelve. I had accompanied her to the Phipps Clinic, the outpatient psychiatric clinic at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. I sat in the waiting room while she consulted with the doctor. The psychiatrist advised her to take a leave of absence from teaching to get some much-needed rest. She also took medication, as directed. Regaining normal functioning after a month or so, she returned to work without overemphasizing this blue period.

Despite being a devout, rule-following Catholic, she gave birth to seven children of varying temperaments. I often wondered if having fewer of us would have better suited her Type A temperament. I wasn’t aware of how being raised by an actively bipolar mother may have scarred her emotionally. As it was, she loved us and trained each of us to know and love God.

One year, when asked what she wanted for Christmas, she replied without hesitation, “peace of mind.” On December 25th, my youngest brother and sister presented our mother with a box wrapped in shiny paper, with a gift tag reading, “To Mommy. Love, Linda and Martin.” She opened her present and pulled back the tissue, revealing a piece of lined paper, on which they had written in bold, capital letters: PEACE OF MIND.

My mother’s daughter, peace was what I craved to bookend the unconditional love my family provided me.