Final Part

I opened my eyes to see my mother standing over me, who decided until further notice to wake me up at the dawn-scraping hour that she and my baby sister woke up. From then on I would not be allowed to indolently sleep in like the other carefree kids on summer break. I was given a list of chores as long as my arm, and expected to do nothing off-list all day long, including my only escape, reading.

At night after I went to bed, I heard my stepfather considering removing my door from its hinges so I wouldn’t be able to “plan anything.” At the time, I truly thought this was because I was a horrible person. Later I learned it was because he was paranoid about people to such a degree that with his mother’s help, he convinced himself that when I was disowned as a teenager I would come back and literally burn the house down. Never mind the fact that my sister, the only family member I really loved and felt a bond with, was still living there.

After the first week, I settled into my Cinderella routine. I scrubbed and dusted and sorted all day long, while my mother ignored me to the point of not setting a place for me at the table during meals. I don’t remember what I ate during this summer. I probably just grabbed whatever from the fridge and pantry. I do remember her breaking her silence a couple of times to hiss at me, “Those were for your sister.”

Then, things changed again. One morning she woke me up, told me to get dressed, and that she was taking me to a psychiatrist. Like many things, my only understanding of psychiatry was gleaned from TV and the movies. I imagined Sylvester the Cat, driven so crazy by an asshole of a parakeet that he totally fucking lost it and began hitting himself with an oversized mallet. I recalled what I like to think of as the Crazy Bitch Trilogy, an unabridged set of three classics I pulled out of my mother’s boxes of old things and borrowed: Diary of a Mad Housewife, The Bell Jar, and Fear of Flying. I imagined myself post-psychiatry: wandering around lost-looking, in a floor-length Victorian-style nightgown, and intermittently being professionally shocked until I was a new person.

On receiving this news, I considered throwing a fit, something I had never done before. I thought maybe the result of a fit could be worse than shock therapy. My melodramatic streak had me convinced throughout most of my childhood that my parents might send me off to boarding school or to an orphanage at any time for my wobbly grades and tendency to set small fires. Little did I realize at the time that my parents would never drop the considerable fees to have me educated elsewhere, when there was free school right down the street. I dismissed the urge to protest and silently climbed into the car.

We drove to the psychiatrist’s office, which was in a part of town I’d never been to before. It was not too different from the doctor’s and dentist’s offices I had been in and out of all of my life. My mother sent me into the office from the reception area, and as I watched the door close I saw my sister begin to play with the grubby toys in the waiting room, oblivious to me.

The woman who greeted me was surprising. She seemed very young, and had blonde hair and a cheerful expression. I felt that she was practically designed for children to like and identify with, so I distrusted her immediately. I took in her room, which was filled with the tools of the child psychiatry trade: art supplies, Kleenex, anatomically correct dollies. She sat me down and told me that she was going to do some tests to see what I was thinking and how I was feeling, and that she was also going to talk with me. She showed me a bunch of Rorschach cards, which I had heard of, and I answered in the most positive way I could think of. I told her I saw sheep, and people dancing, and a cornucopia. I actually enjoyed that part.

Then she betrayed me. She gave me a list of one hundred or so statements with true/false answers. I could not beat this test. I stumbled on one of the questions: “Sometimes I think about killing myself.” What did this mean? I asked her, which was an enormous mistake. What did I think it meant? she replied. Damn, outfoxed.

I had thought about killing myself. I had just read The Bell Jar, for fuck’s sake, which included a biography of Silvia Plath in the back. I wondered what it would be like if I wasn’t around anymore. I had wondered what it would be like if other people weren’t around anymore. Would people miss me if I was gone? I was also beginning to think about some of the metaphysical aspects of life. I had questions, and without any learned belief system, I didn’t have any answers. Was God real? Was I gay because I thought that Geena Davis was cuter than Mel Gibson? What happens when you die?

I expressed this line of thought to the psychiatrist in one awkward blurt. Yes, I had thought about death, in the abstract. Did I actually want to kill myself? No. She let me dangle. “You have to decide the right answer for yourself.” I made my decision. I checked “true,” for “I have thought about killing myself.” I’d like to think I was more sophisticated than the test. But maybe I was just a little jackass who over-thought things.

Diagnosis: depression. With a side of preteen angst.

I was given a prescription and my mother was given the diagnosis, which she seemed satisfied with. Shortly after the visit to the psychiatrist, I was dusting the banister and stairs and overheard her say to a friend on the phone, “I didn’t know such a young child could be depressed.” Maybe it was because I had dusted the banister every day for a month. My mother doled out a pill every morning after I made myself breakfast. I pretended to take it and went outside and poked my finger down into the dirt of the garden, and dropped the pill in.

I’m sure no one had ever seen such happy roses, but I knew the drugs weren’t for me. This was right before the era of media hype regarding Ritalin and child drug zombies. If I had been misprescribed with speed later, I’m sure I would have run with it. But wanting, no–needing to really, completely experience things, including terrible psychological and physical pain, has been both the best and worst character trait anyone could ever have. I would fight my crazy and I would win. Or, fuck it. I would just be crazy, wandering around downtown with frozen dinner boxes strapped to my feet. But I really didn’t want to become the person in my mind: the hollow-eyed girl in the nightgown, taking her pill every morning. Of course, things were more black and white in my head when I was that age.

When I went back to school in the fall (and who would have thought that public school with all of its horrors could provide such a sweet escape) I had a class with my accomplice, the dissatisfied girl I ran away with. She did not look at me once during class, or speak to me before. I tried to approach her in the hall after class, and she said one thing: “I am not allowed to talk to you. Ever again.” She did not speak to me for five years, until she was stage managing a high school production of “Our Town” that I had a bit part in. She broke her silence to tell me to quiet down during rehearsal and I told her, from the stage I was goofing around on, that I thought she was a snotty cuntrag, and that I thought she was putting on airs with the new “kreative” spelling she had given her common name between the eighth and ninth grades. Obviously, she could do better than to have me as a friend anyhow.