Emily White – on mothers and mania.

Seattle, Washington
July 17, 2000

Dear Paul,

It is late afternoon and I have just emerged from finishing a draft of The Book. Now I am in limbo, coming down from the terrible and exhilarating hard work of finishing. I fedexed it this morning to my agent and my editor. I do not know if they will like it or hate it or if they will say, Well, this has potential. Well, uh, this is different. All I know is I have been wearing the same dirty dress for three days straight, and my cats have gone feral, waiting for me to come out of my office and talk to them.

Out in the light of the world, I look at myself in the mirror and I look crazy. Maybe if I was from a different family I would look at myself in the mirror and see a Writer, worn out from the creation of a masterpiece. But what I see is a girl on the edge. And the edge surrounds me and calls to me like a mother’s voice. My mother’s voice.

It’s the five-year anniversary of my mother’s manic panic summer. That was the summer I turned twenty-nine, when she found herself in police custody in a fancy hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon, the city where our family has lived forever, the city which haunts us and reclaims us. Before the cops got to her she had been seriously manic for months; changing the locks on the house, staying up all night listening to Sting full blast, kicking my Dad out so he had to go live temporarily on an empty Christmas tree farm; moving into hotels and flooding the bathrooms over and over; calling me in the middle of the night and chastising me for being a selfish little feminist.

One night, calling at 3 AM, she asked my husband, “Do you think I’m crazy?” and he replied, in an attempt to lighten things up, “Well, Jean, you listen to Sting, right?” This bit of music-snob humor was lost on her, but nevertheless my husband successfully defused the situation, one of his many gifts.

My mom had a manic break with reality; it culminated in a party she threw one June night when she believed everyone in the world was her friend and she was on the verge of a religious epiphany. My parents live in the same house where I grew up with my two sisters, a beautiful, sprawling mansion on the hill, a place with too much history in the basement. This manic party took place on the blue front porch, and my younger sister Julia was there playing hostess, being a good girl, trying to figure out what the hell was happening as strangers and friends and my mom’s co-workers from her middle-school job commingled. A few of the guests she’d met hours earlier at the supermarket: An old busker playing guitar, two deadheads who could tell they had stumbled across a lady having some kind of bad acid trip. The principal of her school was there, as were old family friends who had no idea what they were in for when my mom called to invite them. Mom almost lost her job after that. Heavy medication and tenure saved her from this fate, which surely would have ruined her, since she loves being a school librarian and is fantastically good at it.

These days, five years after the fact, Claire and I still give Julia extra credit points for actually being there for this surreal party. Like a soldier who has been on the front lines, Julia saw the worst and lived to tell the tale. Claire was in Japan, Dad was out among the Christmas trees, and I was up in Seattle working a high-pressure job, behaving like a Success. Julia was in limbo, between jobs and boyfriends, and so she was sucked directly into the storm of my mom’s mental illness. It was the most powerful thing happening in her life at that moment. She didn’t have anything to hold her back from it.

She has never quite recovered from that head trip. She still gets spooked. She still thinks when the chips are down, when everyone is at their worst, she is going to get stuck playing hostess, holding the whole meaningless party together by herself.

There was a moment when my mom thought we were trying to poison her; this was after months of not eating or sleeping, her face like a mask, a thin smooth crust over her angry skull. We had gone downtown to her flooded hotel room to talk to the cops about what to do. I handed her a glass of water and she said, Did you put something in this? These days, she has her old face back, and I am not particularly afraid of her or for her, and we never talk about it. But sometimes the summer itself, the pale Pacific Northwest, people having barbecues and acting too too happy, these things can bring it all back.

Since that time I have learned a lot about mania and about what brought on my mother’s attack: too many prescription drugs, a quack psychiatrist, lots of whiskey, and an anger which might run in the blood of the family, which might be part of our tribe.

Like my sister Julia I get spooked; maybe there is something inside me, too, waiting to come undone. While I was trying to finish the book, I drank too much and smoked joints as if they were cigarettes. I marched around the house and terrorized my husband; it was like a long, drawn-out PMS. I was so far inside my own head, my eyes seemed to be sinking into my face. This strange and regrettable behavior makes me wonder if maybe I am too much like my mother ever really to come into my own. To know what storms will happen in my brain. To predict the weather and prepare for it. I spend a lot of time feeling like I need to be forgiven.

Periodically I hope my mother will talk to me about what happened, address the darkness that opened up in our family, ask to be forgiven. But five years after the fact I have pretty much realized that this will never happen; it cannot happen. From here on out, it is a matter of keeping our heads above the poisoned water. My Dad long ago moved back into the house, Lithium brought things “back to normal,” my mother switched from Prozac to Zoloft and whiskey to beer, and now she is “balanced.” As a family we are supposed to be over it. We convene at the coast and crack millions of jokes. Mom gets mad if we watch her too closely, if we bust her sipping whiskey, or look slightly alarmed if she starts inviting people over for no reason. “Don’t treat me like I’m crazy!” she says. Okay, we say, calm down mom, calm down, calm down, calm down.

Yours truly,

Emily