Snide Reply

Category: Bipolar disorder

  • i Don’t Get the iPhone Lines

    They’re lined up all over the country, hunkered down in their folding watch-the-kids-at-T-ball chairs. In my town, they’re bundled up in Bears jackets and hats. Some are even wearing gloves. While they don’t quite qualify to be committed to the local mental health center, everyone passing by them wonders, “Are they crazy?”

    I see them, amazed by their dedication and devotion and I think, “Wow, there really ought to be a name for people like that. How about, say, ‘losers’?”

    And what are they waiting for? The iPhone 5. Now, I love Apple products. In our house, we have an iMac, two MacBook Pros and two MacBooks. We have an iPod Classic, two iPod Touches and, yes, an iPhone. I love Apple products because they work and they’re backed by great service. Don’t get on my back about PCs. Been down that road and I’m never going back. You can if you want to and I won’t care at all. Besides, this isn’t a post about who makes better computers or phones or MP3 devices.

    This is a post about people obsessed with stuff. People so obsessed with stuff that they are willing to sit in line for stuff so they can say they were the first to have the stuff. Frankly, I don’t understand why there is more than one person in any of these lines. If you’re not the first person in line, why bother? You’ll be the second person to get the iPhone 5. Where’s the glory in that? I imagine the water cooler conversation going something like this:

    Julie: Hey, Joe! I see you’ve got the new iPhone 5.

    Joe: Yeah, Julie. Sat in line for four days for this little beauty.

    Julie: Wow! So you were the first person in Naperville to get an iPhone 5?

    Joe: Actually, no, I was second. So, kind of the silver medal in iPhones.

    Julie (backing away): Yeah, well, good for you, Joe. Bet you can’t wait to show it to the guys in your RPG meetup.

    The thing that really puzzles me about the losers people waiting for the iPhone 5 are the diametrically opposed concepts involved in waiting days to buy an iPhone 5. iPhones are expensive, $199 without anything else, such as the talk, text and data package you also need. So, you probably want to be employed for that to work out. Most of the people I know who are employed don’t have days to sit on their ass in a folding chair at the Apple Store. So, in my mind a bunch of unemployed nerds are sitting in front of a store so they can be the first to buy a product they can’t afford.

    The iPhone losers buyers are up there, in my mind, with the people who get up at three o’clock in the morning so they can be the first in line when the big box stores open at 5 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving. Why? So they can get incredible deals on stuff, stuff for Christmas, the Stuffapalooza of Stuff.

    People have been shopping for stuff the day after Christmas since the three Kings hopped on their camels and hoofed it back to the Orient. And yet, my local news always reports on people shopping for stuff on the day after Christmas as if it were the Second Coming. My favorite part of the news reports is the interview with the happy, exhausted shopper, who brags about saving $500 on a $1500 flat-screen TV.

    No, Ma’am you didn’t save $500. You didn’t save any money at all. You spent $1500.

    Maybe I’m sensitive to the stuff obsession because one of my favorite activities during a bipolar mania was shopping. I racked up a mountain of debt while I was high. Every one of my personal Black Fridays was followed by depression, made even blacker by the aftermath of my manic episode.

    Anyone who says we are no longer a hunter-gatherer society hasn’t taken a good look around. The people featured on “Hoarders” are only the most extreme of us. Evidence of our hunting and gathering is everywhere. A two-car garage isn’t enough anymore. Now we need three—one for each of our cars and a third for stuff. Toy boxes can no longer contain our kids’ stuff; now we need entire rooms. We have so much stuff that we have entire stores devoted to containing our stuff.

    Recently, we sold the home I grew up in. While it was emotionally wrenching, I expected that. What I didn’t expect was the overwhelming magnitude of stuff. Faced with getting rid of an entire life’s worth, I realized how truly insidious stuff is. It slinks into our lives one shopping bag or birthday or Christmas at a time. We suck it into our existence, shoving other stuff aside to fit it all in, then go about slowly accumulating more and more stuff.

    This time tomorrow, losers people all over the world will call themselves winners in the “Who Got the iPhone First” game. Good for them, I guess. But me? There is nothing in the world that I want so much that I’ll sit on my butt in front of a store for days on end. Now, if you just happened to pick up an extra one . . .

  • Head of the Class

    Image: Designtechtonics.biz

    Not too long ago, in my newspaper column, I wrote about my son’s friends being given cars by their parents. I had heard that kids with cars—and I don’t mean Power Wheels—was pretty common here, but didn’t really believe it until one newly minted driver after another was given a car. And we’re not talking old cars in funky colors, like the mustard yellow Pinto that was my first car. Two of my son’s friends were given new Priuses. Or is it Prii?

    I wrote that no kid should be given a car, especially a kid who just learned how to drive. Let that kid buy a car and he’d appreciate it, care for it, drive it with caution, fill it with gas using his own money. Until he could do that, I wrote, my son would be asking to borrow the family car. I mentioned that we can’t afford to buy our son any car, but even if we could, there’s no way in hell that we would.

    I was accused of having class envy. You need to understand where I live to fully appreciate this accusation. Money magazine has named Naperville one of the 10 best places in America to raise children—more than once! There are a lot of reasons to like Naperville: good schools, nice houses, lovely downtown near the historic district. A river even runs through it.

    In Naperville, you could live here.

    With all that good publicity from Money magazine, lots of people moved here in the past 20 years or so. So, you’ve got the old timers who mostly live in the old neighborhoods. Back when I was a kid, houses in those neighborhoods were very affordable for a young family; my own family almost moved there. If you moved here in the good old days, your $25,000 house is probably worth more than $500,000 now. Wealthier people have moved here and built even more expensive houses. And less wealthy people started moving here when builders started turning farmland into subdivisions; I live in one of those. Today, we even have town houses, condos and (gasp) apartments.

    Or you could live here.
    Or here.

    What started as a pretty nice small (white) town has become a city of more than 140,000 people replete with every race, religion and socio-economic grouping. We even have a prostitution ring and a heroin problem.

    In that context, I understand the anxiety that pushed an obviously wealthy long-time resident to think that when I said “ there is no way I’m giving my son 24/7 access to something that is a proven killer, particularly of boys” what I actually meant is “rich people suck.”

    I don’t think rich people suck—well, not all of them. There are rich people that suck and poor people that suck. I’m equal opportunity when it comes to thinking someone sucks. So, me with class envy? Nah.

    I have had several other types of envy. Like kid envy. There are children who make their beds every morning, get their own breakfast and go happily to school. There are children who join in school activities, practice their music lessons, do their homework and help around the house. There are children who respect their parents, walk the dog, get good grades and brush their teeth. These are not my children.

    Frequently, I find myself wishing that my son were more involved in activities at school, such as anything. And I would love for my daughter’s room to not look like Lord Voldemort could hide in it. But, then I wouldn’t have a son who calls me on his cell phone and says, “Hey, Mom. I’m sitting on a couch on the corner of Sanctuary and Lowell.” When I drive to said corner, I do indeed find my son sitting on a discarded sofa, kicking back like a football fan on a Sunday afternoon.

    I have had penis envy, too. When I worked in public relations, I made a fairly decent salary. We bought our first house on it. But, if I had a penis, I would have made $25,000 more. That would have also made us a gay couple, but we’re ok with that. Hell, we adopted our second child and lived in Oak Park for a while.

    Do I even need to mention shoe envy? Massive quantities of shoe envy here. My sister and her daughter have truly gorgeous shoes and they wear the same size, doubling the number of shoes available to each of them. Not fair, right? When my husband finally got his PR business off the ground, I could buy truly gorgeous shoes, too. I paid lots of money for some pairs. I still swoon over the Italian ones made completely of leather. Does that mean I envy myself my shoes? I think it might.

    I certainly envy my daughter’s shoes. She has narrow feet. With a lot of obese children in the US, they make cheap shoes really wide these days. So, the Empress—I mean, my daughter—can only shop at the pricey children’s shoe store in town, or Nordstrom.

    But the envy I’m most likely to suffer is Writer’s Envy. Like most writers, I read a lot. I read all kinds of things, from crappy fantasy to classic literature. And when I find truly good writing, I want to crawl in a hole and never touch my computer keyboard again. I feel like Mike Myers and Dana Carvey meeting Aerosmith in Wayne’s World. “I am not worthy,” I think, “I am not worthy.”

    Being bipolar actually has its benefits in dealing with Writer’s Envy. Reading something truly fabulous will send me into a tailspin. But all I have to do is wait for the next mania train to pull into the station and I’ve got myself convinced I can write a bestseller . . .in a month . . .while still working . . .and raising my kids. You jealous yet?

  • Spare the rod? Spare me!

    Yesterday, I wrote in my newspaper column about spanking and the fact that it, quite literally, can drive your kids crazy. Well, I stirred a little nest, I guess. I’ve been berated for humiliating my children and been informed the spanking can be appropriate. What do you think?

    http://naperville.patch.com/articles/the-bare-truth-about-spanking-it-affects-mental-health

  • Check it out! I guest blogged!

    Ordinarily, I eschew exclamation points in my writing but, golly gee, someone asked me to write for his blog and I did it! You can check out a bit of my experience parenting my son through one of the darkest times of both of our lives here:  http://blackboxwarnings.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/a-tale-of-two-meds-and-one-teen/

    Read the other posts, too. The man who started the blog is also dealing with a son with ADHD and the meds that come along with it. And there are others who posted as well. It’s a valuable, developing resource for those of us taking drugs with black box warnings (means they can lead to all kinds of nasty side effects, like suicidal ideation and other fun things) and parenting kids taking those drugs.

  • Now, THIS is crazy!

    Image from Zazzle.com

    It’s Father’s Day. I’m sitting with my Dad on the patio.

    “How are you, Dad?” I ask.

    “Not very good,” he says, looking down at his hands. I’ve never seen him this sad.

    “Your mother rejected me,” he says and tells me, through tears, that my mother left him.

    I start to cry, not knowing which is worse, telling my father that my mother died nearly four years ago or letting him believe she’s still alive and left him.

    “Dad,” I say, as gently as I can, “Mom’s dead. She died almost four years ago. She would never leave you.” He looks up, confused. He’s confused nearly all the time now.

    “You took such good care of her, do you remember that?” He’s trying. “She had emphysema and you took such good care of her. She was just too sick. We had to let her go, Dad.” I wonder if he remembers making the decision ending life support. He believes me. He believes and he’s sad, but he’s calmer.

    I visit my dad every week these days, but I never know where it’ll be. Last week, it was Denver. He was waiting at his hotel, while my mother and grandmother shopped for houses. They’d come to Denver for a convention, something they did a lot. Traveling to conventions, that is, not traveling to Denver. He seemed anxious about buying yet another house, but he’d never really been able to say “No” to my mother. I told him I knew the feeling.

    Another visit saw us in Hong Kong, having dinner with a group of executives my dad clearly didn’t like because they’d kidnapped me. Yet another visit saw us in Rochester at a bicycle factory. There was our visit in an undisclosed location in Romania, where my dad told me he was forced to sit on a minaret to escape the men trying to capture him in Saudi Arabia. Recently, my sister married the Shah of Iraq, so we have an Arabian theme going lately.

    My dad’s delusions are nothing compared to the other residents. There’s the woman who gathers all of the baby dolls and stuffed animals and arrays them on a table. She dresses them all and sets them down to sleep then complains about how she has so many babies to care for. There’s the 105-year old woman who was once a singer. She still tries to sing but it comes out as screeching wails. There’s the woman who sits quietly and, when she catches your eye doesn’t say “Hello,” but “I’m afraid.” “Afraid of what?” I asked. “Of dying,” she replied.

    It’s hard not to make the leap to The Snake Pit or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or whatever look-inside-the-loony-bin movie was popular in your particular generation. This, after all, is what crazy people are and do.

    But I know better. My father and his housemates aren’t nuts. They have a terrible disease that literally eats at their brains, destroying the web that connects a lifetime of accumulated memory and leaving them with a stew of thought they continually try to make sense of.

    No. They are not crazy; I am. At least, that’s what my society says. I have bipolar disorder; I am bipolar. I never know which description to use, so I use both. But no matter how I reveal my condition, I get a universal reaction, spoken or no. “That chick is crazy.” Someone even told me, “Wow. You’d never know to look at you!”

    I suppose that’s a compliment; the self-harming, judgmental thoughts, over-spending and insomnia don’t show on my face. Of course, the medication helps. More likely, it’s an indication of how crazy Americans are about mental illness.

    I happen to come from a family of crazies. Alcoholism, schizophrenia, drug abuse were things I learned about early. None of the crazies looked crazy. Well, ok, the schizophrenic lived in another state, so I didn’t see him very often and can’t really say he never looked crazy. Still, “you’d never know to look” at any of them that they lived with demons.

    So, I don’t usually tell people I’m bipolar, though I’ve been doing it more often lately. Maybe it was the “you don’t look” it comment; maybe it’s my own growing acceptance. I’ve been more active in the blogosphere lately and the anonymity it affords makes it easier for crazies to hang out and connect with each other.

    In America, you can pretty much tell who’s a flag-waving conservative by, well, the flags waving on their houses. I decided, some time ago, to take back the flag. This is my country, too, I thought, and hung the flag on our porch.

    So, I’m taking back crazy. I’m a mom, a writer and a teacher. I have two great kids and the obligatory pets that go along with living in one of America’s most famous suburbs. I’m happily married.

    This is what crazy looks like, people.

  • Tears On My Pillow

    One look at him and I knew he wasn’t done. Brow furrowed, mouth turned down, eyes wide, he was half an inch from starting up again and I had no idea how to stop him. Then the tears started.

    “Why are you crying?” I asked as gently as possible.

    “Because of the lump in my froat,” he said, still too young to get the “th” sound right.

    “The lump is in your throat because you’re crying,” I said. “So, why are you crying?”

    “Because of the lump,” he said. I sighed. The physiology behind tear production apparently isn’t part of the public school kindergarten curriculum.

    “Well, when we are sad, we cry and the lump means that you are thinking about something sad and then you cry because of the sad thing, not because of the lump,” I explained. Then, he cried in earnest.

    “Why are you sad?” I asked.

    He cried.

    “Are you thinking about mommy?” I asked.

    He cried harder. Ah, I thought, something to work with.

    “Well, stop thinking about mommy,” I said.

    The crying paused, as he considered whether it were truly possible to stop thinking about mommy when he was sure that mommy had abandoned him at math enrichment class. He began to cry again.

    “Think about math,” I said. Well, I thought, that was the lamest thing you could have said. Sensing the lameness of my advice, he continued crying.

    “Wait! Wait!” I said. “I have an idea! Let’s try this!” He paused.

    “Take a deep breath and pretend you’re smelling a big bunch of flowers.” He inhaled.

    “Now, blow it out and pretend you’re blowing out the candles on a cake.” He exhaled.

    We inhaled and exhaled for a while ‘til he calmed enough to think about math. We got through the lesson. He never knew I learned “smell the flowers, blow out the candles” while helping care for my own mother, who died of emphysema.

    I didn’t cry for my mother in public other than those dainty little trails so insignificant that they barely need to be wiped away. I remember holding my daughter’s hand as we walked down the aisle behind my mother’s casket. I spied a friend in a pew toward the front. Tears came to my eyes. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes until the tears passed, not in time to keep one from trickling down my cheek but before my mascara suffered any damage. My mother would have approved.

    I’d like to tell you that my aversion to public crying is based on aesthetics. Runny, ruddy noses and red-rimmed eyes are unattractive at best. But I know that I really do think crying is for sissies and I am no sissy. No, I don’t think this is a particularly healthy stance, but it’s the one I’ve got. And, yes, I do know that big girls, and big men, do cry.

    It’s not that I don’t feel like crying. I feel like crying so often I might be able to cry a river. Between hormone fluctuations and bipolar disorder, my brain chemistry is pretty much primed to turn any amount of pathos into a bawl. Remember that Coke

    (ok, so it was Pepsi) commercial with the little boy being pounced on by a pack of puppies? Had me in tears every time I saw it. Now, I’m not talking little sniffles. I’m talking about tears that lasted way past the commercial break. That Procter and Gamble spot with all the moms dragging their sleepy kids out of bed so they (the kids, that is) can become Olympic athletes? Wrings sobs from me. Is it no wonder I’ve trained my tears to stop on command?

    My kids, particularly my daughter, have picked up on my propensity for becoming maudlin over recorded fare ranging from the sentimental to the insipid. We’ll be watching a movie, say We Bought A Zoo, and everything will be going along swimmingly until the dad-figure and the son-figure have a touching moment that begins to heal the rift they’ve felt between them since the mom-figure died. Only seconds after my eyes begin to fill up, my daughter says, “You’re crying, aren’t you?” Doesn’t even have to look, she just knows it. My sister suffers the same schmaltz-induced weeping. Her kids are far less kind. “Look!” they say, “Mom’s crying! You’re crying, aren’t you?” I believe I’ve seen my sister stick her tongue out at them.

    My daughter may have taken a page from my niece and nephews. Recently, she and a friend were cleaning up the family room. By that I mean they were listening to music, dancing and performing gymnastics amidst a myriad of books, stuffed animals and craft supplies. A particular Selena Gomez song came on; I’ve written about this song before. My daughter knows it makes me cry. So, in consideration of my tender feelings, she said, “Watch this! This song always makes my mom cry. See! There she goes!”

    There, indeed, I did go. My daughter’s friend’s mother apparently does not cry at sappy Selena Gomez songs. Friend looked at me as if I were some exotic creature. “Why does this song make you cry?” she asked, cocking her head to one side like a scientist. I resisted the urge to hand her a clipboard and pencil.

    “Well,” I said, “lots of women have a nasty voice inside their heads that tells them they are ugly or fat or stupid. It makes me sad that I have that voice in my head and I hope my daughter never does.”

    She nodded her head and went back to turning cartwheels. Yes, in fact, I did cry writing that last paragraph—in the peace and privacy of my office.

  • Death Becomes Dad

    It’s the middle of the night. My dad is up from his bed, again. He does this every night, getting out of the bed for any of a number of reasons. Sometimes he just needs to pee. Sometimes something about his bed is bothering him.

    “What’s going on, Dad?” I’ll ask. “Nothing,” he says. “I just have to get away from that bad environment.” I have no idea what it is about his bed that makes it a bad environment. It adjusts to make him as comfortable as possible. He can sleep with his head elevated. He can sleep with his feet elevated. He can sleep with his head and feel elevated so much that he’s almost in a fetal position.

    Tonight, though, is different. Tonight, he’s not getting away from something. Tonight, he’s getting ready to go somewhere. He walks into the bathroom and washes his face then carefully combs his hair, the things he does every morning. But it’s 2 a.m., about four hours before he usually does these things. So, I ask, “What’s going on, Dad?”

    “I’m getting ready,” he says.

    “What are you getting ready for, Dad?”

    “A meeting. I’ve got a big meeting with an architect.”

    “Where are you meeting an architect, Dad?”

    “Downtown,” he says, clearly agitated. Of course, the meeting is downtown. He went downtown to his office everyday for years. I should know this, he seems to be saying as he glowers at me. In his world, I’m the delusional one.

    “There’s a meeting tomorrow, Dad. But it’s with your doctor. It’s Sunday, Dad.”

    “Okay,” he says in a tone that indicates what I’ve said is clearly not ok. He throws his hands up in frustration.

    Fast-forward two months. Dad’s in a nursing home now. His cancer is in remission. The medical kick in the teeth, though, is that he’s dying. Somehow, the chemo, the radiation, the nights my sibs and I spent tending him weren’t enough. He has dementia, pneumonia, urinary retention, leaking heart valves. He might as well have the cancer back.

    I know my dad is dying because someone told me. I couldn’t figure this out on my own. That makes me feel stupid. Dying is huge; how can I have missed this? But I am a rational human. When the palliative care professionals tell us that Dad is not likely to get better than he is right now, I believe them.  At least, I believe them enough to tell them I believe them. Then I go home and do what I always do: I google “dying.”

    Of course, the Kubler Ross stuff came up, but that’s not what I needed to know. Anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. I know where the anger is going: straight to my husband who gets to deal with me railing against whatever I am railing against at the moment. It’s never that my dad is dying. People die. Getting mad about Dad dying seems ridiculous; getting mad because my son did something bone-headed and my husband let him get away with it makes perfect sense.

    I’m down with the denial, too. Dad’s not dying; he’s got pneumonia and he’ll get better. He’s got dementia but at least he thinks I’m my cousin, who has a vague resemblance to me even with that New Jersey accent. His cancer is in remission. It’s a beautiful day. Nobody dies on beautiful spring days, never mind that Mom died on a beautiful summer day.

    Bargaining? Does promising myself to call more often count? Does taking the kids out of school to visit Grandpa count?

    Acceptance? Getting there . . . and part of getting there is getting to know what it is I’m accepting. Before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I would mysteriously become paralyzingly depressed. Then, just as mysteriously, I would feel better. A lot better. Then, out of the blue, I’d be blue. A diagnosis isn’t a cure, but at least I know what I’m dealing with now. I’m not making it up when I can’t get out of bed. I’m not a stress monkey when I can’t get to sleep. The cycles make sense and the medication makes it easier.

    Getting to know death—at least what constitutes dying—has me ticking off the items on the Diagnosis: Death checklist.  Eating less. Check. Sleeping more. Check. Seeing friends and family who aren’t there. Check. Pneumonia. Check. Getting ready to go somewhere important. Check.

    I’ve read that many dying people believe there is something very important they must do. Not like, “Oh, I have to apologize to the neighbor for calling him a son of a bitch for years.” Not that kind of thing. Here is how Ulla Mentzel, of A Good Dying, describes it:

    A man who loves to sail might ask us to get the map. The all important map. Don’t you know? It’s in the drawer over there.

    A soccer player might draw a playing field with an arrow pointing outside the field. Getting ready to leave the playing field.

    A farmer might tell you that she has to take the cows into a different field. The one over the hill. It is very important to take them. Soon.

    I’ve said more than once that I’d rather be shot in the head than live the way my father is now. “If I can’t walk, can’t remember who you are, drool, wet my pants, poop in my pants, forget to put on my pants,” I said, “put me out of my misery.”

    I realize I am a coward and I should have known it. I call myself a Buddhist but I don’t meditate regularly and I am frequently not in the moment. Still, I know that dying is part of living. I place flowers on an altar every week or so. They bloom, they fragrance the house. I leave them in the vase. Their petals droop, then fall until there is nothing on the stem but a flower head. I leave them on the altar. Finally, when they are dry, I take them out of the vase. The cleaning lady admires them when they are fresh, then advocates their removal when they die. But I know, now, that they were dying all along.

  • Two Steaks, Twenty Dollars and My Mind

    When I moved to Naperville, I hated not knowing where I was. Oh, I knew where my house was in relation to the major highways, but I didn’t know the city the way I had known Oak Park. To be fair, Oak Park covers 4.7 square miles directly to the west of Chicago. Like Chicago, its streets are straight, running north/south or east/west. Naperville covers 35.5 square miles. There are a handful of straight streets, mostly in the older, downtown area. In the newer sections, and there are lots of newer sections, the streets have been designed to curve and wind gently through the rolling countryside, I suppose to make up for the fact that all of our houses look exactly alike. Actually, there isn’t much countryside left out here and any rolling is manmade.

    Naperville seems to specialize in streets that take you right back where you started. In my own neighborhood, there are numerous “courts,” or cul de sacs. You enter and exit from the same point. That’s actually pretty straightforward. More confusing are the “circles,” which are streets that have two points of origin. My husband, who routinely blew off our street when we lived in Oak Park, would appreciate it if we lived on a circle. Then he’d have two chances to get driving home right.

    For a while after we moved, knowing how to get Target was sufficient. Soon, though, I wanted more mastery over my geography. With no lake to serve as a point of reference, Naperville proved a geographical nightmare.  So, I would get lost. On purpose. What with the circles, cul de sacs, unincorporated areas and streets that change names mid-street, it’s pretty darned easy to get lost in Naperville. Obviously, I always found my way back home.

    I haven’t always been lucky in loss. Frankly, I’m a world-champion loser. I am resisting the urge to write, “Just ask my kids,” but, clearly, I am losing that battle with myself. See? I really am a loser.

    I have lost all kinds of things. Recently, I lost two steaks. They were big fat rib-eyes, grass-fed, that I snatched on sale at Whole Foods. In the pantheon of things that will stop your heart cold, rib-eyes are up there with an air embolism and Tori Spelling without makeup. I make myself believe that, if I buy them at Whole Foods, the good I do the Earth balances the evil I do to my body in a sort of personal health “cap and trade” program.

    I got the steaks home and then they disappeared. For days, I rummaged through the refrigerator and the freezer hunting down the steaks. Eventually, I gave up, assuming I’d find the steaks the same way I found a pound of hamburger I lost when my son was a baby—by smell. But, the house didn’t start smelling like the stockyards on a summer afternoon so soon enough, I forgot the steaks.

    I don’t just lose meat; I lose money. Now, I’m not talking about making bad investments. I don’t need to invest one cent to lose money. I lose money just by letting it out of my hands. The problem is that I don’t let the money out of my hands in a controlled, habitual manner. If I were to take money that is given to me and immediately place it in my wallet, I would not lose money. But I don’t, thinking that if I do, I will then spend the money. So, I put money all over the place. I put it in my back jeans pocket. I put it in my jacket pocket. I put it in the cupboard with the coffee cups. I put it on top of my clothes drawers in the closet. I put it in any of the three or four pockets inside my purse. I put it on counters, in drawers, in cups, in nooks and in crannies

    I love winter, but not because the snow is pretty and covers up all the ugly gray drabness that is Chicago after autumn. I love winter because I find money in just about every pocket of every coat I own. The first few weeks of winter are like winning the lottery. Every day, I find anywhere from one to ten dollars waiting to make my day. So far, most of the money I’ve lost has come back in due time. Still, there is a twenty-dollar bill floating around the house somewhere.

    I lose my keys, but everyone loses their keys. I lose whatever book I’m currently reading at least two times per day. I’ve found them all sorts of places, like in the gazebo, under the dining room table, in the car. Once, I found a paperback on a shelf under the sink in the bathroom.

    Something I’ve never lost, though, is my mind. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder sometime after I had my son. I’ve been treated for depression. I’ve been treated for dysthymia. Never, in all the years I’ve been treated for my myriad of mental maladies, have I misplaced my mind. Frankly, there were times I wished I could. I was naturally curious then when I discovered iCarly, the kids’ show on Nickelodeon, would be airing an episode titled “iLost My Mind.”

    I was warned that this episode would present a terrible picture of mental illness and institutions that treat it. Mental health support groups implored parents to boycott the show. Of course, my daughter wanted to watch it. So we did what we’ve always done when my kids wanted to watch something I was pretty sure was crap. We watched it together.

    “iLost My Mind” is crap. I did not say, “I told you so.” We did talk about what was funny and what was not. Not funny: dirty walls with signs on them saying things like “Don’t eat the puzzle pieces” and “Friends don’t kill friends.” Funny: a male character dressed up as one of the other character’s moms. My daughter admitted that she understood that delusional people don’t act the way the characters in the show did but she thought one of them was funny anyway. And, we talked about how people with mental illnesses are a lot more like her mom than the characters in the show.

    I found the steaks. They were delicious. I have no idea where the $20 went. Perhaps my son knows. And my mind? Firmly and permanently ensconced in my skull.

    © Copyright 2011 by Janice Lindegard. All rights reserved.

  • Let Me Take You To Funky Town

    It had to happen eventually. I’ve been riding pretty high on this writing thing. Every week, I told myself, I would write 1,000 words. I would get them written and published without fail. I set my deadline: Monday before noon. It’s been about six months now and I’ve achieved my goal every week. Copious pats on the back for me.

    Then, this week rolled around and shoved me right into the writer’s block wall. I’m not really surprised. I kind of felt it coming early in the week. “What will I write about,” I asked myself. “Hell if I know,” I told myself. “Maybe I’ll write about what goes on inside my brain,” I thought, then realized there wasn’t enough going on to fill 1,000 words. There wasn’t enough going on to fill the back of a Target receipt.

    I’ve gotten to Saturday and wondered what I would write for Monday many times. I’ve always come up with something. Maybe not what I originally intended, or how I originally intended, but generally, Saturday ends with me set on Monday’s topic. Not this week. At the end of the day on Saturday all I knew was that “Camelot,” the new series on Starz, looks like it might be good, though Joseph Fiennes looks really silly bald.

    This week, though, it was Sunday night and I still didn’t know what to write. It became our dinner table conversation.

    “What should I write about?” I asked.

    “Write about me and my friends,” my daughter said.

    “Did it already.”

    “Pets!,” she said. “Write about pets.”

    “Done,” I said.

    Not to be deterred, she said, “Houses. Write about houses and how they protect you.”

    “I try to write about funny things.”

    “Oh,” she said. “It has to be funny?” That ruled out houses in her mind though I had considered writing about how I coped with a portion of Spring Break by allowing her to string yarn all over the house.

    “Write about condoms,” my son said.

    “I have,” I told him. “You came up in it.”

    He offered suggestions for a number of truly obscene things about which I could write. I informed him that my mother’s cousin reads my blogs. He shut up.

    I turned to my husband, who had said nothing throughout the children’s suggest-o-rama, though I did see him hide his head in his hands over one or two of our son’s suggestions. He looked at me and without saying a word, I knew that he knew the problem.

    “I’m in a funk,” I said, “and it’s not very funny to write about being depressed.”

    The conversation turned to lethargy, which is a fancy word for feeling so tired that you just want to stay in bed forever even though you aren’t really tired and you know you’re not tired but somehow getting out of bed just seems impossible. I mentioned that antidepressants can actually give some depressed people the energy they need to off themselves. I am already on antidepressants so there’re no worries about that here.

    My neighbor calls our house “The Fun House.” I know she means that I don’t care if the kids paint or build a blanket fortress in the family room or tie the house up with yarn. But, to me, it’s a pretty good description of the atmosphere in our house. Things are a little wonky, often outrageous, definitely not normal and that’s fine by us. So, I laughed full and loud when my son described how I could commit suicide without leaving the bed by having our cat nap on my face.

    While I’m in no danger of taking the feline express to the afterlife, I am most decidedly down. I’m sure its primary cause is the whole morbidly underemployed thing and the now-due student loans that are part of my economy-induced nightmare. There are also a number of other factors inhibiting my ability to maintain my generally cheerful-ish demeanor.

    First, there’s my health. You know how people will go on about the problems they are having in their lives and you don’t know what to say and so eventually you wind up saying something lame like “Well, at least you have your health”? Well, I don’t have my health. Now it’s not like I’m really, really sick. I don’t need a benefit for me. (Wait . . .a benefit might help pay off those loans.) No, I’m not gravely ill. I have a nagging respiratory infection of some sort with one of those coughs that doesn’t bother you until someone makes you laugh and then you wind up hacking up a chunk of lung. And a toothache. I have never had a toothache in my life. Now I have a toothache. And a pulled groin muscle. What the heck is that about? I’m not a linebacker. How do I rate a groin pull?

    Ordinarily, I’d be running and laughing to cope with my troubles. Can’t run, because I’m still resting and rehabbing the offending muscle. Can’t laugh without paroxysmal coughing.  I thought I might garden away the blues, so I decided to clean out the garden beds. Seeing all those little green and purple shoots sticking through the soil would surely improve my mood.

    Gardening didn’t improve my mood at all. On the contrary. with every dead grass whacked back and every dried-up leaf pulled, I was more and more convinced that it was time to move into a nice little townhouse. It was sounding better and better in my mind until I got to the selling the house we already own part. Then I got to the packing up everything we have part and the part where the movers somehow misplace the box containing all of my shoes. I went inside for a cup of tea. The garden beds looked better, but my pity party continued.

    With laughing, running and gardening put out to pasture, all that was left was reading. Usually, reading helps me relax. Lately, though, reading is just making me feel terrible. It started with “The Name of the Wind” by Patrick Rothfuss. I am thoroughly enjoying the story and its imaginative setting. There are just enough fantasy elements to remove the story from reality but not so much as to overwhelm the narrative. It is, in short, wholly imaginative and beautifully crafted. And it makes me feel completely inadequate as a writer. When I tell my husband this, he tells me I am being ridiculous and that, if I were a full-time writer who started full-time writing when I was in my twenties and who had someone to take care of everything else, I would be writing wholly imaginative, beautifully crafted fiction.

    He’s right, of course. I am a mom, a wife, a teacher, a dog trainer, a cat wrangler, a gardener, a runner and a writer who somehow managed to write more than 1,000 words despite a week-long bout of the blues.