Bi-Polar Opposites
It's hard to describe my mother to others,...
Our relationship may be even harder to explain.
I know I'm lucky to have her,
and I know she's a tenderhearted person
who is open about her struggles
but there is no middle-of-the-road broad in her,
she's all-black one day,
and all white the next
and there is no space to discuss
that there was ever a change between.
Whatever is now
has been like this
forever.
SHE'S CERTAIN OF IT.
It has ALWAYS been thusly,
and tomorrow will be the same
no matter what has changed
in between.
A couple years ago,
I helped her purchase a hobbit house from craigslist
and installed it in the backyard
so she'd have a personal, private place
when she came to visit.
She lives off-grid on a mountaintop
surrounded by Trump-Thumping registered fervent Christian white nationalists,
and about two hours away
in the opposite direction
from anything/everything
people-oriented.
Sometimes we know when she is coming,
sometimes we don't.
Sometimes she tells us,
sometimes she doesn't.
This visit from Mom started like this:
TEXT MSG:
"Hey Darling Daughter,
I hope things are going well and you are in town!
My car just caught fire, my brother drugged me this summer,
and I think my neighbor is planning to kill me;
his name is Richard and you tell that to the police if you get The Call, okay?
ANYWAYS, I'm coming to visit today or tomorrow!
See ya, kidling!"
[Oh, Mom]
I texted back,
"Wow! What? I'm glad you're visiting!
Let me know if there is trouble!
Love ya, Ma!!"
Two days later I will get a text from Mom.
"Hey! I couldn't make it out last weekend,
so I'm coming on Thursday, okay?
P.S. Richard didn't kill me! Yay!!"
Me: "Glad you're alive, Mom!
See you when you get here!"
Thursday came and went, so did Friday.
Sunday I get a text,
"I just got in!
Running errands!
I'll take you to dinner!
My car is being auctioned and I need to tell 12 probably-dead people about it,
just in case they're NOT dead, and want it!"
Me: "Cool mom! Good luck!
Just come in whenever you want to, you have a key!
I'd love to see you!"
Mom 12 hours later,
at 2am: "I knocked but no one was home so I left!
I'm back home at my 'Holler in Idaho.
I might be back in a week or two
but my horses escaped and are probably dead
from tansy poisoning or wolves.
STUPID BUTTHEAD HORSES!"
This.... is often how a visit from my mom goes.
Her life is a string of compounding confounding emergencies.
My life resembles this remark, as well...
so I shouldn't throw rocks from my glass house
I suppose.
When mom finally did show up,
we had a great visit and talked for hours.
She asked questions of me
*about me*
for the first time in more than a year.
So, it was a notably nice conversation
from my point of view.
Usually when she comes down
it's to manically monologue
recounting any/all recent tragedies
and/or plots/coups/subplots going on in her life
real or imagined
with dedicated details.
This time she came with a different purpose.
What she really wanted was for Sailor
to do his engineering math-fu
to prove to her she was right
in a fight she was having with her brother
over the use of bailing twine
and intuitive guesses
in the installation of her new well pump.
After consulting several material tables
to estimate the involved volumes and weights
she requested he calculate for her...
she learned she was actually probably wrong in her estimation.
She remained adamant she FELT she was right,
and THAT was the important thing.
She left the next morning,
bright and chipper
with a, "I'll be back soon!
I picked up some free furniture by the side of the road,
and it doesn't fit in my car!"
and waved.
The next afternoon,
after spending time with a friend on my back porch
I notice I've had a text message from my mom.
"Hey! I'm in the backyard.
Can I have help loading the bureaus I got??"
It had been sent a half-hour before.
I walk back to check and see what's going on
and she is pulling away
with several large wardrobes teetering in the back of her truck.
They are strapped down... KINDA,
but... ya know,
not really?
Mom LOVES to live dangerously
by driving long distances on winding roads with unsecured loads.
She has to stop to close the back gate after herself,
and I catch up with her and give her a hug...
"Hey, mom! I didn't expect you so soon!
Sorry I didn't get your text earlier."
She starts talking adamantly,
a mile a minute.
"I TOLD you I was coming back soon!
I have more room in the truck,
I can take my stereo and dresser now, right?
I'll pull up front!"
She's talking about a electric Bose CD player
and a 150 year-old oak dresser she loves.
In fact, she loves them so much she asked me to store them
so they'd remain undamaged by weather, humidity, or rodents
which would not be possible or preferable at her off-grid
wood-heated mountaintop coop
at this time.
However, since we've been storing them for 5 years,
they are sorta buried. I tell her so.
I explain if she gives me some notice I can make them ready
but then also asking,
"Are you sure that's what you want?
I thought you wanted them in temperature control."
She squints her eye and points at me angrily.
She calls me "chintzy"
and accuses me of withholding her most treasured items from her.
She suggests my storing them is all some long-con
to take sly ownership of her antique dressing table and a sun-damaged 30-year old CD player.
She complains I didn't even come help load her new wardrobes.
She argues that I am not helpful, I'm ignoring her,
and the property + house she sold us 5 years ago
is RIFE with her treasures
and we don't even RESPECT THEM,
and now I am trying to keep them from her.
She begins getting teary-eyed and continues.
"You just want it all for you! All MY stuff!"
She pounds her chest and claws at her face
in desperate expression of her pain.
My instant childish reaction is the unbearable urge
to roll my eyes so hard
my whole body turns inside out three times
which is the secret handshake
that gives my soul permission to just...
leave.
But instead, I walk myself in a tight little circle
and come back to point out that she is yelling at me,
and I don't completely understand what she's going on about,
and that her F-250 Diesel is idling,
with the door open,
in the middle of the street.
I tell her she has some choices to make before she continues yelling at me.
She waves at her truck,
"Don't change the subject! I WANT MY STEREO!!
That bureau isn't YOURS! I have room! I'll just come get it myself
right now, ok?
So you don't have to
how about THAT?!"
She begins angrily crying in earnest
and I
She is scooping out
and flicking away tears squeezed from her eyes
with her fingertips with the same motion
as someone rooting out
and discarding the seeds
from a lemon wedge.
My heart wants to throw her bureau and radio in her truck
with a snap of the fingers,
and tell her to enjoy whatever she does with them.
Hell, I would go back in time
and do that 5 years ago.
NO PROBLEM!
My head (however) sees the storage room now,
and how the pile
of her bureau, stereo, and a lamp
are buried at the very very back and bottom of everything,
because the last time she decided to leave it with us
she said "until she gets a new place"
whatever that means.
My mind checks and taps my assorted internal gauges
just to see how I'm feeling.
I consider how big the bureau is,
how much it weighs,
how cramped the storage room is.
I wonder if we ever found the power cord to the CD player,
and which box it might be in.
I worry about what other miscellaneous items
that might still exist in the house we bought 5 years ago
that she is suddenly assuming I'm stealing from her,
or withholding from her
as some form of punishment.
I groan at the everything of it.
"Mom, you JUST called me 'chintzy'
and accused me of stealing stuff
I've been storing
for you for almost 5 years.
You're mad I didn't help you load....
whatever you have in your truck but
I JUST got your text message,
I didn't even know you were here
until 5 minutes ago
and within 15 seconds you were yelling at me.
What is going on?
What are you mad about?"
She continues to yell/cry in the street
that I'm withholding her cd player on purpose
because she is convinced that
I think it's "too good for [her]"
and demands that I might as well finally say it.
Oh, projection... you sly dog.
"Why you calling me names and accusing me of stuff
that I didn't know you were mad about
and didn't seem to care about when I saw you yesterday.
What is going on!?"
She wails in earnest and thumps her chest
like a stage actor in full limelight.
"You always do this to me!
I'm mad at YOU and then YOU make me feel bad about it!!
You are probably going to sell my things!!
THAT'S NOT FAIR! *I* wanna be the hardass!!
Why do YOU gotta be so... HARD?!
Why can't you just give me what I want?!"
She points at me and spits on me on accident
during her vociferous expression of personal anguish.
"Mom, I get hard when you call me names.
Your stuff is buried in the storage room.
RIGHT NOW won't work for me, okay?
Give me a list and a timetable
and we'll work out for you to get whatever is yours, Ma.
But, what do you want, Mom? For real.... what do you want?
What is this actually about?
What happened?"
She cries piteously,
"I DON'T KNOW!
FINE! WHATEVER! I'll JUST GO since I'm SUCH a BOTHER!
And here I am, mad at you but apologizing to you!
NO FAIR!
I'M SORRY I'M ME, OKAY!?!?!"
She storms off to her truck,
which is still idling...
door open,
right in the middle of the dead-end street.
I shout a goodbye after her.
"Love you, Ma! Drive safe!
Come around front if you want to talk more or need anything!"
I close and lock the back gate
as her truck rumbles all the way away
without stopping by the front of the house.
My mother is the reason almost nothing fazes me.
This is just another visit (or two) from Mom,
sometimes they go well,
sometimes they don't.
I have a few friends
who also grew up with their bi-polar moms....
and I believe we all have something in common.
We are all **excellent** in a crisis
and skilled at being whatever people need us to be
in the moment.
We are good at handling unexpected results and surprises,
and left-field last-minute changes
with multiple back up plans
because we all know
*for certain* that
it is entirely possible
the sky IS falling.
We were all trained in our own families from birth
to navigate our mother's myriad moods and
and organize ourselves helpfully around her unsorted emergencies
at any given moment.
Compared to the other friends,
I'm rather close to my mom
and think we get along rather well.
It's not a *smooth* relationship, though.
Loving someone who is bi-polar
feels like loving a bit of coastline that is regularly reshaped by hurricanes.
Sandy coves and rocky shores
may trade places overnight.
Crabs might fly and seagulls drown,
when water becomes sky
and the winds are just right.
Did you know there are volcanoes that grow from nothing,
into a mountain over the course of a few weeks?
You might think of oozing Hawaiian hot spots,
of black ropey basalt glowing at night.
But there are explosive ones
that bury themselves in their own rubble
spitting terrible clouds of house-sized boulders
belched from a trench
to rain down from the sky
and roll to a stop on top of each other
day after night after day after night
after day after night after day after
night after day after night after day
until it's done
for awhile.
I am only a person who lives there,
when I am not being actively chased away
by dangerous conditions.
But the bi-polar person themselves
they are the sand *and* the storms,
the mountain and the magma
all at once and it can be devastating
if you aren't already well-prepared
for the possibility of disaster
And my oh my
no matter the case
it does seem....
like a lot to go through
even from the outside,
let alone
from the inside.
Our relationship may be even harder to explain.
I know I'm lucky to have her,
and I know she's a tenderhearted person
who is open about her struggles
but there is no middle-of-the-road broad in her,
she's all-black one day,
and all white the next
and there is no space to discuss
that there was ever a change between.
Whatever is now
has been like this
forever.
SHE'S CERTAIN OF IT.
It has ALWAYS been thusly,
and tomorrow will be the same
no matter what has changed
in between.
A couple years ago,
I helped her purchase a hobbit house from craigslist
and installed it in the backyard
so she'd have a personal, private place
when she came to visit.
She lives off-grid on a mountaintop
surrounded by Trump-Thumping registered fervent Christian white nationalists,
and about two hours away
in the opposite direction
from anything/everything
people-oriented.
Sometimes we know when she is coming,
sometimes we don't.
Sometimes she tells us,
sometimes she doesn't.
This visit from Mom started like this:
TEXT MSG:
"Hey Darling Daughter,
I hope things are going well and you are in town!
My car just caught fire, my brother drugged me this summer,
and I think my neighbor is planning to kill me;
his name is Richard and you tell that to the police if you get The Call, okay?
ANYWAYS, I'm coming to visit today or tomorrow!
See ya, kidling!"
[Oh, Mom]
I texted back,
"Wow! What? I'm glad you're visiting!
Let me know if there is trouble!
Love ya, Ma!!"
Two days later I will get a text from Mom.
"Hey! I couldn't make it out last weekend,
so I'm coming on Thursday, okay?
P.S. Richard didn't kill me! Yay!!"
Me: "Glad you're alive, Mom!
See you when you get here!"
Thursday came and went, so did Friday.
Sunday I get a text,
"I just got in!
Running errands!
I'll take you to dinner!
My car is being auctioned and I need to tell 12 probably-dead people about it,
just in case they're NOT dead, and want it!"
Me: "Cool mom! Good luck!
Just come in whenever you want to, you have a key!
I'd love to see you!"
Mom 12 hours later,
at 2am: "I knocked but no one was home so I left!
I'm back home at my 'Holler in Idaho.
I might be back in a week or two
but my horses escaped and are probably dead
from tansy poisoning or wolves.
STUPID BUTTHEAD HORSES!"
This.... is often how a visit from my mom goes.
Her life is a string of compounding confounding emergencies.
My life resembles this remark, as well...
so I shouldn't throw rocks from my glass house
I suppose.
When mom finally did show up,
we had a great visit and talked for hours.
She asked questions of me
*about me*
for the first time in more than a year.
So, it was a notably nice conversation
from my point of view.
Usually when she comes down
it's to manically monologue
recounting any/all recent tragedies
and/or plots/coups/subplots going on in her life
real or imagined
with dedicated details.
This time she came with a different purpose.
What she really wanted was for Sailor
to do his engineering math-fu
to prove to her she was right
in a fight she was having with her brother
over the use of bailing twine
and intuitive guesses
in the installation of her new well pump.
After consulting several material tables
to estimate the involved volumes and weights
she requested he calculate for her...
she learned she was actually probably wrong in her estimation.
She remained adamant she FELT she was right,
and THAT was the important thing.
She left the next morning,
bright and chipper
with a, "I'll be back soon!
I picked up some free furniture by the side of the road,
and it doesn't fit in my car!"
and waved.
The next afternoon,
after spending time with a friend on my back porch
I notice I've had a text message from my mom.
"Hey! I'm in the backyard.
Can I have help loading the bureaus I got??"
It had been sent a half-hour before.
I walk back to check and see what's going on
and she is pulling away
with several large wardrobes teetering in the back of her truck.
They are strapped down... KINDA,
but... ya know,
not really?
Mom LOVES to live dangerously
by driving long distances on winding roads with unsecured loads.
She has to stop to close the back gate after herself,
and I catch up with her and give her a hug...
"Hey, mom! I didn't expect you so soon!
Sorry I didn't get your text earlier."
She starts talking adamantly,
a mile a minute.
"I TOLD you I was coming back soon!
I have more room in the truck,
I can take my stereo and dresser now, right?
I'll pull up front!"
She's talking about a electric Bose CD player
and a 150 year-old oak dresser she loves.
In fact, she loves them so much she asked me to store them
so they'd remain undamaged by weather, humidity, or rodents
which would not be possible or preferable at her off-grid
wood-heated mountaintop coop
at this time.
However, since we've been storing them for 5 years,
they are sorta buried. I tell her so.
I explain if she gives me some notice I can make them ready
but then also asking,
"Are you sure that's what you want?
I thought you wanted them in temperature control."
She squints her eye and points at me angrily.
She calls me "chintzy"
and accuses me of withholding her most treasured items from her.
She suggests my storing them is all some long-con
to take sly ownership of her antique dressing table and a sun-damaged 30-year old CD player.
She complains I didn't even come help load her new wardrobes.
She argues that I am not helpful, I'm ignoring her,
and the property + house she sold us 5 years ago
is RIFE with her treasures
and we don't even RESPECT THEM,
and now I am trying to keep them from her.
She begins getting teary-eyed and continues.
"You just want it all for you! All MY stuff!"
She pounds her chest and claws at her face
in desperate expression of her pain.
My instant childish reaction is the unbearable urge
to roll my eyes so hard
my whole body turns inside out three times
which is the secret handshake
that gives my soul permission to just...
leave.
But instead, I walk myself in a tight little circle
and come back to point out that she is yelling at me,
and I don't completely understand what she's going on about,
and that her F-250 Diesel is idling,
with the door open,
in the middle of the street.
I tell her she has some choices to make before she continues yelling at me.
She waves at her truck,
"Don't change the subject! I WANT MY STEREO!!
That bureau isn't YOURS! I have room! I'll just come get it myself
right now, ok?
So you don't have to
how about THAT?!"
She begins angrily crying in earnest
and I
She is scooping out
and flicking away tears squeezed from her eyes
with her fingertips with the same motion
as someone rooting out
and discarding the seeds
from a lemon wedge.
My heart wants to throw her bureau and radio in her truck
with a snap of the fingers,
and tell her to enjoy whatever she does with them.
Hell, I would go back in time
and do that 5 years ago.
NO PROBLEM!
My head (however) sees the storage room now,
and how the pile
of her bureau, stereo, and a lamp
are buried at the very very back and bottom of everything,
because the last time she decided to leave it with us
she said "until she gets a new place"
whatever that means.
My mind checks and taps my assorted internal gauges
just to see how I'm feeling.
I consider how big the bureau is,
how much it weighs,
how cramped the storage room is.
I wonder if we ever found the power cord to the CD player,
and which box it might be in.
I worry about what other miscellaneous items
that might still exist in the house we bought 5 years ago
that she is suddenly assuming I'm stealing from her,
or withholding from her
as some form of punishment.
I groan at the everything of it.
"Mom, you JUST called me 'chintzy'
and accused me of stealing stuff
I've been storing
for you for almost 5 years.
You're mad I didn't help you load....
whatever you have in your truck but
I JUST got your text message,
I didn't even know you were here
until 5 minutes ago
and within 15 seconds you were yelling at me.
What is going on?
What are you mad about?"
She continues to yell/cry in the street
that I'm withholding her cd player on purpose
because she is convinced that
I think it's "too good for [her]"
and demands that I might as well finally say it.
Oh, projection... you sly dog.
"Why you calling me names and accusing me of stuff
that I didn't know you were mad about
and didn't seem to care about when I saw you yesterday.
What is going on!?"
She wails in earnest and thumps her chest
like a stage actor in full limelight.
"You always do this to me!
I'm mad at YOU and then YOU make me feel bad about it!!
You are probably going to sell my things!!
THAT'S NOT FAIR! *I* wanna be the hardass!!
Why do YOU gotta be so... HARD?!
Why can't you just give me what I want?!"
She points at me and spits on me on accident
during her vociferous expression of personal anguish.
"Mom, I get hard when you call me names.
Your stuff is buried in the storage room.
RIGHT NOW won't work for me, okay?
Give me a list and a timetable
and we'll work out for you to get whatever is yours, Ma.
But, what do you want, Mom? For real.... what do you want?
What is this actually about?
What happened?"
She cries piteously,
"I DON'T KNOW!
FINE! WHATEVER! I'll JUST GO since I'm SUCH a BOTHER!
And here I am, mad at you but apologizing to you!
NO FAIR!
I'M SORRY I'M ME, OKAY!?!?!"
She storms off to her truck,
which is still idling...
door open,
right in the middle of the dead-end street.
I shout a goodbye after her.
"Love you, Ma! Drive safe!
Come around front if you want to talk more or need anything!"
I close and lock the back gate
as her truck rumbles all the way away
without stopping by the front of the house.
My mother is the reason almost nothing fazes me.
This is just another visit (or two) from Mom,
sometimes they go well,
sometimes they don't.
I have a few friends
who also grew up with their bi-polar moms....
and I believe we all have something in common.
We are all **excellent** in a crisis
and skilled at being whatever people need us to be
in the moment.
We are good at handling unexpected results and surprises,
and left-field last-minute changes
with multiple back up plans
because we all know
*for certain* that
it is entirely possible
the sky IS falling.
We were all trained in our own families from birth
to navigate our mother's myriad moods and
and organize ourselves helpfully around her unsorted emergencies
at any given moment.
Compared to the other friends,
I'm rather close to my mom
and think we get along rather well.
It's not a *smooth* relationship, though.
Loving someone who is bi-polar
feels like loving a bit of coastline that is regularly reshaped by hurricanes.
Sandy coves and rocky shores
may trade places overnight.
Crabs might fly and seagulls drown,
when water becomes sky
and the winds are just right.
Did you know there are volcanoes that grow from nothing,
into a mountain over the course of a few weeks?
You might think of oozing Hawaiian hot spots,
of black ropey basalt glowing at night.
But there are explosive ones
that bury themselves in their own rubble
spitting terrible clouds of house-sized boulders
belched from a trench
to rain down from the sky
and roll to a stop on top of each other
day after night after day after night
after day after night after day after
night after day after night after day
until it's done
for awhile.
I am only a person who lives there,
when I am not being actively chased away
by dangerous conditions.
But the bi-polar person themselves
they are the sand *and* the storms,
the mountain and the magma
all at once and it can be devastating
if you aren't already well-prepared
for the possibility of disaster
And my oh my
no matter the case
it does seem....
like a lot to go through
even from the outside,
let alone
from the inside.