JUNIOR ARCHITECT: A Blueprint of My Mother’s 1989 Psychosis

This is an excerpt from my unpublished memoir, Model Home: Excavating My Mother’s Madness.

My mother, Lynne, was diagnosed with bipolar with psychotic features around her 30^th birthday. It was later revised to schizoaffective disorder with several personality disorders, and PTSD.

My mother was an interior decorator; I dreamed of becoming an architect. I’d build the houses, and she’d make them beautiful. It all changed the summer of 1989, when my mother had a very serious psychotic break (her first?), and I was a child. This excerpt, told in first person, present-tense, is about that summer, me visiting her in the psychiatric ward, the after-effects, how I turned trauma into art. And still do.

Excerpt from JUNIOR ARCHITECT: A Blueprint of My Mother’s 1989 Psychosis

I peer into the Plexiglass slot of the heavy door. My mother sits on a thin, navy mattress, pushed against a spongy wall. Her head sways as if in tune to an invisible song.  Her robe had been replaced with a hospital gown, and her legs resemble a plucked chicken; her eyes: glossy orbs like the Felix clock at my friend’s house. My mother, always made up, wears no lipstick, she is completely denuded.

My gut swells. I turn to Dad, “I don’t want to.”

Behind his glasses, Dad’s eyes twitch. “I know.” He holds my little sister high on his chest, so her head aligns with his, “I think you should. For Monica. For yourself.” His voice is raspy, words flaking like rust.

“Don’t make me,” I beg. “Please.” I have nothing to offer, not one single thing; no remedies I could salvage from that first aid book in our bathroom. Nothing about mangled minds and frenzied speech. Only tourniquets and splints and ointment.

The concrete hospital corridor smells of urine and chemicals. I feel my father’s heat, an invisible force, urging, coaxing. Monica twists in his arms, restless, oblivious of our mother being a foot away, in a locked room. Molecules, atoms, particles in the ether. My hand, my mind, my will. I must gather them all and enter my mother’s padded cell.

I peer into the room again. Wall-to-wall softness. No canopy beds with matching pillows. My mother looks mislaid, a decorating slip-up.

My eyes lift to the ceiling and notice, it too, is padded. I am struck by the opposing forces of physics. Hard outside, soft in. Freedom versus captivity. Light against darkness. Child versus parent. My mother stands, as if sensing our arrival. She begins to revolve, turning circles while grasping her head; my mother is a caged animal.

I turn; my reflexes sharp. My legs thrum, ready for action.

A clink. A beep. A whoosh of white. The door opens. There are video cameras in the corner, a person in scrubs watching.

My mother lunges from the room, grips me like a vise, “Oh baby!” she sings. “You came.”

My ribcage slams into her hip bone. She smells sour, like rotting meat, old cigarettes, and unwashed bodies.  The hospital gown gapes at her backside. I wince and turn away, embarrassed for myself, my mother.

Asking When are you coming home would be logical, but also tortuous. What if my mother doesn’t know?

What if she isn’t coming home?

I watch my mother mutely. What if having her home terrifies me?

I struggle against her gnarled hands. Her nails have been cut short, so she won’t hurt herself, or others. Nails, they can be like talons, ripping into flesh, dismantling carnage.

“I don’t belong here,” she says. “You know that; don’t you?”

I lift my gaze to Dad, in the doorway. His Adam apple bobs along the slender shoot of his neck. He touches the corner of his eye under his glasses. My mother’s voice becomes gnawing, childlike.

“It’s my birthday,” she says. “It’s scaring me.” And then, “I just want to be loved.” The vowels are wrong, stretched and echoing.

I look at my mother with sympathy and for the first time, pity. I’m not sure I can say, “I love you,” which is what she wants most.

I tilt from her caress, a triangle of fear. Might her madness gather under my skin, a pustule of terror?  Could it live inside me, festering and then emerging so that my daughter, and her daughter, and her daughter have the same affliction?

My mother peers at me now, in the hospital, her face pleading, her grip tenacious. I’m not sure what—or whom—I am seeing. My mother, but not my mother. Quick flurries of movement, followed by stillness. The shape of her face is more angular, her movements, frenzied. My mother shifts into a blur of color and pattern, but lacks form. The hospital smells. My mother is rank. I turn away.

“Tell me you love me, Leslie. Tell me!”

The person in scrubs announces the visit is over. Crisp. Clinical. He ushers me away, where Dad stands with Monica. I hear a click of the door lock behind.  My mother, a mythical fire-breathing chimera, part-human, somewhat dazzling, shapeshifting into something implausible, monstrous.

###

Since my mother’s hospitalization, days pass in a fog. I lose my turquoise ring. It could be at the bottom of the chlorinated waters of the public pool where I went swimming with a friend. It may have wedged itself under the seat at the movie theater. I’m not entirely sure what show, who I was with; or if I ate popcorn or Sugar Babies. I can only focus on my mom and what might become of my family; there’s no way of recovering the ring.

When we left the hospital, that day of the padded room, in the car, I thought of the periodical cicadas hibernating underground for years, sustaining on juices from tree roots. It would be easy to assume them dead; sedentary and quiet, nestled twenty-four inches below the earth’s surface. And then, seventeen years later, when the spring soil warms, they scuttle from the ground in tremulous hoards, relinquishing their previous selves. Now I realize my family is withering, crawling into the holes of the soil and there is absolutely nothing I can do. It’s instinctual, I think, to withdraw, to go where no one can disturb. My mother is like the cicadas, becoming a husk of her previous self.

###

Dad and I do not talk about the visit. I am wrung out. My father is, too. He’s gaunt; shiny, purple arcs lie under his eyes. He says, “Let’s jump on the trampoline.” The rain is gone, but the humidity remains. I don’t want to jump. I don’t want to do anything.

“C’mon,” he says. He pulls my hand and we go to the backyard and clamor onto the trampoline, Monica, too.

Our socks become soaked because the mat has retained water. We start slow, tentative, building momentum. The droplets spray and fling into the sky. The black surface is slick. We go high, higher. The water sprays all around, tiny mists. It starts low, hesitant and before we know it, a roiling laughter erupts from us all. We crash to the circular mat of the trampoline, wet and happy.

Later, I write in my diary and look at photos on my bulletin board of happier times, my mother’s electric smile, her luminous teeth, and think: I have her smile. Do I have her madness, too?

Dad knocks on my bedroom door. He sits on the edge of my bed. His eyes look tired. “Your mom is hearing voices in her head. This was very serious. She might be in the hospital for awhile.”

“Is this why she thinks she is God?”

“Yes.”

What did I say to that? I don’t know.

“There’s medication that can help your mom’s thoughts, so that the voices go away.”

“Why, Dad? Why did this happen to her?”

My father’s face falls. “Your mother has had a difficult life. She’s made choices that have may affected her mental health—the people she surrounded herself with, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, but there’s more—things I don’t understand—about her body chemistry and the tendency for her to develop a condition like this.”

“Like what?” I am nearly a fifth grader; I think I deserve to know.

“Genetics,” he says.

I know genes have given me my hair color, my eye color, my skin tone. If I have those genes, do I have the others, too? The ones that will make me say and believe strange things?

It pains me to formulate the thoughts, but in a stuttered breath, I say, “Dad?”

He blinks. He knows what I must ask.

“Will it happen to me?”

My father makes a keening sound. He pulls me close and says, “I don’t know.”

The next day, I wake to an empty house. I feed the hamsters, change their water, and prepare breakfast for myself. I flick on the television and hear about the heat wave. I’m sick of Gorbachev. Months later, the Exxon Valdez oil spill continues to captivate and worry the world. I see, too the commercial of the egg and frying pan about brains on drugs and I shout back, “Eat my shorts.” I’ve seen brains do worse. Plus clearly, the commercial isn’t working; it hadn’t stopped my mother. I am certain she took my two-hundred dollars for pot and coke.

It’s the day my mother will come home from the hospital. Monica is at the babysitters; Dad is at work.

I line my mother’s shoes into neat rows and unload the dishwasher. Straightening the disarray provides a kind of freedom; by cleaning and organizing, I can bring sense and order into my insular world, I can eliminate my mother’s diseased mind.

I spend the morning walking through each room of the house, examining pictures on tables, the spines of books. I open drawers and cabinets. Everything is cluttered; closet shelves bowing with the weight of boxes and heaps of coats, games. My mother once held immense pride for her beloved home.

I click on all the lamps on the first floor, thinking this will cheer up the place.

I click them off.

It reminds me too much of that dreaded day. My mother. The lamp. The amber glow. Her source of energy.

I climb the stairs. In Monica’s room, I sit in the rocking chair and stare out the window. Her room smells of urine. There’s an old balled-up diaper on the changing table. I toss it down the stairs for the garbage. Her play kitchen set has toppled over, spilling plastic milk cartons, teacups, saucers, and doll bottles with magically disappearing juice. For a moment, I am a child again, ordering them into neatness, stacking, sorting, playacting.

In the master bedroom, my mother and father’s blankets are tossed aside. I smooth the wrinkles and replace the throw pillows. I straighten the tablecloth on the accent table. The carpet is deep violet-burgundy, my mother custom-made the draperies, floor to ceiling, a Princess-style phone, gold and ivory. Waverly wallpaper has been smoothed on the walls at my mother’s hands. Their closet is full of my mother’s shirts and blouses, wide belts and stirrup pants, hot pink tunics from her days at the salon, before she got fired. My father’s suits are shrouded in dry cleaner bags.

My father’s tie tacks and cuff links are on the top of his cherry valet, a gift from my mother. I lie them on the bed, straightening the tiny chains, making matches, placing everything in pairs, two by two. I find this tender, delicate, and heartbreaking. I return them to the valet.

The sun wends its way around the side of the house now, a beam of light casts through the side window of my parent’s bedroom. I look outside and see the O’Brien kids on their driveway and hate them for their freedom, their unencumbered summer, the way their mother, in a long flowy skirt, is always beckoning them inside for food. I notice their pineapple door knocker, a symbol of welcome.

In my own room, I sit at my desk. I think about writing. I pull out a sheet of paper, dazzlingly bright, full of potential, and yet, I can’t conjure an image or story. I cannot put pencil to paper. Shapes, curves, lines, the geometry of art has escaped me.

I loop the room, until I feel dizzy, like when I was a kid. Because now I feel much older, a daughter whose mother is mentally ill. I’m listing sideways, the walls turning around me. I feel myself grow, reaching, creating a micro-inch of height, my feet planted on the carpeting.

Is this how my mother’s mind felt? Before the hospital?

I think I can grasp every wall with my fingertips, sweep the shelves bare, spill my books, shatter fragile pieces onto the floor.

I dream of creating a loft, above my room, in the attic.

I stomp my legs so hard the entire house rattles.

Downstairs, in the front room, my cat bathes in a sunbeam. He reaches for me. I rub his ears, his crescent-shaped body. He purrs and curls into my lap. I hear the wall clock tick-ticking. The day is endless.

At noon, I eat a frozen dinner. Flakey potatoes with a pat of butter, brown sauce, mealy mystery meat. I phone Dad at work. I feel better hearing his elasticized consonants, the laughter infused in his words. He asks if I had watched the movies he rented from Movies-to-Go.

“Soon,” I say.

I do not tell him about my complicated rage, my desire to make everything symmetrical, tidy.

I lower to the floor and stare at the ceiling, deconstructing the house, reimagining it flip-flopped, envisioning spaces.

“I have a meeting with your mom and the doctors; then we’ll be home.”

He keeps saying ‘your mom’ and it grates on me like sandpaper to a sunburn.

“Right. Okay. So, five?”

There’s a pause and I know my father must be considering the logistics; Friday afternoon traffic, my mother’s mental state. “Maybe a little later?”

I nod, though I know Dad can’t see.

“Hey—” his voice sounds stretched, pulled at the edges, “I love you, Biddy Buddy.”

 A smile pulls the corner of my lips. Dad hadn’t called me ‘Biddy Buddy,’ in the last week, maybe more.

###

At two p.m., I trundle the canister vacuum behind, giant hose snaking from its mouth, sucking up cobwebs and filth. I work up a sweat lugging the machine up and down stairs. Next, I get out the upright and try to change its bag, spraying grit over the wood floor of the entryway. I sweep and vacuum again. I push the vacuum throughout the first floor, leaving big, bold lines on the carpet, a gorgeous melding of right angles, diagonal swoops, careful not to leave footprints behind. I stand back, pleased with my handiwork.

Next, I traipse down the rickety basement steps, where I must take in the swell of sewage that has become my mother’s workroom. The bolts of fabric, propped against the walls, cloaked like mummies. I witness scattered invoices, a sampling of sketches. Discs of grayed glass from hundreds of extinguished cigarettes dot every surface: the worktable, the sewing hutch, the desk, the window ledge. Drawers have been left open, contents spilling out, cabinets ajar.

In my playroom, I see the balsa wood dollhouse, the uncapped tube of wood glue. I pick up a sheet of wood. Thin, brittle. A tear rolls from my cheek and splashes the surface, soaking in immediately. I drop it. Grind my heel into the fibrous wood, splintering it.

Shortly after five, I spray Endust in the air so the house smells lemon-y fresh.  If the house is perfect, if it doesn’t show any sense of flaw, then my mother will be pleased, her mind will somehow bend back to the way it was before, and then, my family will be okay.

At five-thirty-three, my father’s car pulls into the garage with my mother inside. I crack open the interior door to the garage and watch as the car rumbles to a halt. Dad exits the driver’s seat, and catches my eye. His mouth is in a straight line, his jaw tense. For a brief moment, his eyes brighten. My father removes my mother’s bag from the trunk. I dash into the garage, squeezing between my father’s sedan and my mother’s station wagon.

“Hi Mom! Welcome home!”

Mom exits the passenger seat, grunting and grimacing. A throbbing rush of energy traverses the space, connecting us to one another, but something had inexplicably changed. My mother is not herself.

Dad places his hand on my shoulder as he passes, “Give her time.”

I nod. A thickness develops in my throat.

Mom’s eyes don’t focus.  Her nostrils flare, her smile is stunted, as if she had had a stroke. I knew my mother’s mind had been snarled into a mass of knots, but the doctor fixed her, right?

She staggers like a drunkard, oozing past me at the door. I am sorry I bothered with the Endust because now the house smells of rotting lemons. Staleness clings to her like a membrane.

I don’t believe she is any better. The foolish statements she said while she was not-herself funnel through my mind. I didn’t mean to kill the postman. I can fly. You’re the devil. I try to tamp them down, but they keep popping up like that arcade game; I can’t pound them fast enough.

In the kitchen, my mother turns to Dad, “I might go to counseling once or twice…you know…play the game.” She is speaking, but not speaking, as if someone else were controlling the words.

“This isn’t a game, Lynne,” Dad sighs, places a folder of discharge papers on the counter. “You can’t do that.”

“I know how it works, Mark. I know what they want to hear; I’m no longer hearing voices. I am no longer the Savior.”

My mother has an uncanny ability to present herself as normal, reasonable, while maintaining a dysfunctional inner monologue. She can be terribly convincing.

Deliberately, Dad says, “You’ve got to tell them the truth if you want any help.”

“I don’t need any goddamned help,” she snaps. “Nothing’s wrong with me.”

He swallows, his voice lowers, “You need professional help, Lynne; you’ve needed this for awhile.”

“You’re wrong.” Her voice slurs. She clenches the counter. Her eyes flick.

“Have you taken your meds today?”

“Of course, asshole,” she turns to face him, “They make you take them in the hospital.”

His jaw pulses. “You go to the Day Program Monday.” He says this like he’s counting down the days.

###

On Monday, I pack my own lunch. A neighbor drives me to art camp where I spend the morning in a visual arts studio and the afternoon writing. I create floorplans of houses, scrape linoleum for prints, scratch pencil across paper.

I start outlining this story.