Escaping the House

I was thinking about how my Gram used to say things like, "I'd be better off dead," and how distressed those words would make me feel. Her depression was a secret thing, for the most part, something quiet, blending into the background, just as she did. It got worse in the years she lived alone, with no one to take care of. She had raised 4 kids, she had kept chickens and a garden and cared for my grandfather all his life and on into the last days when he was sick with cancer up in bed. Caring for others gave shape to her life, but once everyone was gone, she lost that shape and kind of closed in on herself. But she always smiled and had this tiny laugh that she punctuated most of her sentences with. She'd say something and then do this "heh heh heh" thing at the end of it. As if to say, don't take me too seriously here, me with my opinions. She loved to talk current events and politics, always called Ronald Reagan "that old fool". I don't know. She was the one who always got up and did all the dishes while everyone else sat around the table and talked and drank some more--grateful someone was doing the dirty work, but kind of taking her for granted too.

One Christmas Eve, her usually dependable white 1969 Dodge Dart died, and she couldn't make the 1 1/2 hour trip down to our house. When she called us and told us, she was all dismissive of herself, like, don't bother about me. That was a time when the man in the wheelchair was a real hero. He rose to the occasion quite gallantly and told her we would drive up there and pick her up. She pooh-poohed all that, saying 'don't bother, I am not worth it' kind of stuff. But she was worth it! She was my Gram and we all loved her so much and Christmas would not be Christmas without her quiet, gentle presence there. I always remember feeling so grateful to him for doing that, for doing the right thing while my mother cringed and wrung her hands and made whimpery sounds. I remember that ride in the dark night lit with bright Christmas lights as a magical ride, with her in the back seat beside me. It was one of the rare times when a man in the family actually did the right thing, actually reached out and helped one of the women, actually showed some moral strength and backbone, and I felt both grateful and awed. He did have a code of honor that he tried to impart to me now and then, except he usually used his fists to do it, and so the message came out all tangled up in pain and shame, because he was himself all tangled up in pain and shame. But that night, it was like magic, and it was right and noble and it worked.

My mother was essentially a teenager, if not a child, and I think she dealt (deals) with her own form of depression. When she was married to the man in the wheelchair, she spent her mornings lying on her side on the floor in the living room, in front of the TV, watching game shows. Quiz programs, she still calls them. She would lie there in her night gown until it was time to get up and get ready for work. She worked afternoons. The house was always kind of a comfy, cluttery mess, kind of like mine is now, except without the cat and dog hair.

She was fundamentally unable to deal with crisis and expected everyone else to pick up the slack. One time my cousin spilled an entire can of dark brown stain over his head. He was about 2 years old, and he was out on our back porch and reached up for the can that had been placed on the rail, without its lid on tight. My mother probably left it there. She always left jars and bottles open on the counter. She'd fix a sandwich and leave the mayonnaise jar there, with its lid askew. She liked to paint rooms and stain wood, so she probably left that can of brown stain there too. Anyway, he toddled over to the back door, his mouth a wide open O of a cry, his sparsely haired little blonde head stained deep brown. My mother panicked. She started dancing around and flapping her hands and screaming. I got a wash cloth, went over to the door, opened it, picked him up, carried him over to the sink, wet the cloth, and started cleaning his head, while she flipped out all over like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off.

Another time the man in the wheelchair was lying in bed on a Saturday morning and he started making this really weird and disturbing sound like a dog makes when it has something caught in its throat. She had just gotten out of the shower and she flew out of the bathroom into the hall. My room was at the end of the hall and I was leaning back against the headboard of my bed reading. My door was open and so I was treated to the sight of my naked and slightly overweight mother hopping up and down, water droplets flying everywhere as she screeched at me to run to one of the neighbor's houses for help. He was a volunteer fireman. I found it all slightly ridiculous, never mind seeing something I never ever needed to see. And the man in the wheelchair was fine, and I don't even remember if the neighbor even came over, so burned into my memory is the sight of my ridiculous naked mother and my disdain for her. I felt such contempt for her by then. Kids really do need their parents to be the grown up ones.

It is experiences like these that led me to be a natural crisis counselor, calm and cool and able to see what needs to be done. I fall apart afterward, privately, when no one can see--I do have needs of my own, after all. But when I was a kid, I saved myself by getting myself out of the house as much as I could. I ran through the woods and fields with the dog, or rode my bike for miles and miles on the back country roads, singing a James Taylor song ('Country Road'):

"Take to the highways, won't you lend me your name,
Your way and my way seem to be one and the same.
Mama don't understand it,
she wants to know where I've been.
I have to some kind of natural born fool
to want to pass that way again.
But you know I can feel it,
child, yeah,
on a country road......."

The other morning, out early with the dogs, something in the freshness of the air reminded me of the freedom and a thing vaguely like joy I felt as as child when I ran wild outside. I keep forgetting it in my later life of worrying and trying to hold things together. And even though some mornings I feel like a prisoner of my life, a person bound and tied and being dragged along behind those dogs, I am glad a whiff of something in the air suddenly reminded me of the freedom that I once felt in the open air, when I was a kid, gleefully escaping the house, escaping the madness and the powerlessness and the insult and the injury, escaping all that into the fresh air of hope and a kind of freedom--because when you are young, the horizon is truly boundless and it beckons and you know that once you can grow up and move on you will have such a great life. This is before you learn the horizon is only an illusion, and that the past drags its boney mess along behind you everywhere you go, like a skeleton with its claws around your neck, hanging on and rattling along behind. Because I didn't yet know how wrecked I was, and am, and how I have to keep trying to overcome the damage of the past. It's kind of like the land after an earthquake--it is changed forever, it will never be what it was before the quake, and even if another quake comes long and changes it yet again, it will still never be what it was before the damage hit. And I don't even know what I was before the damage hit. It all started so early. But sometimes I get glimpses of something grand in me, and think, oh yes, I might have been that.

"Sail on home to Jesus wont you good girls and boys,
I'm all in pieces, you can have your own choice.
But I can hear a heavenly band full of angels
And they're coming to set me free.
I dont know nothing bout the why or when,
But I can tell that its bound to be,
Because I could feel it, child, yeah
On a country road....."

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai