Kaleidoscope by Erika

I remember the flattened leaves on the wet pavement, I remember thinking I would never see my son again. I remember thinking Rob was gone forever, I remember running, running, and wondering if I could manage to be alive in a world without him. I started thinking about everything that had come before, and led up to one of the most terrifying and disastrous moments of my life.

Epochs of rain. Eons of rain. The rain came down in sheets that  night. I had given up all hope, when, thankfully, (and I had never been so happy to see the cops before in my life), I saw that they had found my son, they were taking him to the hospital, full of scratches and bruises but at least alive. He hadn’t even stopped after he had thrown himself out of the first floor window, falling through a shack below and by little missing a large pillar of cement. When he finally was stretched out at the hospital, he asked me “che devo fare?” (What should I do?). He couldn’t even cut himself a break after jumping out of a window. He couldn’t be tender with himself. Like many times during his life, I started to believe in angels. Once he told me he hadn’t looked before pulling out into the street with his bike, and a car had clipped him on his ear. (Dumb luck)

 Sometimes, looking back, I feel like I had seen it all coming, like his childhood had passed before me like a terrible cross between a lucid dream and a nightmare. Sitting at that little park in that medium-sized, cold Italian city, waiting for his bike to lose the chain the way it always did, cloaked in the loneliness of a mom very far from home, I saw him do a 360 over the handlebars of his bike, in my mind that is, but so real. Years later, it actually happened. I can’t say that I am psychic, simply that I have a special connection to him. When I talk to him now, once a week when he is allowed to call, he often seems himself like my therapist “How are you mom? Are you ok?” I myself have been prone to strange bouts of manic activity, hyper sexuality, drug use, and even run-ins with the law as a young woman. Did I have a psychotic episode? Or was I just a terrible person? Back in the day there may have been less awareness of mental illness. I had been diagnosed as bipolar, but had flushed the pills down the toilet and continued to self-medicate on weed. Had I had a bad childhood? Not really, certainly eclectic, unstable, bizarre, with divorced parents and a choreographer mother, but certainly not abusive.  Perhaps, though, there was a lack of attention, of validation which is needed in adolescence, an acceptance that my feelings of abandonment and sadness were real. I was considered an intelligent child, so I was simply told to achieve, be the best, and go on. Not that there is anything wrong with that. My father had been raised by first generation immigrants and certainly would not necessarily give into to emotional comforting. I always felt like I had to be number one, and once I saw him only twice a month, that stress heightened. Or maybe, simply, I needed him more than I realized at the time. Everyone needs a father. I had a very inspiring one, but certainly, after my parents separated, he became colder and more demanding, more critical. And I felt rejected, on a very intimate level. At the time, however, those feelings were squashed down until they exploded into my young adult life, when I started pushing my family away and indulging myself in every possible way: through low-level  recreational drugs, strange boyfriends (one of whom might have been schizophrenic himself), and mystical flights of fancy, which resulted in me never finishing university and ending up with two young children and an Italian husband married on a whim, much to the consternation of my entire family. My father’s anger and disappointment were the heaviest however, and perhaps I carried this sense of shame and guilt to my own children.

Rob had been a fierce child, a tender child, a very tough little boy. And a very sensitive one. And looking back, I realized that he had been so scared, so alone. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own problems, I would have stopped everything and tended to his. But sometimes life poses insurmountable challenges, so I don’t want to punish myself. I want to try to tell what I imagine to be his story from his point of view, even though some may say it’s impossible to penetrate through the eyes of another. A couple of times, I felt like we were one and the same. That his feeling of terror and anxiety was mine, when unexplained feelings devastated me, which (who knows?)may have been the same as his.

I remember when he didn’t want to go to school. A strong boy, running away from me his aunt and his grandma, he eventually stopped running and we had to take him home again to be changed. He was terrified to go to school, more than simply lazy. He missed his grandma. And he had written a letter to Jesus saying that his father and I fought all the time and he wanted to go back to his grandparents. We chased him over the railroad tracks, and looking back, I realized now that I was caught between wanting to be the sensitive, kind mom and the one who motivated him and pushed him along to be better. I had thought he was simply being a truant, a naughty little boy. I didn’t realize, I still don’t realize, what it means to suffer mentally the way he was.

There had been an earthquake. Many in fact, over the month before the big one which killed more than 300 people, and my sons were attending a school which was in the center of the city and very old. If it had come at night, everyone said, there would have been many more children dead. Luckily (if we can say that), it happened at night, and me and my family were in the car, feeling the strange and terrible sensation of the earth roiling up from within, sending waves of panic and death all around, screams and misery and fear. All that I had kept within was coming out (that was how it felt). All of my terrible emotions of being inadequate, failing my family, being nothing and nobody had exploded out in this earthquake, into plain sight. Somehow this tragedy made it impossible to run and hide anymore.

As a result, we moved to a coastal town (actually escaped at first, with the whole family, including their grandma in her pyjamas), and I stubbornly refused to move back, because I didn’t want to be all absorbed anymore into their family, where I was stuck under the overbearing reign of their grandma, who refused to be convinced of anything other than her own way. I stayed in the house in that town near the sea, even though my landlord was a beast of a man and lived upstairs and I had no one to help me with the kids, and no car. I wanted to do it alone. But for the children, it was hard.

Rob.

I saw it all, I could see that I wasn’t wanted. When I came to class, the students snickered, especially when I was wet from the rain, as mom didn’t have a car and we had to walk to school every day. No one talked to me, except for one other boy who turned out to be my best friend. I had so many lonely times, and my mom didn’t understand, she just wanted me to do my homework, do the best I could, carry on.

But she and my dad were always fighting. They hated each other.

It was all my fault, maybe if I hadn’t been born, they would have been happy. I was nothing to them, and finally, the sky started to talk to me, and it told me that everything was my fault, that there was nothing I could do but die, because I wasn’t loved, and I wasn’t wanted, and it was the reason why I would go so many miles on my bike, to be alone with the trees and the wind and the sun, to see the beauty that no one in the world seemed to see.

I loved mom. So much. But she didn’t understand me. My brother was a good student, well-liked, popular, while I was mostly excluded and left alone by the other kids it hurt me so much, that I would secretly cry, or sometimes I would be so angry that I would scratch and punch my brother just to ease the pain. He was always loved, and I was always the loser… Why?

My mom? She wasn’t happy. Dad was usually away, and she didn’t have the time or money to really enjoy herself. We had no car so we just wandered around, the three of us, buying candy as it was the cheapest thing. She was a good sport, playing games with us and making crepes at 3 am. But I knew she felt sad the way I did. She felt like my father had forgotten about us. And that we were useless, to him and to everyone.

And sometimes, when he came home, he smacked me. Once, hard, on the back of the head. My nose was flattened against the kitchen table.

There were also good memories, but also, way too much suffering.

Mom.

I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It’s not so easy, hindsight is twenty twenty.

Then again, maybe something is wrong with me. Big time.

My divorce and my son’s mental breakdown, as well as the death of both my parents, happened in the same couple of years, along with a fatal explosion at the the bomb dismantling facility where I worked and the subsequent loss of my job.

Of course, he had been very close with me, and suddenly I had up and left (it happens to the best of us). After having willingly sacrificed every waking hour to childcare, I disappeared into a tiny rental pied-a-terre where my lover and I had gone almost every day and I would come home only to wake them up for school and make lunch. I would go and sleep there every night, refusing to say where I was going. Certainly it must have been a tremendous shock, but I couldn’t stand being in an abusive marriage anymore. My husband had knocked me down by giving me a headbutt under the eye in the middle of a crowd of people when we went out one evening. He had done the unthinkable. I had had to stand up for myself and get out, and I had done it, with a great deal of courage, I had even called the cops on him when he tried to take back his car (but of course it had been all in my name to avoid paying bills, for which I had taken the car out of sheer spite).

Divorce is hard on children, but I was still a person, in any case. My children had to learn to respect me.

But Rob lost it. On one occasion, he went to the police saying that he couldn’t find his parents. When I came, he told me he didn’t recognize me. At that moment, I crumbled into tears. The whole day previous I had felt some kind of terrible realization dawning on me, but when I received his frantic texts I realized that something had come undone, forever. While I sat at my desk looking out over the sea, I felt his pain (it sounds strange but it is true). I knew I couldn’t help him, I wanted to but I couldn’t. The problems had to be shared, we had to open up and risk shame, risk fear, or be annihilated.

Certainly, after being in various hospitals and care centers, he seemed not to even want to say hello to me, but after a great deal of time and successful experimentation with medicines, he went back to  being his old self. Then, after a tumultuous summer, he tried to hug me in a way which let me know that he was capable of laying his hands on me in a way which bordered on a kind of incest. He stood over me in the dead of night asking me why I didn’t come back to bed, and while I was able to convince him that I would not sleep next to him, I was terrified. Even though it broke my heart, I realized he couldn’t be with me anymore.

The story is not over. Months later, he punched his father and was hospitalized again, then transferred to a facility for full-time care. When his father and brother went to visit him, he had another breakdown, was hospitalized another time, and then taken back to the center. I then heard from him once, when he asked me when he would be getting out. I told him I would call the doctor, but when I did, they never put me through, as she was always busy. In a gentle way, the idea that I could come visit was taken away, as the nurses gave me to understand that it was not a good idea, and that Rob could call me on Mondays if he so desired. I wonder, now, if he was better off with them, and that perhaps even our calls and visits were nothing but a way to remind him of his past, filled with rejection, fear, terrible hallucinations, trouble with the law and at school, and fractured memories of his family.

I have a terrible image in my mind of Rob being wrestled by his father with a bottle of bleach in his hand. I remember those first days when he started to take his medicine. When I had to watch him take every drop. After his first night in the hospital when he crashed to the ground in my apartment so full of tranquilizers that I thought he was dead. When he woke up the next, day, he started walking straight to the pharmacy like a drug addict in search of his next fix.

I remember going to the beach with him years before. He had parked his mountain bike on the rocks in the most improbable place. When he swam he looked so strong, so handsome, so powerful in the perfect blue water. His body was very strong as he had done hundred of miles on his bike. After a very long such ride he had once slept on a park bench on a foreign city. Alone. He would bring his bike up the stairs in my little apartment, afraid that it would be stolen. He started to refuse to change his clothes, to wash, to take care of his wounds. He acted almost like some anti hero from Marvel. He refused any kind of help or assistance, and wouldn’t follow any rules. Once again, I chalked it up to anger at my separation from his father. But once we realized that he had crossed the line into a dangerous isolation and paranoia, social services made us feel as though there was very little to be done unless we declared a TSO, meaning that the emergency services would come and take him away by force. A very terrible choice for any parent, but which happened in the worst possible way in the end (luckily without any permanent consequences).

I am sorry Rob if I ever made you feel alone and abandoned. I am sorry things ended up this way, but I am hopeful that you will feel better and that you will be able to get out of the hospital. I know how sensitive and wonderful you are. I know that even in the first clinic, I could see how much everyone loved you. I remember when you won the Most Valuable Player award at the football tournament, and I was glad that you received some happiness and appreciation. You had bloomed and you were able to open yourself to the world, but in the end I have realized that it is not perfectly possible for me to help you. I would like to, but I don’t know how. I can’t even really help myself always, but I want you to be happy. I want to forgive myself for anything I have not done right in my life, for people I have hurt when I myself was in the middle of some crisis, which I really was not aware of as a young woman. I am extremely grateful for my sons, for all the kind and wonderful friends I have met in Italy, for my wonderful boyfriend, for my job, for my travels, even for my sense of sadness and desperation. I know that there is hope, even though, sometimes, I was made to feel like a terrible awful mother and that there was nothing to be done for Rob. It is not true.

If anyone is ready this who is grappling with family members with mental illness or who has it themselves, I would like to say, I feel you. I want to assure you that there are many wonderful, sweet and highly educated people who know how to help. How these problems are central to the future of the world. And I sincerely hope that my own struggles can somehow help others in some way. Because when you pass through hell and come out to the other side, even though you must fight and fight every single day, you realize that there is hope. For yourself and for everyone. There must be.

Go down to the depths of your desperation and gain gold. So many people who are full of rage are just wounded, angry, hurt and sad. To protect oneself, one becomes hard, even violent. Someone who seems like a bully may at heart be simply a sensitive and hurt person. Let us take care of each other and find away out of this mess. Let us take care of ourselves and our wounds. Even if we are told by everyone to be strong, buckle up and keep a stiff upper lip. We can be tender. It is our strength and our hope.

Last night I dreamed of him, and an embrace in which we were both tenderly absorbed. Peaceful, divine. And I knew the fight was over, there was simply this presence of godliness, forever….