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might be its cause. Her health was in my hands. Other kids were good because they
didn’t want to get punished if they misbehaved; I was good because I feared that if I
misbehaved it was my mother who’d be punished.
But here’s the thing about conditions, especially pervasive, largely asymptomatic
ones: over time, when the worst doesn’t happen, they gradually lose their power to
terrify. They simply become part of the landscape—as real as anything else, but also as
ordinary. I observed that my mother’s nerves were cyclical, like the moon, waxing and
waning, and by paying attention, I could tell where we were in the cycle. Which in turn
suggested that maybe her health wasn’t in my hands, at least not entirely. True, it was in
my power to make things worse, a lot worse, if I chose to, but I couldn’t make them
much better. There were other forces at work, as powerful and inexorable and
impersonal as gravity, as regular and predictable as the tides. And most of the time she
seemed ne. At some previous low point she’d confessed to our family doctor that the
stress of being a single mother and, in addition, working full-time sometimes made her
awfully nervous, and he immediately prescribed a low dose of phenobarbital. Over the
years these dosages incrementally increased, and in due course barbiturates gave way to
newer drugs like Valium. Afraid of becoming addicted, she cut pills in half when she was
doing well, but then upped the dosage when she “needed help.” Eventually she
developed a tremor in her hands, though it was never clear to me whether this was due
to stress or the medication she was taking to alleviate it. Most of the time her condition
was part and parcel of our lives, a subtext that under the right circumstances might
become a text.
And, on occasion, a screeching ALL CAPS hypertext, a gale of fury and paranoia and
accusation and heartbreaking despair. “I can’t take it anymore!” she’d scream. “Doesn’t
anybody understand? I can’t take it!” Sometimes these episodes had specic triggers—a
raise or bonus at work that she expected but that didn’t come through, or I’d get into
some kind of trouble at school, or a GE man she was dating would break things o, or
she’d be blindsided by some unanticipated expense. But more often what she couldn’t
take anymore was vague, almost global. She felt it as a weight whose source might be
too much responsibility or accumulated disappointment or mounting despair. Whatever
was wrong or out of balance would grow slowly until suddenly everything in the world
was wrong, and utter panic would ensue. Wild eyed, she’d often x her gaze on me and
ask unanswerable questions: “Don’t I deserve a life? Am I so dierent from everyone
else? Don’t I deserve what other people have?” As a boy what scared me the most about
such questions wasn’t that I had none of the answers my mother so desperately sought.
No, it was that it didn’t seem possible for these questions to be asked without
consequence. What would my mother do if I couldn’t manage to console her? “Doesn’t
anyone understand that things have to change?” she’d wail. “That something will happen
to me if they don’t?”
By the time I was in high school, though, this much had become clear: in fact, nothing
was going to happen. At least nothing as dramatic as her hysterical questions implied.
Because the result was the same every time she had one of these meltdowns. The
morning after she’d appear at the breakfast table, so exhausted by what she’d been