When Mental Illness Has a Secret
I think the affair began at the New Year’s Eve party.
Everyone dressed in costume. Mama was a geisha. Daddy, a drum major, all white satin and golden edges. It wasn’t clear who Buddy was supposed to be. The King of Siam, maybe?
My 2 yr old brother was already sleeping. But I was allowed to stay up long enough to greet everyone. After all, 5½ yr olds are-not-babies. Mama curled my hair and dressed me in my nicest pajamas. (The ones that had a matching robe and slippers.) I was swollen with pride. Our home looked like a palace. Plates of finger foods, twinkling lights and our best cut crystal sparkled everywhere. Our neighbors were glittered and face painted and patent leather shod. If you looked up you could see fairy dust in the air.
Mama had set the perfect stage for trouble.
I was relegated to bed, but could not fall asleep. I thrilled in the dark to the sounds of grownups at play. The rise of laughter, the clinking, so much clinking, of spoons and ice and jewelry. The guest bath was next to my room. Partiers passed by all night. One eye spying under my door, I tried to identify them by their shoes.
I didn’t do so well at that. Only recognized Mama’s shoes. I almost called out to her but caught myself. I didn’t want to get in trouble for being awake. I couldn’t tell who the other shoes belonged to. Couldn’t tell who the man whispering with Mama was. But I could tell, it wasn’t Daddy.
My baby brother was born 10½ months later.
I was the kind of kid who knew things. I saw things, sensed things, felt them. I had come into the world that way. I could see truth, long before I had context to understand it all.
In the days and weeks after New Year, Buddy went from minor character (just a background player really) to a regular fixture in our lives. He had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen, a big amethyst ring on his wedding finger and a habit of jingling the coins in his pocket when he was annoyed. He slipped into the role of antagonist with panache.
Mama dragged me into the affair, Brought me along on outings to make their rendezvous legit. One time we danced among the donuts. Mama and Buddy took me to Mary Poppins, at the Robert E. Lee, out by the lakefront. We went for donuts afterward. Buddy danced me around the whole place. While customers watched, my mother clapped and cooed and made eyes at him.
She looked like someone else’s mother.
Buddy started coming to our house for dinner on nights Daddy was away on business. Sometimes, at bedtime, he was still there .
The sound of the front door closing woke me one early morning. I watched Buddy from behind my ballerina curtains. He walked to his unmarked car. Unmarked, but not a mystery, what with the fat blue sheriff light on top of the dash. The sun was coming up. The sky color was still soft. Either the pit in my belly or the hollow in my heart, confirmed it. No good would come from whatever this was.
At home, a tension grew right along with Mama’s belly. Tight lips, heavy air and the absence of laughter, erased signs of our life before. When the baby arrived, Mama chose Buddy as his godfather.
In our Sunday best on a Saturday morning, the whole lot of us, gathered around a baptismal font. Behind the priest, a ten-foot plaster crucifix took pity.
They say, “You’re only as sick as your secrets”.* So, maybe it was the secret that inflamed her mental illness.
Or maybe it was all the lying. She did what we all do when we go astray or transgress or covet our neighbors’ husband. She denied it. She held fast to the story our baby was Dad’s kid. A good Catholic girl and all that, she chose the sin of lying over adultery. Easier to live with.
Mama protected the secret with her life. Even after that baby boy grew into his father’s spitting image, and looked more like Buddy than Buddy did, she white knuckled her tale. Almost convinced herself it was true.
I think it was shame that fueled her engine. A fierce shame that drove her to madness. Must have been a Sun of shame, the kind makes you go blind if you look at it directly. So, she didn’t. Look.
It’s funny how the patterns we play out in life, sometimes for decades, are established so early on. I kept my mouth shut about the secrets I was witness to. Hoped all would right itself. Hoped it would disappear. Tried to excuse, and deny what was so clearly true. Context or no context.
I was afraid the truth would hurt too many people.
Turns out the opposite is true.
*Donna Jacques Temm quote
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*May is mental health awareness month. I’m writing about it, because frankly, it might be the healthiest thing for me to do.
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