What Life is Like When Your Mom is Bipolar
It’s the only normal you’ve got
“Michael, give me a kiss before you go to the bus.”
“Because I’m going to kill myself while you’re at school today.”
I was in the second grade. We had just moved into a new home and this was a day close to the beginning of the school year. I had three siblings younger than myself and my mom was bipolar.
As an 7 year old, I didn’t know what bipolar meant officially, but I sure knew what the effects of her mental illness were on life in my household.
Pretty awful.
That was a long time ago and my mother did not kill herself that day. When she did, I was 33 and living in California — a world away from upstate New York.
My mother spent most of her life undiagnosed, which pretty much meant we just lived life and thought everything was normal. I remember the first time I had dinner at a friend’s house.
At my home, dinnertime meant an endless guilt inducing tirade of how horrible life was, how much the food cost that we were eating and how much life sucked in general. My dad slapping me because I had the temerity to tell my mom she should stop screaming at us kids.
