Saturday Birthdays and Mental Gymnastics

They are just the best. Saturday birthdays are just the best. If you don’t work on a Saturday, Saturday birthdays are just the best. There is a whole long day to celebrate being alive with friends and family and yourself.

My mother use to tell me the story of how I was born over and over again. "You were two weeks late and haven’t been on time since". "You’re head was so big the doctor had to use forceps and I just prayed he wouldn’t leave any scars on my beautiful little girl". "I didn’t use any drugs and had to feel every pain but you forget it the minute you are born."

Mom. What a beautiful woman. Always stylishly dressed, I could hardly believe she was related to the older women with beardish stubble I met every summer who stayed in the kitchen and cooked and cleaned while we visited.

I loved my Mom until her death and beyond. But in my fortieth birthday I did something else. I remembered something I knew when I was very little then told myself the only way I was going to stay alive was to forget I knew it. I remembered Mom was mentally ill. And then later in the year, I told her she couldn’t just call me up every night when she was afraid to go to sleep and tell me what a lousy daughter I was and list the things that were particularly irksome to her. I said it gently. I said it firmly. I cried when I said it because I knew somehow it would be like death to her for me, her only daughter out of four children, to say it to her.

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. "But Debby". There was almost a minute it seemed before any other words came. "You’ve always been in charge of my anxiety."

I didn’t know that. It was stunning news. In an instant it reframed my entire life before my heart in the same way death can make your whole life flash before your eyes.

If you are the relative of someone with mental illness you know that what I did next was anathema to my mother. It was spitting in her face and telling her she was no good. I said, "Mom I think you need to go talk to someone".

I use to envy the kids whose parents had addictions. They had a support group. They had steps to recovery with al-anon. I had letters from people asking ‘How is your dear sweet mother?" I had fear that having exposed my children to her and told them to love her and excuse her as I did that I had caused them irreparable harm. I had no idea how to sort through it all. I didn’t find the book, "How to Stop Walking on Eggshells and Take Back You Life: a book for people in relationship with those who have Borderline Personality Disorder" for twenty years.

But I am a woman of faith who believes that there is this Holy Spirit who will guide you into all goodness and that included finding out who I was and what I could do even though I was in the middle of my life.

Slowly I realized my gifts and talents. My ability to love the broken might not be a calling, but just a habit.

This next act was the worst of all for me to commit. It happened in a psychiatrist’s office as well. See, as all borderlines do, Mom projected her illness on to me. So when in the course of passing exams for ordination I sailed through the mental health evaluation with, as the psychiatrist I was sitting across from said, ‘One of the most stable test results I’ve ever seen." I had to make a decision to be disloyal to Mom. I had to decide to not be the person she needed me to be and start to live my own life. It was crushing news to find out I was sane. It was disorienting and bewildering and ….ohmygosh…such a relief!

Mom never forgave me. I went from being the wonderful daughter to the worst. But near her death she was drugged, thankfully, out of her mind because of a broken pelvis and spoke to me with compassion and love and mercy like she never had. I knew underneath it all my mother loved me.

Fifteen years before I knew she had anything wrong with her and that it wasn’t just me like she always said, I was fixing dinner one night and she said, "You’re so lucky you don’t have it." I didn’t ask her what ‘it’ was. But when I found out, I rested in the fact that my mother had defined me as not having ‘it’.

America has just had its life history changed again because of someone with mental illness that achieved high honors and was lauded instead of diagnosed. If you are the relative of someone with mental illness, be kind to yourself. Sorting out what’s real and what’s pretend, or fear, or desire in their mind and how it has affected you is a genuine journey that needs a knapsack of goodwill and caring and mercy and Grace towards yourself.

Happy Birthday to me. And Mom. I’m so glad I loved her. And that it ultimately lead to loving myself.

Love,
Debby A