My Bipolar Life (eBook)

MY STORY

It isn’t very exciting, but I’ll begin at the beginning—except I’ll put in three vignettes from years later.

The first vignette—maybe “vision” would be a better word—is most obviously from the alcoholism part of my story, though I know now it’s from both. It was the night I stopped drinking, in October 1970. For almost the first night in years, I didn’t have a nightmare—I had what I now think of as my white dream (and I’m afraid I’m having to tell the story in the same words I use later on—it’s hard enough to find one set of words). In the dream there was a large window with no curtains and glistering white sunlight poured in that window almost as white as diamonds. I had never had a dream like that before (or since)—what was it like? Even the words I have found don’t seem to describe what happened very well. I saw the light, though I can’t really describe its appearance (even “white” isn’t quite right), and as soon as I saw it, it was like the design of things was opened to me. I sat there, all confused, and then my whole self that had been angry and “down” was suddenly “up”—like a switch from drowning to swimming.

In the second vignette, maybe twenty months later, I’m in a padded side-room in the mental hospital and I’m convinced my head is detached and bouncing around the room. (I think now it was from the sounds of a volley-ball game outside, but back then it was my head and it was bouncing off the walls.) This is obviously part of the “bipolar” part of my story.

The third vignette is in the same part of the bipolar story. I’m in the same (mental) hospital (my last one), beginning the lithium treatment (which had just recently been re-approved in the United States). This is only a short time after the bouncing volleyball-head. After a few days in solitary confinement I was allowed to wear real clothes and my meals were upstairs. Eventually I was allowed down the huge staircase to the dining room and after all I’d been through the dining room was like a palace and I could eat anything I wanted and even have seconds.

But when they began to introduce the lithium carbonate, I did not do well. I had tremendous tremors and it was nothing for me to take a spoonful of cereal and the tremor would be so great the cereal wound up thrown across the room. I can still see that and the table I was sitting at. Then one day the nurse came up to me with a little plate of crackers covered with peanut butter. There were about half a dozen crackers on the plate—no, maybe four or five. I asked what they were for and I was told just to eat the crackers: the doctor had ordered them. After a week or two my tremors were gone and with just a few minor exceptions they have not returned. That was something more than forty years ago.

So there are the parts of the “trailer” for my story. A wonderful vision, then my head as a bouncing volley-ball, and then fooling my system by putting Lithium in peanut-butter on crackers. Back to my story.

BEGINNING: CHILDHOOD/YOUTH TO DADDY’S DEATH

I was born June 26 1941, on just about the hottest day in years, in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, to two intelligent loving parents. Two years later my brother was born (on a colder day, in October) and he had the same conditions I have—manic depression and alcoholism. But he developed differently.

I seemed to be able to get along pretty well with my dad but the situation with my mother was crazy. I guess she had no idea how to handle me so she beat me. I got more spankings—lickings—beatings than you could shake a stick at. I had bruises, black and blue marks everywhere and I was terribly ashamed and I never told a living soul. I was afraid to tell my father for fear he would be angry with my mother so I just lived it out. My brother was very much like me but he never got a spanking. Maybe because he was asthmatic (and two years younger).

I think I started yelling and screaming when I was born in the Chestnut Hill hospital—as I say, it was the hottest time of the hottest year then on record, and my grandfather had my mother and me to stay at the house on the Widener Estate, where he lived as the Superintendent of the Estate: it was cooler there with the stone house and the trees around the house. (This house comes back into the story when I didn’t even recognize it years later.) And my grandfather taught my mother how to stop my crying by holding me up with my stomach on the palm of his hand and his arm raised. It worked.

The house where I spent my early days, from age four to age thirteen, was also large. It was a couple of hundred years old and had two fireplaces and seven bedrooms. I shared this house with my mother and father, my baby brother, my cousin Stephanie when she stayed with us, and our housekeeper Iva.

I started very early with temper tantrums (which I was famous for in our family)and gave my mother a lot of trouble. I picked on my brother Teddy all the time, and my cousin Stephanie when she was there. The main reason I picked on Stevie was that she had cascades of curling hair and I had none (and seventy years later I still don’t have any). When I started to school I had trouble getting along with everyone, teachers and students, though I got good grades and played sports.

It was when I was almost thirteen that my father died suddenly of a heart attack and I was left with my mother and brother. I went to work in my father’s greenhouses and I missed school: there wasn’t much normal in my life at thirteen.

Up to that time there hadn’t been other people in my life besides family (but I had twenty first-cousins): instead of friends I had dolls. And a doll crib and a doll coach. And a large bedroom with lots of books. And, of course, dogs—and there were the horses. But no people friends. I worried about what was wrong with me and as a matter of fact I still do, though now I have a diagnosis, a condition called manic depression.

Shortly after my father died, my brother was sent to the Milton Hershey School and I was left with my mother. (There wasn’t anyone else to take care of the greenhouses.) In seventh grade in the junior high school, before I quit to work in the greenhouses, I spoke when I should not have spoken to Mr. S, the art teacher, and he slapped me. I was absolutely shocked. I didn’t say anything but I was terrified. This was right after my dad died and before I started work at the greenhouses. I don’t think I went back to school. I was humiliated and I didn’t even tell my mother. I must have really tried his patience.

I did talk out of turn in every class I was in—I even “spoke out” in one of Mr. Risser’s classes at the Prospectville School (he was our Principal). When I did that (this was before my dad died), Mr. Risser came over toward me and I ran out of the room and into the girls’ room. That was the day he called my father. My father told Mr. Risser, “Tell her to go home immediately.” I did and he came home and he spanked me, which was very rare.

There were two times my father spanked me—that time and the time I came home from seventh grade and I spoke of the African-American boy in my class using the n-word, because that’s the word the other kids used: I got a sound spanking for that. But those times of punishment from my father were isolated cases. My chief memories of Prospectville are good—some very good. There was Blackie—in full, Black Beauty, our mixed Shetland and Spanish pony, with one brown eye and one blue eye—and the pony cart Blackie drew. Rides in the pony cart were a staple of the annual Prospectville Country Fair: the red and yellow pony cart is bright in my memory, these sixty years later. (That is Country Fair, not County Fair—it was organized in Prospectville for Prospectville, I think by my Father and his friends.)

There were our family gatherings, from both families, my mother’s and my dad’s, in those days. Sometime in the summer, when we were in Prospectville, these family gatherings would have forty to fifty people. We had a large property so there was plenty of room. We had horses so that those who could ride would be able to ride. We had Blackie, the pony, and the pony cart, yellow with red trim. Blackie was very strong and very durable and he could haul twenty-five children in that pony cart—so the picnics at our house were very popular. The children loved those pony rides.

Then there were Georgy David and Stumpy. They were two infant squirrels of the three we rescued when their mother had been killed (by a car or truck perhaps)—they were so young their eyes weren’t open. We put them in a shoe box in the oven, to keep them warm, and my mother called the Philadelphia Zoo to find out how to take care of them. The man at the Zoo told her it was hopeless—they wouldn’t survive—and she told him she had two children who had rescued them and put them in a shoe box in the oven to keep them warm, and she wasn’t going to tell her children that their mother couldn’t do anything.

So the man at the Zoo gave her a formula recipe for feeding baby squirrels even though it wasn’t going to work and we got a doll-bottle and we nursed those baby squirrels in the dining room, and they survived, and when the man at the Zoo heard about it he said we’d done something no one else had done, at least around Philadelphia. I don’t know why we called one Georgy David, but Stumpy was called Stumpy because he had only the stump of a tail.

When we let them go loose, my dad said we’d never see them again, but in the fall they came back and they hung chattering on the screen door to the kitchen, talking to...