Observation

Count All This — Chapter 15: is it over yet?

Just when Jo Kasten’s adult son encounters schizophrenia, she discovers she has breast cancer. Meanwhile, her marriage faces a test. Count All This is a story about love and loyalty, addiction and madness. This is the fifteenth chapter. Find the first chapter here.

Once we got Eddy home from the hospital, I called the three psychiatrists Dr. Hu had recommended. One of them sounded like a pompous ass on the telephone. A second had no immediate openings. A third suggested Eddy come into his Santa Inez office to communicate with him over a television monitor while he worked in San Francisco. I asked if Eddy could come to his San Francisco office instead. He said no, the video appointment was the only opening he had.

During the search, I learned that psychiatry was no longer being practiced the way I’d seen it done in the movies. Patients don’t go to their psychiatrists to discuss their problems. They don’t lie on a couch. Most of today’s psychiatrists only monitor medications. Patients who want “talk therapy” need to have two health care providers — a psychiatrist and a therapist. I called a dozen people on the list of psychiatrists and therapists covered by our health insurance, leaving sad messages on answering machines. No one was available to help our son — or help us.

Meanwhile, Larry and I were looking up the medications that Eddy had brought home on the Internet. Lithium sounded dangerous. Patients needed to have their blood tested regularly to make sure the drug didn’t reach toxic levels! Seroquel was not the mere sleep aid Dr. Hu had described. Risperadol had scary sounding side effects. The Internet was full of rants against the psychotropic medications from former patients.

Did our smart and handsome son really need these medications? Wasn’t it possible that he’d just had a “bad trip,” like both Larry and I had experienced in college? Maybe with a few weeks of rest and relaxation, Eddy’s mind would settle down and return to normal.

We whispered about the possibilities in our bedroom, changing the subject whenever Eddy appeared. We treated him carefully, like a fragile object. We told him about my upcoming surgery for breast cancer, but played it down. We gave him all the pill bottles and let him decide when and whether to take his medications.

We also gave him a few of the anti-anxiety pills I had stashed in my medicine cabinet, in case he wanted to use those instead of the anti-psychotics. That’s how I’d been treated when I had a nervous breakdown in college. That’s what had worked for me.

At the same time that we were wondering how to help Eddy, he seemed to be getting better. (Or was he just pretending?) Larry drove him to College of San Mateo each day, where he continued attending classes. They stopped by his apartment and picked up some of his things. At home, he was subdued and seemed wary. An occasional flash of his eyes gave me the impression that anger simmered beneath the surface, but I couldn’t be certain. He didn’t talk much, and spent most of the time in his room.

Then one evening he barged out of his room and walked forcefully into the living room where Larry and I were sitting together on the couch, reading.

“This isn’t working,” he said aggressively, as if we’d contradicted him.

“What isn’t, Honey?” The deliberately calm tone I used sounded false. I felt like I was imitating a kindergarten teacher.

“I can’t live here like this!”

“Like what?”

“I can’t live here under your constant observation! I can’t stand you asking me every day how I’m feeling! I don’t like you tiptoeing around me all the time. It’s driving me crazy! There’s NO WAY I’m going to get better in this environment.”

I looked over to Larry.

“Well, Eddy-puss,” Larry used his old nickname — the name we’d called him as a baby. “What do you suggest?”

“I want to move back to my apartment.”

Dr. Hu’s warnings about suicide and lack of impulse control swirled around in my head.

“Okay — that might be a good idea,” Larry said. “But your mother and I will need to talk about it privately.”

“Why do you have to talk about it privately? What is it you’re going to say about me that you don’t want me to hear?” Eddy gave us a scornful look.

“We don’t know, Eddy. We just want to discuss the idea between the two of us without the pressure of you standing here trying to convince us to see it your way.”

“Why shouldn’t I be here? Why do you have to discuss it without me? Who does this concern more than me?” He was still standing in the center of the room, belligerent, with his shoulders held back. Larry said nothing. I said nothing. Eddy stood and glowered.

“That’s fine, Eddy,” Larry finally offered. “Your mother and I can always talk about it later.” He turned his attention back to the computer on his lap, where he was looking at bike parts on Craigslist.

Ed stood in the center of the living room for a minute longer, arms crossed against his chest, glaring first at Larry, then at me, before turning and storming back to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

“Well, what do you think?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “He doesn’t seem very together. It’s hard to say.”

“What do you mean by ‘not very together?’ What’s your evidence that something’s wrong?”

“You can see something’s wrong! He’s so angry with us!”

“But how is that any different than he was before?”

I had to think about that one. Eddy had been angry with us for most of his life. It wasn’t until after he had moved out to the eco-commune just a few months before, when he finally realized some of his long-yearned-for independence, that he’d started to treat us more reasonably. “That’s true. But it seems different now — more unrelated to actual events. He’s also acting sneaky. I have no idea what’s going on in his head.”

“That’s true. He is pretty secretive. And God knows he’s not all the way down to earth, yet. But on the other hand, he’s going to school every day. He’s almost through the semester. And he has a point about the atmosphere around here. It is really uncomfortable. It’s hard to sit in the same room with the two of you. It’s not healthy.”

“The two of us?” I couldn’t believe Larry was criticizing me. “I wish he wasn’t so resentful,” I shifted the blame back on to Ed. “Why can’t he just be nice? It was different when I had my nervous breakdown in college, because I put myself totally in my father’s hands. I trusted him to take care of me. But Eddy resists whatever we suggest. He doesn’t want anything to do with us.”

Larry sighed. “I guess that’s the difference between a girl and a boy.”

“I guess.”

Just then the door to the back bedroom opened and Eddy appeared again in the middle of the living room.

“Well, have you decided my fate?”

“No, Ed. Not yet.”

“What’s the hold up? What’s taking so long?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’re just slow.”

Eddy stared at us scornfully before announcing that he was going for a walk and leaving through the front door.

“I think we should let him move out,” Larry said after enough time had passed for Ed to to have gotten off the porch. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Besides, we have enough to worry about with your surgery coming.”

“I guess… He seems pretty coherent. He’s just acting upset, like a regular teenager, not crazy. Right?”

We sat with that for a few moments, uncertain.

“I finally got him an appointment with a therapist. We could make that a requirement: if he moves out, he has to keep seeing a therapist once a week. And who knows? Maybe once he’s back at the eco-commune without a car, and he realizes he has to get himself to the supermarket and up to CSM on his bicycle, he’ll decide it’s too much trouble and want to come back home.”

“Maybe. On the other hand, if I continue to give him a ride to school every morning, I’ll be able to keep an eye on him.”

“True.”

“I could give him a ride to his therapy appointments, too. That way we’ll know he’s going. I told him earlier that I just want to take all the pressure off, so he can make it through the semester and not blow his admission to UC Berkeley. I think we should still follow that plan, even if he moves back to his apartment. That goal hasn’t changed.”

“But what if he goes back to his apartment and loses his mind again?”

“What’s to stop him from doing that here?”

I didn’t know what to say. “At least when he’s here, we’ll know if something is going wrong. We’ll be watching him.”

“But that’s just what he’s complaining about! And frankly, I’m afraid if we don’t let him move out, he’ll just leave anyway. There’s nothing keeping him here. He’s legally an adult. And if he just walks out on his own, then we won’t have any idea where he is or how to get a hold of him.”

The conversation was familiar. All his life, we’d been discussing how much rope to give Eddy, or how much to pretend to be giving in order to preempt him from taking it.

One year, when Eddy was about 12 years old, and wrecking havoc at home every night while his dad was out working at the restaurant, I told Larry that I didn’t think I could live with him any longer. “He threatens me,” I reported. “He steps toward me when we argue.”

We considered sending him to boarding school, and I went so far as to contact one in Oregon and send away for registration materials. But when the time came to make a final decision, Larry lobbied against it.

“I don’t want to send him to Oregon,” he told me, “because I’m afraid if we do, we’ll never see him again. He’ll make friends with those people. He’ll make a life for himself up there, and he’ll never come back home.”

A week or so later, we sat together in the living room, on the same couches where we were sitting now: Larry and I on one, Eddy on the other. He’d gotten into trouble at a church camp, and we were meeting to decide on a punishment. On a camping trip with a youth group, Eddy had defied the leaders, refusing to go to bed at curfew.

“Your mother and I have been talking about what to do with you,” Larry began. “We’ve been considering sending you away to boarding school because of all the trouble you’ve been getting into lately. And frankly, it would be a helluva lot easier to pay someone else to raise you than to raise you ourselves.”

No one disputed that.

“But we’ve decided not to do that, because we want to have a lifelong relationship with you. You know how I go and visit my parents on the weekends, and we go out to dinner? I’m 41 years old! But if I’m in trouble — if I need to borrow money or something — I still can go to them. That’s the kind of relationship we want to have with you, Eddy. We want to be close to you all of our life…”

Eddy squirmed in his seat. I remembered why I loved Larry.

“So, instead of sending you to boarding school, we’ve decided just to ground you for a month.”

“Okay.” Eddy spoke quietly, accepting the punishment, which was completely out of character for him. We three stood up and moved away from the couches, as if nothing special had happened.

We didn’t mention boarding school again. But Eddy didn’t forget that I had wanted to send him away. Two years later, when he was 14, we had a monumental struggle over his computer. He’d become addicted to an online game and played incessantly, neglecting sleep and food and homework, and snarling at anyone who tried to interfere with his play.

After many failed attempts at limiting the time he spent online, Larry and I decided to take his computer away from him. And one day when Eddy was at school, I took it out of his bedroom. But that night, when I got up from working on my laptop at the dining room table, Eddy took my computer in retaliation. When I came back from the bathroom, I saw what he had done.

“Give me back my computer right now!” I confronted him in the kitchen.

“No! Not until you give me back mine!”

I grabbed him by the shoulders. “I’m not playing with you, Eddy. I need that computer to support this family!”

“I need my computer too!” He struggled to get away from me, and the next thing I knew I had him pinned to the floor with my knee in his belly and my face pushed into his.

“You give that computer back to me right now or there are going to be serious consequences!”

Ed looked up at me from under my knee and made a sour face. “Am I threatening you now, Mother?” he asked before wriggling free of my grasp and running out the back door.

I remembered that struggle now as I sat on the couch and considered how much of Eddy’s nervous breakdown was my fault. Maybe all of it. Probably some. I never had figured out how to parent that defiant boy.

“I guess you’re right,” I finally answered dispiritedly. “We might as well let him go. There’s just as much chance of him recovering his senses there as here — maybe more.”

“I think that’s the best choice.”

We sat a bit longer and considered the possible ramifications of our decision. As soon as it was made, I began to worry that it was wrong.

“Do you know if he’s taking the medication Dr. Hu gave him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you think he should be?”

“I don’t know.”

That was the fifteenth chapter of my novel, Count All This. To continue, follow the free chapter links below or buy a digital copy of the whole book on Amazon, where leaving a rating or review will help others find my story.

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