MENTAL HEALTH

Time Out of Mind

Bipolar disorder is a Category 6 sh*tstorm for the whole family, but there is hope.

It’s eight o’clock in the evening. Do you know where your kids are? My teens are preoccupied, my three youngest are in bed, and at the moment I’d like to keep it that way. This is Mama’s special time to mow down Red Vines and think about roughin’ it in with both Property Brothers.

This escapism is the “sane” kind. I have no fear or self-loathing around my moments of post-bedtime reverie — or gluttony. However, about a year ago and over the course of a few eventful days, I slipped away into a more shameful kind of daydream — one with an aftermath much more hideous than a sugar hangover.

This is the story of my first (and hopefully last) manic episode, the “crash” that led to my bipolar disorder diagnosis, and the long, lonely struggle to reconnect with my family.

I am a wife and a stay-at-home mom of six kids — five sons (ages 17, 16, 8, 6, and 3) and a daughter (15). It often feels like I have been parenting and wifing from time immemorial. On the eve of my 38th birthday, I was hospitalized for my first mental health-related crisis, for mania that descended into psychosis.

I had struggled with depression before. But as 38 is a relatively late age for a first manic episode, I was bewildered and devastated, as was my tribe. Over the last year, I have tried to piece together what happened. And I have strained to fix the relationships that are most dear to me, which have been deformed and broken by the weight of my illness.

The episode went like this: at first, there was a subtle weirdness in my behavior, after I’d had a few straight nights of poor sleep. I was uncharacteristically “Zen.” I am, and have always been, a card-carrying control freak, so at first blush, my husband was pleasantly surprised by what he saw as an upgrade to my personality.

Eventually, though, the real weirdness began. I became euphoric and wise and even all-knowing. Profound realizations began to “dawn on my like the rising sun,” as I tried to explain. I told my husband, Joe, that his Tesla was really a spaceship. I didn’t feel the need to bother with picking up our daughter from her friend’s house, deciding that she’d be fine without any ride home, then opted to pee on the bed when I laid down for a random nap. I also got buck naked and sat in the garden with our preschooler, chatting casually with our gardener. If I didn’t know better, I would think these “epiphanies,” impulsive behaviors, and state of utter nirvana were the result of having tried some ‘shrooms.

This was mania, as I later came to understand.

And in some ways this phase was both exhilarating and slightly hilarious (at least, in retrospect). I don’t remember this but Joe swears that at some point I earnestly suggested that “we should look into our moms’ vaginas because that’s where we all came from.” Our daughter ran from the room, and Joe’s head turned on a swivel to stare at me — my mom and I have been estranged for more than six years, and in more typical times I don’t even like to look her in the face.

“I don’t want to see my mom’s vagina!” Joe protested, and he gave me some serious side-eye for the rest of the evening.

Joe was concerned. He stayed home from work the next day to keep an eye on me and started calling doctors. But it was only once the paranoia set in that he really started to get worried.

The fear was warranted. I asked Joe to turn off his phone the next afternoon as we walked down our rural street (where there isn’t a lick of cell service), explaining that my uncle was in the CIA and someone would surely be listening. When we got home, I ran into my teens’ rooms as they Zoom-learned and hurled their computers outside into the woods — I’d been convinced that internet traffickers were trying to lure them into prostitution.

Our teens sheltered together in a bedroom, horrified, while Joe brought me outside. Relentless winds of fear and dread were howling inside me, and my mind was making up plausible stories to explain the awful feelings. We were terrorized by my thoughts.

Joe called 9–11. The first responders advised him to bring me to the ER, where the staff did a rapid COVID test, a spinal tap, and toxicology — all clear. I tried to sprint out of the hospital when Joe left my side for a minute in triage. And from that point on, repeatedly asking out loud for his anchoring calmness was all I could do to stop the racing, macabre thoughts.

It took a few days to stabilize me with medications, and the hospital sent me home.

Then came the crash.

I got so anxious and depressed I couldn’t get out of bed, and Joe had to work from home a lot to keep the kids afloat. I would wake up drenched in sweat, crying, and shaking. Once Joe returned to work I’d call him from our bed and sob hysterically while a nanny took care of our kids in the next room.

This terrible scene repeated itself every day for at least six months while I started therapy and tried what seemed like every medication known to man. It often felt like there was ice-cold rain running down through my brain, especially when I was bone-chilled by the gales of sadness.

The despair belonged to us all. And the seawater’s surge that overtook my husband and kids as a result of my mental illness has been worse than words can say. As it turns out, there isn’t an e-card you can send your loved ones that says, “I’m sorry for what I did when I went manic,” or “I’m still your mom; I’m just riding out a downpour of depression,” or “My bad about your school laptop,” or “Just kidding! I don’t really want to see Grandma’s snatch.”

Nobody in our family was prepared for me to whirl up into a paranoid psychosis or fall into such a sorry, soggy heap. The stereotype of magical cloudbursts of creativity and any huge upside whatsoever to the disease is incredibly misleading, and it is mostly a long torrent of irritable depression. Bipolar disorder is a violent, destructive storm surge from which the waters slowly recede.

The hurricane of my harsh irritability spun its eyewall straight at us when we had to meet with Child Protective Services. A disinhibited, furious spanking I gave our six-year-old, George, had left bruises on his butt, and our dismayed daughter had told her mandated-reporter therapist. I tried to make repairs with George, who was upset and baffled. And our interview with CPS yielded just a warning; I have rarely (if ever) spanked any of our kids and had no prior history with the agency. But it was then that I had a major reckoning.

Even though I’d always tried to be a “calm eye in any storm” kind of mom — I’d been a co-op preschool mom, a PTA mom, and a licensed foster parent, after all — I needed to become a parent who could undergird us through these new, Category 6, mental health challenges.

The levees my husband and I had built over the years for our family’s well-being gave way. Our teens all but completely stopped looking to me for appropriate support, long after my delirious manic symptoms wound down and washed every bit of me out to the bedrock. It didn’t help that I was trying out anxiety medications and in post-apocalyptic “zombie” mode most of the time, but the kids were so traumatized by these stretches of unavailability that they no longer trusted me to be their mom.

They (in no particular order) lashed out angrily, shut down, started wetting their pants again, acted out, became depressed, stopped caring about school, got anxious, stopped caring about sports and other passions, buried their feelings underneath a mountain of schoolwork and perfectionism, holed up in their rooms with an endless stream of video games, had tantrums, had suicidal thoughts, became incredibly wary of me, started physically self-harming, or engaged in different combinations of the above. It is hard to fathom their pain, as I was out of mind at the time of these catastrophic erosions of faith.

But while the kids and Joe were emotionally battered, they also hoped. We all hoped in parallel that life could become calmer and less lonely again, and that we all could get better. And although it took me a long time to regulate my mood with medications, it has, and we have.

For his part, Joe deserves a Partner of the Millennium award. His patient support has been loadbearing for my recovery. Modern psychiatry and pharmacology are miracles. But even more so is a deeply committed and loving spouse. There is nothing easy about having to act as a single parent when your partner is seriously, intractably ill, or holding your crying wife every day and keeping your sh*t together when you also feel like crying. And there is little that feels weatherable when there seems to be no hope. Joe was a caisson of comfort in a raggedy-ass time when we weren’t sure I could ever come back.

Like in an Oprah meme, everyone in our family of eight has received a rather sudden gift of therapy.

I am working every day to spend peaceful, undramatic one-on-one time with each of the kids and Joe. And, crucially, Joe and I have been doing active dates outdoors together. We skate along the boardwalk and scan the skies for disturbances, but we are intentionally connecting, too. We provision ourselves against a wicked sh*tstorm that we are hoping will never again make landfall.

When difficulty hits, I have still struggled to regulate myself out of fight-or-flight mode — to recognize the distress and fear in the kids’ and Joe’s faces, to be emotionally present, and to summon the right words to soothe them. Somebody could be screaming, and instead of calming myself and adulting, I have screamed right along with them. And so there is a strict to-do list I follow now for helping and giving empathy.

Before I am able to tend to my kids’ safety and souls I must first be the source of my own relief. Breathe. Take stock of my reactivity and whatever scene the disaster has wrought, notice my family members’ faces, soothe, and then assist.

I still sometimes get the sensation of cold rain trickling through my brain when I have big feelings. And I fear the bigger unknown: will I have another episode? Almost half of all people diagnosed with bipolar disorder only have one. Still, I live with the threat of a repeat experience and what casualties would await Joe and our children.

What more is there to do but to live each day with a humanitarian’s gratitude and hope that the heaviest rain bands have passed?

If you or a loved one is struggling with bipolar disorder or another devastating mental illness, please take heart. With great care, it is possible to recover.

I practice self-care as insurance — compliance with meds, a regular sleep schedule and exercise regimen, stress reduction measures, and nutritious food (with the occasional Red Vines binge). I attend my doctor's visits without exception. I also set aside time to acknowledge my humanity.

There are neurological uncertainties in our lives, but so far they have not permanently demolished any of us. I show up for my kids and spouse just as faithfully as I show up for my evenings with the Property Brothers as they build better stuff where piles of rubble used to be. With a lot of emotional labor, we have managed not to harden ourselves against intimacies. And I remain hopeful that, as Joe has predicted, our relationships will ultimately be stouter than ever before, with time and healing.

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