Mercurial

Wordy Wednesday

Carol's 3rd grade photo

Mercurial.    I do not like what it means: changeable; volatile; fickle; flighty; erratic: a mercurial nature.   It describes how I often feel. . . maybe even, how I've always felt. 

On good days, it makes me feel alive, creative, some times even witty.  On bad days, my mercurial nature is a source of embarrassment and shame.  I wrap myself in side it and look out at a world covered in cold gray fog.  It is a world I have created, my mercurial mind and I.

Last night, I finished a book:  The Dark Side of Innocence.  Terri Cheney writes of her childhood.  After struggling for years with depression and its evil cousin, mania, she was diagnosed as bipolar.  Her first book, Manic surprised her with its success.  Encouraged to write of her childhood, she resisted until realizing that telling the tale might help others and herself.

I'm no Terri Cheney.  Mania and I are not as well acquainted. It teases me from a greater distance.   I did not label the darkness within as the Black Beast when still very young.  She is brilliant and talented in ways I am not and yet, when I read about her childhood, the feeling her words conveyed, tapped into memories that I had long tried to escape.  The circumstances of our lives were very different in so many ways and yet, I knew on the most basic level that the things I felt, the things I tried to run from and deny, the things that haunt me at the oddest moments, were experiences and emotions so similar to hers that reading them felt like being kicked in the stomach.  Like Terri, I, too was the unusual child who began her struggles with light and darkness when still very young.

Maybe it's no coincidence that I came across her book, when I did.  Lately, I have felt the weight of being a mother to a bipolar child.  I look at my son and feel the terror of uncertainty. 

I often close my eyes to it but, there are times when his unique way of being forces my eyes open.  At those times,  I have to face what I have always known.  He is not an average child.  His world is tormented by worry and obsession.  His despair can feel bottomless.  He questions his worth, his life and often needs help to carry on.    The depth of his sadness is profound and frightening.  We both tumble through space in pitch-black darkness and wonder when will we hit bottom and what will it look like?  Can I save him?  Can I teach him to save himself?

Once in a while, a light shatters the darkness and we are blinded.  We forget we are falling.  We are saved by our own glory.  Always, the light fades and disappears.  We return to our dark descent and wonder, have we ever left it.  Was the light a dream?

In my own private, mercurial hell, I often avoid dealing with the facts.  Facts.  I can not escape some of them.  The fact that he requires so much supervision, so much encouragement, so much attention is one I often ignore.  Recently, his ability to upset others couldn't be denied.  As much as he wants the love and approval of everyone, he becomes his own worst enemy and pursues his own brand of madness in such a way as to make those around him frustrated and annoyed.  Once he's achieved this alienation, he is filled with despair and remorse. 

My awareness of this tapped into something very primal within me.  I grieved for the child he is and the child he is not.  Words failed me.  I began my own odd mercurial shifting, swinging slightly between two extremes: hope and despair.  I couldn't write about it or talk about it.  I had to learn to walk around with this secret burning inside me until I felt empty and hollow.  And, then, I read Terri Cheney's book.  I saw myself.  I saw my son.  I felt for both of us and then for all of us cursed in this way.

But it is more than a curse.  No matter the reason, it is what is.  It is not all bad.  I realized that there is a great value in being honest and open about the truth about oneself.  Terri Cheney did not have to write her books.  She did not have to tell her story.  I did not have to read it.  But, she did and I did and one day my son might read it or another book like hers and feel hope.  Maybe some where between the crazy kaleidoscope of light and dark that plays across the mind and heart and soul, he will see how special he is.  That is what I saw in between all the words, those in Cheney's book and those in my own head.  Mercury is part of who I am.  It is one of the things that makes me uniquely me.  I am no better or more "special" than another.  It is simply one of the tools in my kit and it's one I can embrace as my own.