Crazy Baby

Joan Osborne sings it straight:

The Crash

Everything had been so normal, productive. More so than anything I'd experienced since the hospital. It reminds me of my childhood, the abuse. You could go days full of normal, and then out of nowhere, you'd get slapped down. Literally. Even now I have to use "you," second person singular, to distance myself from the memories. Depression feels like that. You find normal, if only for a few days, but there's always that trepidation that you'll have to pay for it -- with a slap out of nowhere, a hand that slaps you down, and there's a sort of a detached surprise when it happens, and then, like someone abused for a long time, resignation.

Mondays are the hardest for me. They're the first day I have to deal without having Jb around. That's strike one against me. But the previous day, we'd been driving in the car, and some country song had come on about weddings, fathers and daughters, the love and hope of a wedding. And it was disturbing how quickly it sent me back to my own wedding. Over ten years ago now, and I still remember it. How perfectly planned. How I never thought I'd end up separated, divorced. How maybe I shouldn't have married him. About how I'd felt myself shout "no!" inside when he'd given me the ring. How I should have listened to myself. It reminded me of how little I do. And it reminded me of failure, of a lifetime ago. And I felt such grief for that person that I was. For the tender moment with my dad. For the grief of leaving home.

Jb saw it, or part of it. There are things I can't tell him. There are things he simply can't know, having never gone through a wedding, a marriage. But he saw the part about my father. Knew I was thinking of him, and brought up a picture from my wedding I'd entirely forgot. It's the best picture taken from that wedding. My dad, in the library, holding an open book in his hand, dressed in the only suit or tux I've ever seen him in, with a silver glint of earring in one ear, and a mischievous grin for the camera. The big joke being that my dad's functionally illiterate, and he'd never in his life pick up a book or look like a man of leisure in a library and tux. He's always been blue-collar, down home, Southern through and through. And I love that about him.

It all was enough to trigger me, I think. I slept most of the rest of the evening, getting up for a couple cheese cookies I'd made for my birthday the day before and a drink. Then I crawled back into bed and slept the rest of the night. I'd get up for the bathroom, but I literally slept from 5 the following day until 4 o'clock on Monday when I knew Jb would be home. I had to be up when Jb got home, so I forced myself to take a shower. But the depression of those two days was so dark and deep that I couldn't fathom leaving my bed. And all last night, Lucy Kaplansky lyrics from "The Tide" kept running through my head, over and over and over and over.

Today's Playlist

What About Everything -- Carbon Life

In search of some rest, in search of a break
From a life of tests where something's always at stake
Where something's always so far
What about my broken car?
What about my life so far?
What about my dream?
What about.....

A Girl and Her Horse -- Carbon Leaf

And away she rides,
To the great beyond.
You can wave goodbye –
To a girl and her horse
With a bond you can't deny.

Not Only Numb -- Gin Blossoms

In the shade below the eaves
Think I could chain smoke anything
Im not only back, Im not only numb
When the air at home is thin
Getting out, then looking in
Yeah she knows, she knows, she knows
It aint awful hard to tell
What its like, my little hell
Yeah she knows, she knows, she knows.

Toy Soldiers -- Carbon Leaf

We find the people of our dreams
We find that they're not what they seem
I've learned that people come and go
I've learned that families break and grow
Toy soldiers brave away those tears
Toy soldiers hope for better years.

The Riverflow -- The Levellers

Life goes on and round we go and words can kill these things I know
Often you cut me, deeply so, but on the river flows.

[ . . . ]

But I still remember the day you said
That the river flowing through my head
Would take me far or leave me dead
And all you said was true .

Stop and Stare -- OneRepublic

Stop and stare
I think I'm moving but I go nowhere
Yeah I know that everyone gets scared
But I've become what I can't be, oh
Stop and stare
You start to wonder why you're 'here' not there
And you'd give anything to get what's fair
But fair ain't what you really need
Oh, can you see what I see.

Follow Through -- Gavin DeGraw

So since you wanna be with me
You'll have to follow through
With every word you say
And I, all I really want is you
You to stick around
I'll see you everyday
But you have to follow through
You have to follow through.

Work Song -- Dan Reader

I've got all the fucking work I need
I've got all the fucking work I need.

Studying Stones -- Ani Difranco

I am out here studying stones
Trying to learn to be less alive
Using all of my will
To keep very still
Still even on the inside.

Life Got in the Way -- Sister Hazel

And I wanted you so much
Just like I do right now
I wanted us to be the one the poets write their books about
I wanted it to last
I wanted to grow old
But life got in the way.

Over My Head (Cable Car) -- The Fray

I never knew
I never knew that everything was falling through
That everyone I knew was waiting on a queue
To turn and run when all I needed was the truth
But that's how it's got to be
It's coming down to nothing more than apathy.

One Green Hill -- Oysterband

It might he tears of laughter,
It might be tears of rage
You hate it and you love it
And it rattles at your cage
My people are survivors, living in the cracks
Whatever bad luck hands them,
They keep on coming back.

What was Wrong -- Storyhill

Roll the window down
Turn the car around and get the hell outta town.

Oh, So Girl, Interrupted

I'm also having this need to read things like The Bell Jar, and Prozac Nation, and Girl, Interrupted. Or to at least Netflix the movies made from the books. Everything is so Sylvia Plath. In the hospital, you'd have morning group, right? And they always wanted us to start out with some pithy quote on the board that was meant to buoy us through the day. There were more than a few of us that looked around at each other, all aware that the only thing we had in our heads were snippets of Plath, Parker, lyrics and rhymes of the mentally ill themselves. We were the girls who did not know how to play nice in the ward, the ones that complained about the staff late at night in the dining room, the ones who didn't care if they left group in the middle of it, the ones who slept during the day to make it pass. Except for visiting hours, we thought the whole thing a farce. The only thing they cared about was that you took your pills at 9am and 9pm and kept yourself washed and clean.

Snap

Just like that. I'm standing at the kitchen sink, shelling shrimp, lost in despair, and singing Roseanne Cash's "Bells and Roses" in my head:

Everything was mine
But it's long stripped away
Will you love me if I'm naked
Or as silent as a grave.

If you see who I really am
Will you still wanna stay
There's a danger in this love
And I want to be that brave.

Bells and roses
A sign of departure
But I love them just the same
Bells and roses
A sign of survival
On the door into this pain.

Jb comes home in a dark, snappish mood. Suddenly, I'm seven again, and my mother is raging at me, and there's no perfection I could ever achieve that would ease her pain. Because, like me, she's mentally unstable. And when Jb lashes out at me, I curl inward, go quiet, and the same thoughts play over and over: Maybe if I were sane, maybe if I were beautiful, maybe if I were the right size, the right shape, the tv girlfriend, the perfect girlfriend. Maybe then, he'd be happy with me. Maybe I would do something right, and I wouldn't be repeating stanzas of songs over and over and over while the water runs in the sink:

Now I'll go in if you say I must
But I'd rather let it go
There are people I will never trust
And things that I can't know

Kiss you 'til we turn to stone
Or fight you 'til we're blind
But you love me when you're left alone
And it makes me wanna die

Bells and roses
Wake up the senses
To remind me who I am.

And I'm reminded: I am flawed. I am broken. The trigger is like a switch, my mood like night and day. And I can't let the pain or the fight go.

Slippery Slope

I'm heading for a depression. I can feel it coming on. I've lost interest in most everything again: reading, computer games, movies, sex, going places, doing things. I am angry at myself about this, so I'm cranky all the time and restless. Sometimes, instead, I'm listless and passive. The IBS and GERDs is acting up as well. I'm beginning to stress about things like Jb coming home at night. While other things, I don't care about at all: like whether the bills get paid, whether we have money or not, whether we have food or not. When Jb tries to ask me about these things, I get annoyed, short with him. He is constantly yelling at me for snapping at him. My temper and patience are nonexistent. I resent Jb's intrusion into my "world." More and more, he says things to me like, "You know, maybe you should try living here in reality, like everybody else."

This morning, on waking, I remember having a very vivid dream about living in a city with Hitler and being somehow close to him. Because he's a despot and mercurial of mood, everyone is always on eggshells around him, not wanting to curry his disfavor. I am someone he favors, and even I am very careful about what I do and say. It is stressful, this living on the edge, never knowing whether he'll be kind or cruel. And he can be very kind, as well as very cruel. There is a small resistance in the town. They know each other by the books they read. But those loyal to Hitler know them by the books they read as well. I try to sneak past a Hitler supporter with one of these books tucked among many. I make it, barely, out to a terraced park full of students and wildflowers, and there are two women who oversee the whole body of supporters. L-----, from the psych ward, is there in my dream. She screams out at a line of nuns who walk past the park; she was always screaming out about freedom and being closed in.

The dream is telling. I am having a hard time dealing with being home all day, then having Jb come home and disrupt my little world. It's like Jayne says in Firefly, "[He] damages my calm." It also sends me back to my childhood--when I lived in fear of my mother's moods, never knowing what they might be from minute to minute. I have to admit to myself that I've felt this way for the last year or so. Even when Jb was picking me up from work, the last hour of work, before I knew he was coming, I'd start to get sick to my stomach, I'd taste cigarettes in my mouth, and my IBS would suddenly flare up, so that I missed almost a half hour of work at the end of the day, every day. I think, perhaps, this is an inability to deal with change on a small, localized scale. And like in my dream, I used to escape into books. But since the hospitalization, I've had trouble concentrating enough to read them, except in small snippets.

Jb also gets on my ass--understandably so--about not having started to unpack. I took a week off because I needed it after the move, but I've no energy for it. It's been up near the 100s this week, so I tell myself it's because it's been so hot and I've been trying to keep the A/C off during the day. But the truth is that I simply don't have the motivation to do it. And Jb's losing patience with me. We had another fight last night. He told me that I've ruined every night so far in the new apartment, that I no longer participate in our relationship. And I'm left hurt and shamed and guilty and small--and angry at him for making me face the truth. I wish, sometimes, I could not listen. That I could wrap the bubble of my quiet day alone around me.

I cannot blame Jb, though. He is working hard, for both of us. He has every right to resent what he must see as my laziness. And it's like work all over again. How many times can you say, "I don't feel well," before they begin to look at you askance, like you're lying, or making it up. Depression isn't an excuse, but it comes across as one. Unless you've been there, deep and alone, you cannot ever truly understand what it feels like. Mild depression is not the same as major depression. Trying to follow each mood swing is exhausting. Depression is depleting. You are told, expected, to be this or that, but you can't be. Part of you no longer even cares that you can't be. Another part of you is angry and bitter, guilt-ridden and ashamed. And still, even though you want to meet someone's expectations, you can't. The will to try sputters and flags like a flame about to go out, and you're left feeling helpless, and you know it's all you're fault. You are the one who is broken. You are the one who is wrong.

Running: An Essay in Five Parts

I

"I awoke today and found
the frost perched on the town.
It hovered in a frozen sky,
then it gobbled summer down.
When the sun turns traitor cold,
and all the trees are shivering in a naked row,

I get the urge for going,
But I never seem to go.
I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown;
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in."

Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going"

Spring and Fall always bring The Runaways. But other things can trigger them: a song, stress, a show on tv, an argument, lack of sunlight and activity, anything that overwhelms me emotionally or physically. Jb has told me more than once that he finds it hard to understand me because I don't let things go. But for me, it's not that I don't let them go, or that I don't want to; it's that I can't. The wanting, the emotion, the physical embodiment of that emotion, and all I have is the thin layer of my skin to keep it all in. And sometimes it sleeps, and sometimes it wakes, and when it wakes, it starts off with a soft whimpering, then a mewling, then a bawling, until with tiny fists, it's battering for my attention, to do what it would have me do, and I know this: by now, I am half mad with the need to be up and gone. Half crazy with the itching of it, as if it's a rash you'd scratch and scratch until you were bleeding, and still not care that you were. All that matters is the itch, and somehow, you have to quiet it.

II

"Now the warriors of winter,
They gave a cold triumphant shout,
And all that stays is dying,
And all that lives is gettin' out.
See the geese in chevron flight,
Flapping and racing on before the snow.

They got the urge for going,
And they got the wings so they can go."

Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going"

When I'm stuck, when I can't up and go, whether for lack of money, a job that ties me down, responsibilities to some Other, I become claustrophobic. The world closes in around me, trapping me on all sides, squeezing in on me until the walls of the world have locked me in, and I know I am dying, and that everything around me is dying for lack of air. Madness to go is screaming and pushing at a vacuum-sealed vault it can't escape. But sometimes, blessedly, it does, and when I had my first taste of adulthood and freedom, when I had access to money and means, I ran away, desperate for the running. Even as a child, I stood, face pressed to the glass windows of an Oasis in Illinois, watching the cars speeding by below, and envying them with a hunger a child shouldn't know. And even now, there's nothing I like better than being on an open road, going somewhere, going anywhere, the allure of truck stops and rest areas foreign and enticing, a mere stopping point on an exodus of Biblical proportions. And that's what it always feels like once I break away: as if the world was made for only me, and only I can truly appreciate it. What was dull and dingy is now Technicolor in my world, and the trees flash by in their glowing blur, and I count hawks, but never the miles.

III

"I'll ply the fire with kindling now.
I'll pull the blankets up to my chin.
I'll lock the vagrant winter out and
I'll fold my wandering in."

Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going"

I haven't been able to be up and gone in nearly three years, and it's a bit like going cold turkey. When the madness takes hold of me, I lock it down, repress it. I learned early as a child that society and mothers expect quiet children, so I kept it all in, as the Beautiful South song goes. And then, free of home, I began to let it all out, acting out as I never could when I was young. In college, though, everyone ran away, and they called it Spring Break. So, there was Cancun where I couldn't be bothered to be dragged around the markets and the bars, where I maxed out my credit card to become a certified scuba diver, leaving my friends to drink themselves merry or stupid. Every day, Klaus ran us 5 miles out and 150 feet down, and all that mattered was the running. And there was the time I met my husband, flying into the unknown with $100 in my pocket, and no guarantee this boy I'd met online would be there at the gate. When I finally married, I could count the times I ran away on two hands. There was the cold feet of my engagement, the sudden trip up to Milwaukee, and my best friend whispering that he could never made me happy. And there was my bachelorette party: a trip up to Madison, Madtown, me and my best friend and a toilet that wouldn't work.

IV

Of course, once I was married, there was the money, and Saugatuck, MI. Something there staved off the hunger longest, and I went back, again and again, staying in a hidden cottage off the main street, set up in such a way that the craziest of travelers could pretend to set up house there, behind the wine store, and buy plum wine and cream sherry, and walk down the street for Framboise at a British pub or peanut butter soup at the coffeehouse. Saugatuck called to me in such a compelling way that I once drove through a blizzard to get there, spinning out six times on the Michigan freeway. And then there was the summer, when Saugatuck was just a starting point for a week-long birthday run up to Petosky, where I was determined to camp, alone, in the state park, then further up to Mackinaw to spend my birthday with wine and chocolate covered strawberries in a claw foot tub, then further still to the Upper Peninsula and a town called Paradise that had one hotel, and one restaurant, and a convenient store that never stayed open. Dar Williams sang "Traveling Again (Traveling I)" the whole drive up:

"Have I got everything? Am I ready to go?
Is it going to be wild, is it gonna be the best time?
Or am I just a-saying so-o-o-o? Am I ready to go?
What do I hear when I say I hear the call of the road?

I think it started with driving.
More speed, more deals,
More sky, more wheels,
More things to leave behind.
Now it's all in a day for the modern mind.
And I am traveling, again,
Calling this a ghost town, and where is the heartland?
And I'm afraid, oh, was there any good reason, that I had to go?
When all I know is I can never come back.

Traveling, I made a friend.
He had a trouble in his head.
And all he could say's that he knew that the bottle
Drank the woman from his bed, from his bed.
He said, "I'm not gonna lose that way again."
But sober is just like driving.
More joy, more dread,
someone turns her head,
And smiles and disappears.
He's gotta take it like it is, and it goes too fast,
And he is just like me, caught in-between.
No sage advisor. Does weary mean wiser?
And someday will I sing the mountains that carried me away
From home and hometown boys like you?

Yeah, but what about us? Was it really that bad?
Oh, it's hard to believe I want a highway road stop
More than all the times we had, on little dirt roads.
What am I reaching for that's better than a hand to hold?

It really was about driving.
Not fame, not wealth.
Not driving away from myself.
It's just myself drove away from me.
And now I gotta get it back, and it goes so fast.
So, I am traveling again.
Sitting at the all-nite, picking up a pen.
And I'm afraid, oh, was there any good reason
That I had to go? When all I know is I am all alone again.
And you are the ghost town, and I am the heartland.
And I can say, oh, that's a very good reason
That I had to go, but now all I know is I can never come back.
And I will never go back."

I made it up to Whitefish Point on Dar Williams that summer, to see the bell of the Edmond Fitzgerald, and everything that was mystical and new, from the way Gordon Lightfoot's "The Edmund Fitzgerald" began playing softly over the museum's speakers right as I stepped up to view the remains of the American lake freighter, to the way I lived out Stan Roger's song, "White Squall," by touring the Soo Locks along the Canadian borderline. It was the summer of my greatest Runaway, and everything shined clear as Lake Huron.

V

"Baby, let me set you down.
You look so troubled, and I think I know.
Just when you think you've come around,
There you go.

Now, I know the business of the heart,
And it'll get you anyway it can.
You need someone to walk with in the dark. Well,
I'm your man."

Shawn Colvin, "Trouble"

And then there was Jb, who caught me up when I ran away to Knoxville -- and from my marriage. There had been other boys who had tried to catch me, and some boys that I had tried to catch. One even spoke about me as if I was a bird in the hand, ready to fly at the slightest provocation, and at the time, he was more right than he knew. But Jb caught me and twirled me around and set me back down on my feet, and for the first time in ten years, someone insisted I stay. And there I was: in a relationship with a man who would not tolerate my runaways, who claimed we were "in this together," and strangely enough, something in me sighed, as if I suddenly realized that all that running had left me exhausted and footsore. And that should be my happy ending. But the whirl of bipolar never quite goes away, and there are nights, like last night, watching Firefly, cowboys in space, laconic and always on the move, that brought the Runaways back. And the move is closing in around me, suffocating me, so that there is no air, no air. I can't breathe. And all I can think of is a run to the water.

But Jb knows how to deal with my runaways. I'm not sure he knows that he knows how to do this thing, but like a dog kept on a short leash, because of bills or poverty, he makes it possible for me to slip off that leash, if only for an hour or two, and he lets me run. Short trips into the "country," long drives to nowhere and anywhere that a quarter of a tank of gas can get us. And we roll the windows down and turn the music up, and I'd put my head out the window and push my face up toward the sun, just to feel the warmth and the wind, if I didn't think I'd look as crazy as I sometimes feel. But we sing along to every song we know, and we sing loud, and off-key, and we shoot each other laughing looks, and for that little while, I finally feel unfettered and free, and miracle of miracles, Jb's saved me from myself.

Ahem.

Tori Amos, "Snow Cherries from France:"

You question me,
"Can you ride anything?"
Lord, do you mean like your moodswings?

Ahem. Truer words sometimes. Poor Jb.