The Hundred Story Home Page 3

  “Where’s Mom?” Louise asked urgently.

  “With her roses!” Allyson cried.

  We hurried down the short flight of split-level stairs into the den. Mom was still visible outside, moving in small circles through the rose bushes and speaking rapidly to her planted children.

  We watched together, the Green Girls, trying to understand. How could this be our mom? My mom noticed when a hair in my bangs was out of place, but this woman didn’t even see me, didn’t recognize her own daughters. I looked pleadingly at my big sisters for answers. Mom’s behavior had no context. She seemed to have come untethered from us.

  Louise ran across the den and took the small flight of steps in two desperate leaps. Ally and I held hands, racing behind her. Louise grabbed the kitchen phone, pushing the buttons from memory.

  “Gigi, this is Louise. It’s Mom. I don’t know what’s wrong, but you need to come—now!”

  We huddled together waiting for Gigi and watching Mom, who was oblivious to the chaos she’d unleashed.

  Gigi arrived and convinced Mom to come inside. Dad rushed home from the office. Shaken with sorrow and confusion, he helplessly held Mom’s hands, speaking words of love to a stranger who did not appear to hear him. Poppa met them all at the hospital with his thirty-year-old cracked black leather medical bag, but there was nothing inside that could heal my mother.

  Mom spent that night at the hospital, the first of many she would endure on a psychiatric ward that in the late sixties and early seventies offered little respite and certainly no remedies.

  I retreated that night to my secret hiding place at the top of my closet. The space was just wide and tall enough for a six-year-old to sit and dangle her feet over the edge. It was my indoor tree house where only my stuffed animals were allowed. I curled up on the shelf and hugged Snoopy, wondering if Mom would ever come home.

  The suddenness of her affliction shattered us.

  When Mom came home after several weeks, she was deflated and lifeless. She slept, it seemed, for almost as many days as she had been gone. My sisters went to camp that summer, and I went to stay with my aunt and uncle in San Antonio. At the time, I thought it was a vacation with my cousins, but I came to understand later it was because my mom still couldn’t care for us.

  That hospital stay was the first of many. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for weeks. Gigi, Poppa, and Dad would whisper in the kitchen.

  “Exhaustion.”

  “Fragile constitution.”

  “Lindsay always tries to do too much.”

  With each episode the worry deepened. Poppa, a general practitioner, consulted psychiatrists and psychologists. In the early 1970s, these doctors had trouble naming my mother’s condition.

  Nervous breakdown. Schizophrenic form psychosis.

  It would require the right doctor, the right medicine, and the right diagnosis—bipolar disorder—to truly bring my mom home to us. It would also take sixteen years.

  During that agonizing period, each time as inexplicably as Mom went away, she would return. With each recurrence, however, a little more of her had blown away.

  And each time a little more resentment built inside of me. Why did she sleep so much? Why didn’t she just wake up?

  When Mom unraveled, so did our family. She was the thread that pulled us tight, and each time she left for a new treatment or hospital stay, we frayed a little more.

  A housekeeper, Maria, came from Juarez to live with us, crossing the river illegally and staying for weeks at a time before risking the perilous journey back to visit her own two children. Maria had been trained as a secretary in Mexico, but she made more money in the United States cleaning homes. She was diligent at keeping our house, folding our laundry, and making our beds so it always looked as if everything was in order. But Maria couldn’t care for us. She spoke no English, so we could only pantomime our needs to her. I had begun learning Spanish that year in first grade, but I never found a good translation for, “I want my mom back.”

  Gigi’s house became my safe haven. Between the chocolate-mint sticks and the pink nubby couch, I found the place of comfort that would wrap me in reassurance. Our house, that perfect split-level ranch my parents had saved for to hold our dream family, became only a container that held our sadness. When Mom was depressed, the symphonies that had soared from her classical cassettes were silenced. The art studio was shuttered and dust collected on her paintbrushes as she slept, trying to outlast the darkness that settled over her for months at a time.

  Throughout elementary school, I tried not to be needy. Dad was overwhelmed with his law practice and negotiating this new world of caring for my mother. I packed my lunch, walked to school, made all As, and walked myself home. My parents’ bedroom door became a sign I monitored closely. It was the first thing I checked when I came in from school. If the door was open when I got home, I knew I would find Mom painting in the studio or tending to her roses. If it was closed, I would know to get my own snack, and she would wake up in time to make dinner. Mom always made dinner. It was the one task she never gave over to Maria—the one that still meant she was the mother in this home.

  But the sight of her bedroom door closed when I came home became a wound that would not heal. I wanted her to want to wake up and ask me about my day. About the boy who had teased me on the walk home. About the play I was going to be in. I wanted desperately for her to be the superhero mom she used to be, but with each break that ended in a hospital stay our old life felt more like a TV show we used to watch. Someone had switched the channel in our lives from The Brady Bunch to The Twilight Zone, and we couldn’t find the remote control to change it back.

  Even when we had a name for this thing that had stolen our promise, manic depression, we still did not name it. We did not talk about it all. My dad. My sisters. My grandparents. We didn’t comfort each other, cry about our devastating loss, or curse the diagnosis. We simply carried on. Dad went to the office every morning and still expected the three of us to do very well at school. I kept collecting As and added to my résumé student council representative, National Honor Society, and yearbook editor, but I never talked to my teachers about my home. I never said I had done my homework after visiting my mom on a psychiatric ward. I never admitted to my friends that the reason I never invited them over to my house was because I was afraid they might see my mother asleep in the middle of the day or, more unexplainable, manic.

  I, like my family, simply became numb. I could no longer cry when my mom went to the hospital. She just did. I could not get excited when she came home. She would go back. The only cure for this pain was simply not to feel, not to hope.

  By high school, I needed small escapes from this dysfunction and I found it by secretly rebelling at night. Andrea, a.k.a. Goofy, was still my best friend. Some weekend nights we would drive over the border to Juarez to party in clubs that asked only for our American dollars and not our IDs. I was escaping the crazy in my home and she was escaping the cancer in hers.

  Andrea’s father had been battling cancer, and her mother was trying to keep the family business going while radiation burned new holes in their lives. It was striking to see how her family was supported as her father suffered. Their family was inundated with help, especially from their small Lutheran community church. Friends swarmed the tragedy with cards, meals, offers of compassionate support. I often went to Andrea’s church on Sundays. The pastor called her father by name in the prayers and asked for his healing.

  Unlike Andrea’s family, mine was not showered with care. Throughout those sixteen years of our searching for a cure for my mother’s mind, our fellow Presbyterians didn’t bake and didn’t write. It wasn’t that they didn’t care; it was because they didn’t know.

  We never told them. Whether Mom was sick or well, the Green family still went to church every Sunday, smiling at the friends around First Presbyterian Church, saying hello but not speaking our truth.

  Mental illness doesn’t work like cancer.

&n
bsp; There is no Hallmark card for, “I’m sorry your loved one is bipolar.”

  There are no casseroles for crazy.

  Over the years I watched Poppa, Gigi, Dad, and Mom all bow their heads in church, and I could make less and less sense of it. When I sat quietly in the pew beside them, I wasn’t drawing on my program or gazing at the ceiling anymore. I was studying the profiles of my parents and grandparents as they prayed.

  What exactly were they praying for?

  I had no idea. But from where I was sitting, God had not answered any of their prayers, nor was he delivering us from this evil.

  four

  HEADED FOR HOME

  Don’t forget—no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.

  —Charles de Lint1

  It was almost my last year of high school before any doctor could begin to explain what had happened to my mother’s brain and the two keys to living well with a bipolar disorder. One, Mom would always need daily medications to balance her brain chemistry, and two, she would need to fight daily for her sanity.

  He explained it like this: “When the mania begins, it is as if there are three TV stations and two radio stations all broadcasting her thoughts in her head at the same time. She has to constantly try to turn them down and figure out what she is really hearing. You are lucky your mom is so smart and can determine what is real. Most people can’t—or they give up trying.”

  By my college years Mom had almost fully returned to us, as had her early promise of a life of service, church involvement, and even classes to obtain a master’s degree in art. Battling for sanity had swallowed almost two decades of her life—time she calls her Lost Years. Even after she was stable we held our collective breath, hoping not to tip the fragile balance that kept her with us.

  I was not fully ready to appreciate her struggle. Although my mom was back, I didn’t really welcome her into my heart. At twenty-one I could still revert to my six-year-old self, hurt that she had virtually disappeared after my perfect cartoon birthday and effectively left us wandering in the desert.

  The self-reliance learned during elementary school was now almost pathological. I didn’t want to depend on anyone for anything. If I craved that perfect home and family, I was going to have to build them on my own. And I was not going to look for a future in El Paso or even the state of Texas.

  I worked every summer taking extra classes along with a part-time job at a design firm so I could graduate early from the University of Texas at Austin. At twenty-one, I was eager for adventure and desperate to leave the state I had always lived in. In 1985, I did. Watching it recede in my rearview mirror, I was not even a little bit sad.

  Thirty years after my mother’s odyssey from North Carolina to El Paso, I made the exact trip in reverse: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina. The states fell behind me as I headed from the Texas desert to the green of Charlotte for my first job out of college as an art director with an ad agency. I was hoping it was the promised land.

  In moving to Charlotte I wasn’t trying to trace my parents’ college path; a job offer in the same city where my parents had met was coincidental. It was also unplanned that I had ended up with a BS in advertising from UT Austin. I had started out at my dad’s alma mater intent on going to his same law school, but my sophomore year, I took an Introduction to Advertising class just because it would be an easy A. As it turned out, watching my mom develop themes for parties and designing my own Hallmark-style cards had resulted in the skills I needed for mastering copywriting and graphic design. Advertising was apparently in my DNA.

  UT’s advertising program was run by Dr. Leonard Ruben, an original mad man.

  “Concept, people, concept!” Ruben would yell at us. “What is your big idea? Why should I care about your product?”

  Ruben didn’t care what our mock ads looked like. He said it didn’t matter how much you polished something; it could look good, feel good, but every ad concept had to have that intangible thing that separated it from everything else. The big idea.

  Each week Ruben would bark out orders to us, demanding perfectly rendered two-page magazine layouts for a real product. This was twenty years before Apple computers and Adobe software would revolutionize our industry, so we typically had three days laboring with markers and layout paper to dazzle him. By the time I had been in the program a year, I forgot all about my law degree and my dad’s approval.

  I wanted Dr. Ruben’s approval.

  On the mornings that assignments were due, we would file into the classroom and pin our layouts to the wall with silver thumbtacks, then wait for the Ad God to arrive. Gruff, bearded, and chain-smoking, Dr. Ruben would study our layouts one by one, slowly drawing in smoke and exhaling an impossibly long time later. For projects that were simply bad, he would slowly shake his head and rip a page from the wall. But for those layouts that completely lacked the crucial big idea, he carefully touched his cigarette to the edge of the paper and watched with satisfaction as the assignment disappeared into ash.

  In the early days of the program it happened to me over and over.

  “Where’s the concept, Green?” he would bellow.

  Slowly I got it. We all did. And job offers waited at the end of this pilgrimage—mine in Charlotte.

  In those days this southern city had a Mayberry feel—it seemed everyone knew each other and said Hey! In the beginning when strangers were friendly, I assumed they knew my parents. Then I realized it was just what people in the South did. Warm didn’t just describe the weather; it characterized the way of life. People genuinely cared about talking to each other.

  In 1985, a little more than three hundred thousand people lived within the Charlotte city limits, but it was already becoming a financial center that would grow to 2.5 million people in the metro region a decade into the twenty-first century. The same reasons I was attracted to Charlotte were drawing thousands of others: jobs, low cost of living, good quality of life. Unlike my advertising-school friends who shared cramped walk-up apartments in New York City, I could rent a brand-new one-bedroom apartment in a complex with a swimming pool. A ten-minute commute along tree-lined streets brought me into a laid-back downtown that consisted of a few dozen towers.

  Starting my job, I was in heaven. It was everything Dr. Ruben’s stories had promised—photo shoots, filming with TV crews, deadlines, and brainstorming. I felt glamorous at twenty-one with my own client roster and the responsibility to create regional and national campaigns.

  Three months into my new career, I had barely looked up from my layouts. I knew only a few people in Charlotte, and my one friend was the boss’s daughter, who worked in the marketing department. She invited me to a party but I declined, citing a client deadline. It was ten o’clock on a Thursday night, and I was still hunched over my drafting table when it hit me: I really needed to have a little fun.

  By the time I arrived at the backyard party, my resolve to play a little was slipping. As I approached a small white house, the beach music blared, and a mob of friends danced the dance of a happy keg crowd. The yard was filled with strangers who all seemed to be friends from Chapel Hill or Duke. I was a transplanted Texan with no real connection to any of them.

  Searching for the keg to drown my fear, I saw him: one tall figure, three inches above the rest of the crowd, facing sideways—a profile to my stare. Beer in his hand, he seemed part of the crowd but still somehow separate. He turned and caught me staring. I didn’t look away. I wanted him to see me. When he did, I somehow felt as though I recognized him. Like we had always known each other.

  “Beer?”

  As he filled a clear plastic cup for me, I discreetly sized him up.

  He handed me my drink and his lips moved, asking a question. But he was six three to my five three, and I had to stand on my toes to hear him. Somehow, with him leaning over and me stretching up, we talked for two hours, oblivious to the crowd that moved around us.


  It was way past midnight before I remembered the unfinished layout on my drafting table and reluctantly drove home to my apartment, thinking about him all the way.

  I knew little about him except that I wanted to know everything about him. A thought as crazy as the impulse that had sent me to that party would not stop whispering, That’s the guy I am going to marry.

  We had made no plans to see each other, but he mentioned in our awkward shouting conversation that he exercised after work every day at the YMCA.

  The next day after work, I joined the Y.

  Two weeks and fourteen aerobics classes later, I finally saw him again. He crossed in front of my car in the Y parking lot as I was leaving, holding his suit in one hand and his briefcase in the other.

  I slowed down as he moved toward my open window.

  He bent down to look in. “Oh, hey.” A little confusion and then a flicker of recognition. “It’s you!”

  I tried to act casual and aloof. “Yeah! We met at the party, didn’t we?”

  “Yes!” Obvious relief appeared on his face now that he could finally place mine.

  A prolonged, awkward moment passed.

  Finally, he spoke. “You wouldn’t want to have a beer with me, would you?”

  We had a beer, then dinner, then another dinner, and then dinner every night for six weeks straight.

  As crazy as it seemed, after only forty-two days of knowing him, I said yes to Charlie Izard’s proposal, blurted out with no ring over a late-night bottle of wine. We were married within the year. Although I was happier than I had ever been, I also clearly remember a moment of panic at our rehearsal dinner, looking at his friends and family and realizing that they all knew Charlie better than I did.

  five

  A HEART WITH A HOLE

  Making the decision to have a child—it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.

  —Elizabeth Stone1

  I didn’t just love Charlie from first sight; I loved his whole family too. It seemed by moving to North Carolina I had accidently stumbled into the life I was looking for. Charlie came from the type of big, boisterous family I had always envied. He was the middle of five children his mother had delivered in six years. Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy. His parents had been next-door neighbors in Asheville, North Carolina, but because they were eight years apart they didn’t really know one another growing up. They rediscovered each other years later, and their five children eventually became part of a large family on both sides. There were so many cousins, uncles, and aunts that Charlie had to draw a family diagram for me when over fifty of them arrived in El Paso for our wedding.