Post #41 – Women’s Memoirs, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
By Bettyann Schmidt
June 10, 2010
It’s been a year and two months. I feel the gentle, cool breeze of early morning wafting through the windows and see the green trees surrounding our home. The spring and early summer season is, once again, a source of peace and inspiration, like it has always been since I’d moved to my husband’s family farm 21 years ago.
Outside My Window
The farm’s 250 acres are a canvas of varied colors this time of year. The graceful white and pink-edged dogwoods, azaleas arrayed in vivid red, the whimsical yellow of early daffodils.
Surrounding the farm, the deep woods themselves have their own seasonal hues and sounds. Gurgling of the spring and creek, occasional callings of early birds back from migration, the scurry and wisp of a small furred animal. These are some of the blessings of living with nature. Feeling alive and thankful are present more often than not.
This is not the picture of my world a year ago however. The story of my descent into a total enveloping blackness has more to do with writing memoir and scrapbook stories than any I’ve written previously. It’s both a hard one to write and a gratifying one. A story for my own benefit and for others who’ve been where I was, and especially for someone fearing they are going into the dark themselves. I know the journey there. And I know the journey back.
What I learned at a Writer’s Conference
Going back to my mother’s bouts with depression when I was a child, which I’ve posted about previously–writing on the surface only–I now see the relevance this has to my own illness.
I realized this in a startling way at a writer’s conference in spring of 2008. I’d chosen to attend a breakout session on memoir writing led by John Sedgwick, author of the biography/memoir, In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family.
At some point in his presentation, the entire room of listeners, those sitting, standing against the walls, and the ones sitting on the floor in the back, became as one unit, eyes focused in chorus to the man behind the podium. There was not a rustle or breath. Just utter silence except for the man speaking.
I didn’t know if others in the room felt like I did, but it was as if John Sedgwick was telling part of my own story. He spoke of not sleeping for continual nights, pacing the floor and eying a window in his apartment–I can’t remember how many floors up–and thinking about jumping. He’d not eaten a bit of food in the same time span.
I knew this not sleeping and not eating.
When he got to the part where he described himself as “bi-polar,” I felt a chill in a very warm room. “This is what’s wrong with me,” I thought. “I have bi-polar disease.” I couldn’t wait to get home the next day and tell my husband I knew what was wrong with me. I had a diagnosis.
Part of what Sedgwick related about his family was true for me, though there had not been exact “madness” as he spoke of. I did, however, at that point see the link back to my mother. It was, as John Sedgwick wrote, “in my blood.”
BackStory
Realizing that my mental status could be and probably is inherited does not help alter my condition. It explains it. There are other indicators apart from that fact, and that’s the real part of my own story. The part I personally lived through.
My downward spiral began in 1999, when my best friend Barbara noticed my almost constant anger and agitation. I’d been arguing vehemently over minor topics not only with her but with my husband Gary for some time, to the point where I’d finally have an outburst of real rage. My husband was confused, but Barb knew I needed help and one day threatened to drag me into my doctor’s office if I didn’t go voluntarily.
My doctor was at Vanderbilt then, and I worked there as well, so he was easy to see. No excuse.
I love my doctor because of his real capacity to know you, to see what you’re feeling. That morning in his examining room, he did what he always does, rolled the stool he sat on across the tiled floor to me and looked into my eyes. He has this way about him. He is “present” when he is with you.
I told him of my anger and rage that morning, and he said. “You’re depressed.” I answered, “I’m not depressed; I’m angry.” He repeated, “You are depressed.” He then went on to explain clinical depression, and together we went over the events of the last several years.
My youngest son was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and we lived two years in and out of the hospital, going through first the surgery, then the chemo, radiation, and then more chemo. During Jeff’s last round of chemo, my oldest daughter Sherry, who has lupus, had gone into a severe relapse and required frequent trips to the hospital. I managed to get the appointments for Sherry and Jeff on the same days and took both of them, along with my two young grandchildren.
The hardest parts were that Sherry lived in another county, so there was a lot of driving. Second, the grandchildren were preschool and got bored, tired and hungry. Third, Jeff sometimes was weak and had to be carried. Though he was small because of Down syndrome, he was nine at the time and a heavy load. Lastly, sometimes on the long drive home, Sherry would get sick. One time in particular I had to take her to the emergency room of another hospital halfway between Nashville and her home. These were hard times.
My doctor pointed out that I’d gotten through the extreme hardships, doing everything required of me. No whining, no breakdowns. I remained strong through it all.
One of my sisters once said to me, “You’re the strong one. You get through everything just fine.” Now I see that such a statement can be a sure tip-off that lurking inside where no one can see it lives a waiting monster. People with my disease sometimes try hard to cover weakness, not showing our true emotions. And sometimes it’s because we’ve learned over time that we “have” to be strong.
For instance, when one’s mother needs to be taken care of while Daddy is at work and watch the little siblings. I don’t remember all the details of those times, but I distinctly recall one day where Mom continually vomited into a bucket by the side of the bed, and I would empty it in the toilet and rinse it out and return it to her. I remember when she was taken away to the hospital.
I remember thinking when I was a little older that I would never be “weak” like my mother. This came after she woke me in middle of the night, a school night, to stop my father from committing suicide with a handful of pills. I went downstairs, asked for the pills, which he placed in my outstretched hand, and flushed them down the toilet. I then went back to bed and got up for school the next morning, and it was never spoken of again.
I remember thinking, “I bet I’m the only kid in school today who had to stop her dad from killing himself.” Just that matter of fact. That’s how it went in my home. I was 13 at the time.
Fast forward to that day in 1995, where with my doctor’s help I understood that people who shoulder tough responsibilities and get through times others might not be able to as easily can also have depression, that the disease attacks “after” the worst is over and life has moved on. It’s as though your mind says, “It’s time now; you can break down and it’s okay. You’ve done everything you have to do.”
First Ending
I got the prescribed medicine and life got better. I saw the sun again. I lost the need to accuse anyone of causing my unhappiness, or the need to release a savage anger inside. The people around me, especially Barb and Gary, were happy.
The calm before the threatening storm lasted almost nine years. There were warning signs towards the end of that period, but neither I nor anyone else recognized them.
Seven months earlier, I’d heard Sedgwick’s words, his story, and I told my doctor, after which he recommended a psychiatrist because, he said, the drugs for bi-polar disease must be handled with the utmost professional skill. This was not his expertise. I remember Sedgwick talking about the drugs, the trials, the different ones started and stopped.
My doctor was right. But I didn’t see a psychiatrist. I was “waiting.” I thought I’d know when I got serious enough to take that huge step, at least huge to me.
By late 2008, Thanksgiving to be exact, the crisis was growing. I continued to take my antidepressant first prescribed, but I steadily started spiraling down to where I started in 1995. Except this time it went beyond that point, to a level that is hard to come back from. I never even realized it. That’s how insidious this disease is.
This time Barbara wasn’t with me as often. I have another BFF named Debbie who was. She would end up saving my life…and possibly her own as well.
In ScrapMoir #15, Part 2, I’ll tell what happened when the storm cloud erupted, how one comes to feel suicide is an option, what it’s like to be a patient in one of “those” hospitals and how one can live to write about it, and show the scrapbook layout that tells the story for my family that I wish my Mom had left for me. In two weeks.
Bettyann Schmidt
http://journey2f.blogspot.com
memoir writing
memoir vignette
memoir scrapbooking
scrapbooking about depression
