My son is bipolar and schizophrenic, according to at least one of the myriad of doctors who have weighed in on his condition. He is 42. His first "complete psychotic break" was when he was 19.
It has been a long road to this place we are in today. I am going to start from here and tell you about my own "fool's journey" of endeavoring to help, to accept, to cope, to survive... and I hope to tell you, from what can only be my own outsider's view, about his nightmare.
This, the fall, is Chris' most difficult and vulnerable time of year. Historically, he is more likely to "crack up" at the end of October. He has not been what you might call sane or well for a few years now - or even borderline so. Chris lives on a small piece of property, in a small cabin, on a dirt road which is impassible for much of the winter. He has no car. He lives on SSD (I think that is what it is called).
Right now, the only way I can communicate with Chris is by mail. He does have a cell phone which appears to be working but he is afraid of it. He keeps it turned off so that "they" cannot reach him through it and eavesdrop on him and record him or worse. I am not certain the phone is actually currently working because the last I heard from Chris, he said the phone was broken. Saying things are broken is kind of what Chris does. (more on this as my saga unfolds in this and other posts)
Two weeks ago, we received a package from Chris. It had a letter and the software recovery disk for his laptop. The letter said his laptop had crashed (well, it cryptically suggested that) and said maybe we could use the disk on one of our computers. The crash of his computer, if true, is a huge loss, because it contained all his music and his art. Chris was a photographer - a really great photographer - and he took a lot of poignant and insightful pictures. I hope he has them in some other form or perhaps a backup.
The letter in Chris' package included an apology to me for "the words he had used" in our last phone call, when he had called me a whore and a thief, this time raising the amount of money I had "stolen" from him to a number in the trillions. The apology in this letter turned around mid-sentence to justify his actions due to "necessity". Still, that was nice. What mom would not treasure an apology from her son after being called a thief and a whore, eh?
When I got that package from Chris I was ecstatic. He was reaching out to me. He said he had tried to call me - I felt that he was feeling bad about cutting me off and being so harsh -at least on some level, and more importantly, that he was reaching out to me. Luckily, I had been writing him a letter. I added a thank you for the package, an I love you, ten dollars, and sent him the letter.
Chris is very untrusting and resentful. Being resentful is just part of his illness, I believe. So.. even if he is in a good moment and asks me to send him, say, a part for his bike (years ago, now, because he has been far too ill for a while now to do such), by the time the part gets there, his response is likely to be "I told you not to send me things. My back is broken and I cannot carry the weight of every stupid thing you send me." Or... "Don't be sending me things. They see this. You have no idea what I am dealing with. They are watching everything." (He keeps a hat over his electric meter so that they cannot "see him through it". And he keeps his electricity off most of the time for similar reasons. Ah... but I digress).
Knowing how Chris feels about packages, I hesitated to send him a shirt I had bought him for his birthday in June, and a pair of new jeans (things must be new because God only knows, otherwise, where they came from. This is no guarantee, however, of Chris' acceptance, since he is certain that the brand new items we give him are in fact, used, discarded, worn out rejects of one sort or another.)
I felt that Chris was too anti- package to receive these items I had bought him in good grace so I waited. But as fall progressed. and this dire dark time, the end of October approached, I had yet another "great idea" for Chris' comfort and well being. I recently read that coloring can replace meditation and is a great way to feel centered and grounded. I cannot send Chris books - he has forbidden them because they are an attempt, in his eyes, to control him. But a coloring book, I thought, might be defined in a different category, and maybe, just maybe, if he could accept it, and try it, it could give him some level of comfort. So we searched and found a "Kaleidoscope" coloring book which I hoped was not too scary (everything has a hidden dark scariness, it seems) and we bought a set of nice colored pencils. I wrote a letter and in a moment of wild abandon, put the shirt in the package too, thus really pushing the envelope of what Chris might accept.
Even letters can not be too closely spaced because that is an infringement on Chris' privacy. It is a careful dance, this relationship I have with my son, one guided by intuition and love mostly.
I mailed the package on Monday. On Tuesday, the letter I sent two weeks ago came back. It said "Not deliverable as addressed. Can not be forwarded". Well. That was a devastating blow. I called the post office in Chris' town - a VERY small town in Maine. They were closed. It turns out, they close at 4:45. I missed them by three minutes.
Here is the thing. I have no way to explain here how it feels to lose the only way I have to reach my son. To know that any little thing I do or fail to do could result in his surviving or not, in his ultimate recovery, or lack thereof. Yes, I lie awake nights. I wake up fretting. I sit up. I fill my life with flowers and chocolates and little projects. Mostly, I have been only a shell of myself for the past 23 years, the first 7 of which, I spent sleeping, soaking in three hour baths (maybe two or three a day), eating chocolate, reading mindless smut, and crying. I constantly try to pull myself up, dust myself off, forgive myself for every little way I failed my son (and my other children) and for every way I continue to fail him - for not being there, for not doing more, for not trying to bring him here, for not FIXING this, God damn it!
Sometimes I talk to support people from support organizations. Last year a man from one of those recommended we read a book called "I'm not Sick, I don't need help". We read that and I "realized" that everything I had been doing was the wrong thing. So I spent one entire year going by the book. Well, that did not turn out as expected. Heh. Now that is added to my list of ways I failed my son - "going by that 'stupid' book". Yeah, there is some truth in everything. Many many people have told me the answer - what I should do. What I should not do. That it is my fault. That it is not my fault.
You know, being the mom of an insane person is like being a rape victim in a way. People assure you it is not your fault, and yet, even your nearest and dearest believe in their hearts that it is. They talk about you behind your back and that news trickles back to you in very hurtful ways. They shun you. You see it in their eyes. You know too, in your own heart, that you failed in so very many ways, to be the perfect mom - falling far short of June Cleaver some days and treading way too close in her tracks on others.. what I mean is, failing to just follow your heart and be truly loving and never egotistical or emotional or angry or selfish.... failing to offer enough love and acceptance. Failing to recognize the Oh, my god, so obvious in retrospect signs....
Ah... yes, back to Chris. On Wednesday, I called Chris' post office trying to find out 1) if his box was still active and 2) if they might allow me to reinstate it if needed. They said they were not allowed to give out info on anyone's box. Then they did: It is still active. I said a letter had been returned. The woman said "Not to be rude ma'am, and please don't take this the wrong way... but was it illegible? I mean, was the address difficult to read?".
Yes, as a matter of fact it was. I was anxious when I got Chris' package two weeks ago, to get that letter out to him in that day's mail, so I hurriedly addressed it and got it into the outgoing mail. I printed the address (not longhand) and it was mainly very clear, but when I wrote the 5 in his post office box number, the top horizontal line did not quite touch the rest of the 5 because my pen failed to lay ink for a fraction of a tiny increment. Therefore, anyone who took half a second to think about it would realize that was a 5 and yet it was not a perfect 5. Again, Chris lives in a VERY small town and the post office is a tiny, tiny building. He has had the same address for 10 years. His name was very clearly written on the envelope. Everything was correct, except the 5 (which could only be read as a 5, whether perfect or not) was a tad sloppy.
Chris has complained to me many times that he has big issues with the post office. That they send his mail back and he does not get it. And that this has caused him a lot of problems, such as not getting money in time to pay his bills on time. I have always thought this was mostly his paranoia speaking, altho I have seen post office workers play power trips when uncalled for at times, just as people tend to do in any position of authority when bored or resentful. My husband calls this "DMV syndrome".
I wonder if my son is ok. Now I realize that the hours I comforted myself during the past two weeks, "knowing" that at least he would have received that letter with my love and unspoken forgiveness for calling me a thief and a whore, with my little thoughts and endeavors to reach out to him... that all that self comfort was unmerited and that once again, he was on his own.
We went and watched The Martian recently. Once again, millions of dollars and a massive effort was spent to "save" Matt Damon. It blows my mind how we, us humans, honor and cherish a few heroes, real or imagined, such as sports stars... fictional characters... etc., and yet, we turn away in disgust and horror from everyday people who are lost... lost not on Mars, but 'on the Bizarro Planet'.
Obviously, the woman I spoke with at the post office knew my letter had been returned because of that sloppy number 5. I imagine there are less than 500 PO boxes in that town. My son has a very distinctive name, and has had the same box number, as I mentioned, for ten years. Was the decision to return my letter at all influenced by knowing who my son was? By scorn and disgust because he is mentally ill? By mistaking his distrust and resentment for just being an asshole and not understanding that he is ill? Was it a decision made out of being unaware of just how important one letter can be - of how a person's entire life could hang in the receiving of that one missive?
I don't know. Yeah. It's another lonely, tearful day here. Wonder how my son is doing.
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