All the while I felt like I was being swallowed by quicksand. I had to make sure my younger siblings had dinner, that the food didn’t erupt in flames because Mom left it unattended to send dozens of emails to strangers in Sweden about investing in her computer business. I had to argue with my mother when she decided Resident Evil—the game we played together as a family for years—was demonic and needed to be removed from the house so our family could heal. I had to go to school every day and pretend that I was happy and whole and got more than three hours of sleep.
Unlike our father, I couldn’t just drive off and stay away until eleven at night, pretending Mom didn’t exist. As soon as I got home from school, I had to endure every minute of her illness along with her. I have no idea where my father went all those hours, all those days. He didn’t have a job half the time, he didn’t volunteer anywhere, he didn’t bring home friends. All I knew was he was gone and we were alone and I hated him for it. I hated my mother, too—for scaring Dad away, for staying with him, for reminding me that a calm house was a privilege.
I hated her being bipolar most of all.
Just before Mom’s brain was firing too fast to let her sleep, before her repressed anger could boil over and burn everyone around her, there was a period that all of us loved. We loved it so much we refused to admit it was connected to her bipolar disorder. For the days or weeks she inhabited that liminal space it was as though she had complete control of the best parts of her personality. She was charming, funny, excited. A current of electricity ran through her, lighting her eyes and words. When she was like this we couldn’t help ourselves; we twisted ourselves over and around one another like weeds to capture the warmth of her full attention. We’d gather around, waiting for her to do a goofy dance, or buy a tub of ice cream so we could make sundaes, or watch the Mortal Kombat movie with us again, leaping up to show us kung fu during the fight scenes. She was more fun than any other mom we’d ever known.
Six months from now, she’d say, we’re going to be rich, and then she’d buy us everything we’d ever wanted: art supplies, a canopy bed, a whole new wardrobe, a mansion with an indoor swimming pool and big-screen TVs in every room, a Jacuzzi hot tub, a complete set of holographic Pokémon cards. Even our dad couldn’t resist the fairy tale. He’d listen, rapt, as she laid out the latest business plan or pyramid scheme she was sure would get us rich quick. All it would cost is an initial investment of $299.99, which we’d make back within a month. She’d sit at the computer, her fingers tapping out possibilities on the keyboard, her eyes darting, searching for the best opportunity a banner ad could sell. She’d stay up late, get up early, her face constantly awash in the blue glow of the monitor. Then she’d become obsessed, easily irritated, her laughter skittering to a stop and her jokes morphing to sharp chastisements whenever we interrupted her. That was about the time the fun part of her mania seamlessly transformed into the difficult part.
Just before that, though, if you were to tell us that the excitement and energy we loved so much were part of Mom’s mania, that her hard work and hustle were at their height when she was manic, that she was at her most hilarious, fun and focused then, we’d probably say her bipolar was awesome, too. It was always awesome until it wasn’t.
As a child, and even as a teen, when my father told me the signs that my mother’s mental health was deteriorating, I believed him. I believed that identifying these signs, collecting them like baseball cards, and shoving them before her face to stare at when she was at her most argumentative—or most depressed—was being a good partner. I believed that forcing her into a car, turning on the child locks so she couldn’t jump out and shuttling her over the border, where New York laws would allow her to be involuntarily admitted to the mental hospital, was the only way to support a mentally ill person.
I began to question these assumptions when I grew up, primarily because I became the partner of a person with severe clinical depression. Mike had a rough time with his depression in university and barely finished his classes. He would cry in bed almost every day the last year of school, saying awful, untrue things about himself, often wanting to hurt himself, even kill himself. I had no idea what to do. My experience with my mother hadn’t prepared me for this. I only knew how my father would approach the situation: forced hospitalization and medication. But I also remembered how traumatized my mother was by those hospitalizations; I remembered when she couldn’t recall simple words because her medication interfered with her brain too badly, how she’d eventually erupt in frustrated tears. I didn’t want those things for Mike. I didn’t want them for her, either. Instead of getting cops or doctors involved, I tried to talk Mike through his depression, countering the negative self-talk in his head with all the evidence his depressed brain wouldn’t let him see. You’re not a bad person. You’re not a burden. You are not your depression. I looked up how to talk to suicidal people, learned the crucial difference between passive thoughts of dying, thoughts of suicide and active plans for suicide. Somehow, despite my fumbled attempts to support him, Mike managed to pull himself out of the depression—and somehow I managed to convince myself that his depression was a one-time thing.
When it came back every year or so over the next ten years, it would hit with the force of a fighter jet. I tried to find ways to help. I read books about supporting depressed partners. I persuaded Mike to go to a therapist. I supported him when he and the therapist decided their four sessions were all he needed. I convinced him to go on medication. I supported him when he insisted on taking himself off medication to save our family money. I didn’t always agree with his decisions, but they were his decisions to make. I didn’t want him to feel as though my opinions on his treatment mattered more than his, the way my father had with my mother. I kept wondering what would have happened if my dad had talked to my mom about her experiences, consulted with her about her treatment, let her have some autonomy over what happened to her body and mind. Would she have accepted that she had bipolar disorder years ago? Gone through the long, gruelling process of figuring out a treatment plan and support system that allowed her to have a more stable life? Or would everything be exactly the same, with Mom still struggling to admit her diagnosis today?
Here’s the thing: despite criticizing my mother for not admitting her mental illness, and despite assuring my husband that depression was nothing to be ashamed of, it took me until I was twenty-six to admit that I had severe depression and anxiety. I didn’t want to admit that the creeping ivy of my mother’s genetics had taken hold in my mind, climbing its walls, obscuring every good part of my life. I saw the way Mom was treated by police, doctors, nurses, cashiers, total strangers and family members. They could all tell that there was something different about her; they would look at her with a mixture of fear and revulsion, as if she were a rabid dog. I didn’t want to be looked at and dehumanized that way. I was terrified that if I admitted my problems to myself, every person who thought of me as strong, put-together and fearless would see my mental illness peeking out from behind my eyes and turn on me, the way everyone had eventually turned on my mom. History would repeat itself through me.
I had always asked Mom, Why can’t you admit there’s something wrong with you? Now I knew. With Mike’s unending love and support, I eventually admitted my mental health issues. Still, it took another four years for me to work up the nerve to ask my doctor for medication, and another six months after that for me to realize that I should probably take it every day as prescribed. There was another question I’d always asked Mom: Why can’t you just take your meds? I knew that now, too.
Just before I decided to go back on my medication, I cried every day. You’re not a bad person. You’re not a burden. You are not your depression, I told myself, repeating the words I used to say to Mike until they tasted like ash on my tongue. I didn’t believe any of them. I couldn’t. The depression made that impossible.
It’s easy to tell a person who has a physical illness that they are not their cold, or their
diabetes, or their stroke. Their illness is something that happens to them, affects their life—sometimes in incredibly difficult ways—but it still isn’t them. It’s harder to make that distinction when you have a mental illness that completely changes the way you express your personality, the way you interact with others, the way you see the world. Where do you end and where does your sickness begin?
* * *
When I was at a writing residency a few years ago, I read from a piece that took my experience of depression and heavily fictionalized it, turning the worst experience of my life into what I hoped was art. One of the mentors of the program approached me afterwards, expressing how much she could relate to the narrator’s hatred of her good, loving husband because she’d felt the same way about a really great person she’d once dated. I explained to her that wasn’t what was going on, that my narrator didn’t hate her husband at all, that her undiagnosed depression was convincing her that she did. The mentor gave me a blank look and claimed she didn’t understand. I tried again, telling her the narrator’s emotions were based on how I felt about myself when I was depressed. I would dwell on everything wrong with me, telling myself that I was unlovable, that I was better off dead. But I didn’t actually feel that way most of the time. Depression had slid over my eyes like a lens, tinting everything I saw, thought and experienced until I no longer remembered what life was like before.
“I still don’t get it. How do you know what’s you and what’s the depression?”
Nothing I said would make her understand. She clearly hadn’t experienced the sort of depression I had, so anything I said would be theoretical to her, a thought exercise instead of a devastating, ongoing lived experience. Often, deep in my sickness, I’d wonder whether depression was my natural state. Maybe there was no point to anything, and all the things I could possibly do or experience were just a series of shallow attempts to distract myself from the bottomless void of life. That very well could be true, but having known the depths of depression intimately meant that I would no longer be tactless enough to ask a person with mental health issues a question like that. It meant I would have empathy for others with depression, that I wouldn’t call those who lost their battle with depression “cowards” or “selfish” or “assholes” for committing suicide. It also meant I would appreciate being healthy much more than if I’d never been depressed.
“You don’t know what’s you and what’s the depression when you’re still depressed,” I finally answered. “That’s why it sucks so much.”
X-Men character Jean Grey has an evil alter ego named Dark Phoenix. Dark Phoenix is unbridled power, a god that cares for nothing and no one, being channelled through the compassionate, heroic Jean Grey. Once she is Jean Grey again, and has to deal with the consequences of her actions as Dark Phoenix, she is grief-ridden. Her friends try to tell her it wasn’t her who did those things, it was the Phoenix, but Jean Grey realizes that even though she and Phoenix are separate, they’re bound together. One cannot exist without the other, and so long as Jean Grey lives, Dark Phoenix will eventually manifest. Eventually Jean Grey volunteers to be killed so Dark Phoenix can never take control of her again.
It seems to me my mother is often at the mercy of her sickness, waiting for her own Dark Phoenix to take hold. So is Mike. So am I. And though I try to mentally split my mother in two, to make her “Normal” or “Bipolar,” she isn’t. She deserves a fuller range of adjectives and acknowledgements than that. I may not understand her with the conviction I feel I understand a good literary character, or have perfect bouquets of flowery memories unmarred by pain, but I do think I know her. Distance may make the picture fuzzy, but it always does. Crude collaging may, indeed, be the only way to reassemble her person and our past. But really, is that any different than what we do with anyone? Sculpt people into the archetypes we prefer to imagine instead of the people they are? Isn’t that why it offends us so much when those we love do something that makes no sense to us, even when to them it’s an obvious and perhaps inevitable choice?
It’s hard to let go of control, to stop trying to be the architect of not only our own lives but the lives of the people around us as we single-mindedly work towards our own flawed constructions of “perfection.” Once we do, though, we might actually be able to recognize the beauty we’ve missed. Witness the glimpses of unplanned perfection that have been there all along, perhaps hidden in the few rushed lines of a Facebook message, or in an unasked-for Catechism bought and mailed after months of scrimping and saving, or in the eyes of a mother whose life may have never been easy but whose love has always, always prevailed, ensuring her daughter would prevail, too.
NOT YOUR NOBLE SAVAGE
have a confession to make: I’ve never danced in a powwow. Not unless you count awkward shuffle steps self-consciously made during intertribal dances, which no one should. “Intertribals” are when the MC invites all onlookers—regardless of experience—out of the bleachers and into the arena to dance. They’re basically the powwow equivalent of having a karaoke break during a concert. Why would anyone want to see the rhythmically challenged when they can watch professionals? They don’t. It’s a nice gesture, but ultimately an embarrassing affair all around.
Despite my lineage and fervent passion for long braids, I am most definitely not a professional dancer. This is distressing news, I know. After all, what kind of Indian woman can’t dance to drums to please the colonial eye? Believe me when I say this was not the way I wanted it. My cousins were entered in the Grand River Champion of Champions Pow Wow every year. I’d watch them sweating in their regalia, so painstakingly beaded by my aunt, a dull envy swirling in my gut. The moment they left their outfits unattended, I’d appear as if summoned by dark magic to surreptitiously run my fingers over the raised, precise beadwork and velvet inlays, the feathers and bells. This was being Indian, I’d thought. It had a certain amount of pageantry to it; it was showy and fun. And judging by the number of newly bought dreamcatchers proudly hanging from their rear-view mirrors, non-Native Canadians seemed to agree.
So imagine my surprise when, in 2006, during the land reclamation in Caledonia, Ontario, the same Canadians who came to see my family members dance every year started screaming obscenities at us from their minivans, their dreamcatchers gently blowing in the wind as they passed our occupation at Kahnestaton. They couldn’t hurl empty coffee cups or racial slurs fast enough. Our treaties didn’t matter, nor did our concerns. Apparently, we were to be tolerated only in a very specific context. We could entertain them every summer and pose in photos with their children, sure, but attempting to assert sovereignty over our lands elicited moral outrage on par with drowning kittens. Maybe if we’d worn powwow dresses and brought a drumming group, they’d have been more receptive.
This seems to be Canada’s preferred image of Indigenous peoples. Not the modern Native girl in a sweatshirt and jeans trying to figure out how she fits in “Reconciliation© Canada.” No. They want the “genuine artifact”: the stoic Indian man decked out in beads and leather, who has not one ounce of white blood because that would taint his authenticity. He’s managed to dodge assimilationist policies the way superheroes dodge bullets. Preferably, he’s just stepped out of a DeLorean into 2017 immediately after learning that charming stilted English so clearly realized by Johnny Depp’s Tonto. (Although, as recent events have shown, should the genuine artifact be unavailable, Canada will happily accept a handsome, agreeable white dude with tenuous Indigenous “roots” as a substitute.)
Settlers prefer this stereotypical, impossible image because it means they can outsource their guilt. Instead of actually dealing with the consequences of historical genocidal policies—policies that are still in place—they can pretend that assimilation settled over our people like a gentle fog. It was entirely natural; no one is to blame. Certainly not them. They like Indians. They named a few sports teams after them, after all. They also read The Orenda and it, like, changed their lives. But these same settlers will not listen
to the voices of real-life Indigenous people and, further, seem unable to realize that by expecting us to be their Ideal Indian Caricatures, they’re adding another layer of colonial trauma to our already overburdened peoples.
Within the past few decades, there’s been a surge of Indigenous voices in the literary community writing against these harmful histories and images: Lee Maracle, Eden Robinson, Thomas King, Richard Wagamese, Tracey Lindberg, Katherena Vermette and Tomson Highway. Yet even those successful writers have been subject to what I’ll call “literary colonialism”: insidious criticisms—almost always from non-Indigenous people—that not only reflect but reinforce troubling attitudes of colonial ownership over Indigenous people within the literary community. These include policing what Native writers can write about, and even whether they count as Native at all. Like those powwow spectators throwing garbage out of their minivans, those enforcing literary colonialism want us to stick to our script.
This kind of criticism is nothing new, of course. When Margaret Atwood wrote her foundational work on Canadian literature, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, she happened to leave a considerable hole in her literary account of the country: she didn’t reference a single Native author. Considering her book posited that Canadian literature consisted of different types of “victims” surviving their circumstances, and the Canadian body politic has victimized Indigenous peoples since before Confederation, this omission is particularly ironic. It should be noted, however, that there was a chapter that examined non-Native writers’ fictive portrayals of Indigenous peoples, rather tellingly entitled “First People: Indians and Eskimos as Symbols.” In her essay “A Double-Bladed Knife: Subversive Laughter in Two Stories by Thomas King,” Atwood excuses her exclusion, saying she simply couldn’t find any Native writing. One questions her due diligence when she follows up her semi-apology with this rather ridiculous contradiction: “Why did I overlook Pauline Johnson? Perhaps because, being half-white, she somehow didn’t rate as the real thing, even among Natives; although she is undergoing reclamation today.”
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Page 13
