The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

by Penelope Rowe

  Mum was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. My sisters and I would visit her most afternoons after school. Often the three of us would end up sitting in the waiting room while the doctor spoke to Mum. He never explained anything to us. I didn’t mind—we were too busy exploring this room, which had one wall entirely covered with the photo of an enormous red oak tree. There was also a drink-vending machine against another wall. The three of us would look at the soft drinks and lollies and wish someone would buy us something. We didn’t want to pester Mum to give us money. Harriet would look hopefully at some of the other visitors, but they were too absorbed in their own worries to notice. Sometimes we’d sneak into the games room and check out the patients playing at the pool table.

  Mum would find us in one of these rooms and then take us to dinner at the hospital cafeteria. What an adventure! This was the first time I could choose what I wanted to eat in a restaurant. I quickly forgot about the junk in the vending machine downstairs. I loved sliding the tray along, picking up flavoured milk and plastic-wrapped sandwiches. I couldn’t help but stare at the very skinny girls who weren’t allowed to join us in the food queue. Mum explained they weren’t allowed to choose their dinner because they had to eat special meals.

  The novelty of getting public transport and the cafeteria dinners started to wear off after a while. I was missing Mum and I was ready for us all to go home. Mum tried to explain that she wasn’t coping very well, and the doctors were trying to help her get better. But I found that hard to understand. To me, she seemed the same. She just looked tired and pale and got snappy with us if we danced around her hospital room and made too much noise. At the time, I had no idea how much Mum’s illness would impact on our lives. I just wanted life to return to normal.

  Penelope: I had made important changes in my life in the months before that first admission, but sadly for the children it would be a long time before life actually returned to normal. I had applied for a job as the state office manager for a large company. This was the ‘working mother’ compartment of my life, though nothing had changed inside me. I needed something more permanent than taking guided tours but nevertheless wanted a job that would not be too demanding of my energy, as I knew I was still very unstable.

  It began rather bizarrely. I was summoned for an interview and quickly went into my organised, responsible mode. I had about an hour to spare before the interview. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen our little black cat for a day or so. My heart sank. She never missed her mealtimes. I called and called and then, dressed in my best interview garb and lucky underpants, I walked down the back lane. An old bloke was pulling a car engine apart.

  ‘Have you seen a little black cat?’

  ‘Little black cat? No, there’s a big dead one over there.’ Indeed there was. She was lying stiff and bloody in the grass.

  ‘If I get a bag will you help me put her in?’ He agreed and while I held the green plastic bag open he stuffed the cat awkwardly in.

  ‘You’ve just missed the garbos,’ he said. I couldn’t bear to think of the cat sitting in my garbage bin for another four days. Time was running out. I had to leave for the interview. I decided that I’d put her in the boot and when I saw a council bin, I’d dump her.

  It was an encouraging interview. The man from head office, a kindly, fatherly type, told me he was not far off retirement. I left feeling optimistic and hopeful. All thoughts of the dead cat vanished from my mind. I didn’t remember her until that evening when the phone rang and I was asked to come in for another interview the following morning. Then I remembered that I had a dead cat in the boot.

  I set out early the next day, absolutely certain I could smell a dreadful smell. Would I be contaminated? Would I smell like Penelope & Jessica Rowe dead cat at the interview? Apparently not. I was offered the job and grabbed it. Now I could apply my mind to the cat. I needed petrol so I pulled into a garage and the young bloke who came to fill the tank seemed friendly enough.

  ‘Something dreadful has happened,’ I said. ‘Someone has put a dead cat in my boot.’

  ‘Jeez.’

  ‘What will I do?’

  ‘Tell you what. Don’t let the boss see you. There’s a bin round the back beside the toilets. Just move the car round and dump it.’Which I did.

  Later I told another fib, this time to the girls. I explained that the cat was dead and I had buried her ‘near a beautiful park in Lane Cove’. They were not so upset about the cat, but they were furious at me for leaving the Opera House. ‘It was SO good.’

  For three months it all went well. The job was not difficult. A modicum of self-esteem returned, although trying to work full-time and be a ‘proper’ mother was exhausting. I had by this time been seeing a counsellor from the Family and Marriage Guidance Bureau for about six months. Delicately but very firmly, she was trying to get me out of the habit of blaming. I had so many people to blame.

  ‘Yes,’ she would say,‘but what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘It’s them that should do something.’

  ‘You can’t make people do things just because you want them to.You can’t control what happens but you can always have control over how you react.’

  It took me a long time to learn and accept that philosophy, and truly, it has been one of the most important lessons of my life. I’ve drilled it into the girls. They got used to me saying, ‘You always have a choice. You can always choose how you react.’ Like me, they didn’t always want to accept it, but I believe they have now incorporated it into their lives, too.

  Sometimes this wise, patient and perceptive woman asked me whether I thought I needed more professional help. The thought of psychiatry or a psychiatrist scared me witless. Weren’t they just for really crazy people? I think she recognised I was in serious trouble but knew the lifeline she offered me was better than nothing until I was ready to accept the next step. So we struggled on. One day she said to me:‘I think we need to make a contract.You won’t do anything foolish without telling me first. Agreed?’ I agreed.

  It was school holidays. The children were spending time with their father, I woke with a raw throat. It was years since I had had such a vicious attack, and I knew I had no hope of going to work. For two days I alternately shook and sweated with flu. At one stage I was awakened by a fireman putting his head in the bedroom window and announcing: ‘The fire’s out.’ I thought I was dreaming but there had actually been a fire down in the backyard, against the fence.

  As the children were away, I had no proper food supplies in the house. I drank tea and ate soft bread and felt myself retreating from reality in the silence and stillness that filled the house. I started to think I would starve to death through lack of food or company if I remained alone any longer, so the next day I forced myself to get up, shower, dress and go to work.

  My chest wheezed and I coughed convulsively as I drove to work and tried to catch up on all the jobs that had accumulated. I was alone in the office, as all the reps were out on the road. Suddenly, out of the blue, panic started to build in me, growing ever stronger. I tried to control it but it became worse and worse, a full-blown panic attack—the first I had ever experienced. Finally I couldn’t take it any more. I jumped up, grabbed my keys, switched off the lights, locked the door and ran to the old car that I now owned. I started it with a jarring of gears and backed it wildly and carelessly out of the carpark. My heart was pounding and there was a roaring in my ears. I half expected blood to come streaming from them. What was I doing? Where could I go? I drove over the Harbour Bridge and, to my horror, thought that the car would not fit between the side stanchions and the pylons. I was swerving, certain the car and I would be squashed. I put my foot on the brake and stopped, opened the door and went to get out. I would have to leave the car there and run. But cars were banked up behind me hooting and I climbed back in and crawled at about 15 kilometres an hour to the off-ramp.

  When I got to Macquarie Street, I was unable to progress. The traffic seeme
d to have sped up to a dangerous level like a video on fast-forward and I was terrified. I pulled into a carpark and sat with my head on the steering wheel, holding on tight to stop my shaking hands. After a while—I have no idea how long—I decided to go to a film. Movies had proved to be good distractions in the past. I left the car and walked into a cinema that was showing Four Seasons. But after about twenty minutes the panic came back. I couldn’t sit there; I had to get back to the safety of my car. I remember running through the city streets, gasping and sobbing as I went:‘I’m going. I’m going. No more. I give up. I abdicate. Someone else can take over. But there is nobody. I don’t care. I’m done.’

  It was hard to drive and I couldn’t control my tears. A little edge of sanity crept into my crazed mind. I had made a contract. I had to keep it. I drove to Bondi Junction and pressed the bell of the counsellor’s office. The woman who opened the door told me my counsellor was not there that day but insisted I come in. She obviously saw that something was very wrong.

  ‘Would you like me to ring her?’ I nodded and stood facing the wall with my forehead leaning against the dull green paint. When she had been contacted the woman handed me the phone.

  ‘I came because of the contract,’ I sobbed.

  ‘Okay. What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve given up.’

  ‘Do you want to go to hospital?’

  ‘Yes.’ I remember feeling deathly tired.

  ‘Wait there. I will come for you.’ I hung up and walked to the small kitchen.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ I nodded but could not bear to sit down. I was restless, jittery. Suddenly I turned and fled. Terrified. Hospital. Drugs. Electric shocks. And the cost. Whatever was I thinking? I heard the woman calling after me. I averted my face and drove away home. Why did I flee? I don’t know. I felt like a small furry animal being pursued by raptors that were hovering, waiting to pounce. I was in a maze and running insanely around, unable to find shelter or escape. Help! Help me!

  The phone was ringing as I came into the house. I grabbed it and the lifeline it offered.

  ‘Why did you not wait?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If you will wait there. I will come for you. It will take a little time to arrange the hospital. Will you wait?’

  ‘Yes.’ I was exhausted. Finished. Now I would hand over.

  Shortly she arrived, an ageing, dumpy, real woman, nonjudgmental, sensible, calm, caring. I was sitting on a chair in the kitchen as she came through the open front door.

  ‘What’ll I bring?’

  ‘Maybe your night things.’ I took a toothbrush, put it in my handbag and stood up.

  ‘I’m ready.’

  Her husband was waiting out in the car. I sat in the back and we drove away. I remember that trip so well. I could feel my face was wet but I didn’t know I was crying. From time to time she slid her hand back and took mine, giving it a squeeze. I stared out through the window, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. I was on the ice floe from my childhood. I was too far out and it was creaking and groaning, breaking up all around me. This was the end of me.

  The reason I remember that first evening in hospital so well is that I wrote it all down a few days later in one of the little notebooks in which I was always scribbling. I asked the nursing sister all the usual questions that, I’ve found, all newcomers seem to ask.

  ‘Can I leave whenever I want?’

  ‘Yes. We can’t make you stay but we might advise you to.’

  ‘What about shocks? Is someone going to give me electric shocks?’

  ‘They all ask that. No. And if we felt you needed ECT we would have to have your permission in writing. You’ll find we’re very civilised, you know.’ She left and returned with some pills. I was suspicious, irritable, afraid.

  ‘They’ll help calm you down and give you a good night’s sleep.You need that. Some TLC and R&R.’

  I took off my clothes and climbed into bed in my underpants, pulling the covers up over my head. I was anonymous. No one knew where I was. That would have to be handled tomorrow. Obliterate. Obliteration. Obliterated. To obliterate. You are obliterated. Obliterate her. The words coursed through my head like a mantra then and for months later. It was the ‘exact’ word for what I felt had happened, was happening, for what I wanted to happen. Depression is the absence of all feelings. That was what obliteration meant.

  The hours passed, but I could not sleep. My muscles cramped with the tension of my body. I dressed myself and wandered down the hall to the nurses’ station.

  ‘I’m still awake.’

  ‘I’ll get you your second dose.’

  I returned to bed. The night seemed to become feathery, my body weightless, time and anxiety became as nothing. I floated, conscious but uncaring, unfeeling, until the huge pepper tree, with sudden eddies of wind, shook the dawn into my window.

  Thursday, 17th. I feel as if I’m sitting in a bucket in a well, deep deep down. I can see the hideous black sludge of mud and I’m about to tip into it. It is dark down here and getting darker. I can barely see the top, just a pinpoint of light. I can tip the bucket and fall into nothingness or I can start hauling on the rope and edge upwards. But the strain is too great. Will I ever get up?

  Saturday, 19th. Ambivalent about the children. So lovely to see them but unable to rouse myself to enthusiasm. Guilt as they were leaving—they have no right to be treated the way I am treating them. Feel dark and dreary and fearful. I urgently need to get better. But, the effort. The doctor told me this morning:‘You are sicker than you want to believe you are. You are suffering a severe depression. By rights you should have cracked up years ago.’ Sunday, 20th. Not a good day. Here is like being in a jet plane.Neither here nor there. Suspended, anxious, tantalised, knowing there is something, an end, but not knowing where or what that end is. The anxiety is like nothing, nothingness, nowhere, no place, no knowing. NO KNOWING. Is the end just beginning or the beginning just ending?

  How appalled I would have been to know that the beginning was just ending.

  I was in hospital for three weeks. It was decided after daily consultations with a psychiatrist that I had what he described at that time as a ‘mixed depression’. I was still grieving my marriage in a pathological way and grieving my relationship with my parents, but I was also clinically depressed. Something was out of sync in the brain. The medication would help get that right and things would then seem more reasonable and easier to deal with. Was I prepared to do some cognitive-behavioural work as well? I was—anything that might help. It was arranged that I would continue this as an outpatient for as long as it took. I felt that my life was like a castle composed of a million matchsticks that now lay scattered all over the floor. My task was to rebuild my castle in a different style, matchstick by matchstick, but looking at them all, the task seemed almost insurmountable.

  I felt, however, tremendous relief to finally have an explanation for my unrelenting mood misery. It meant that my bizarre behaviour was not all my fault, that it could be helped and I could lead a normal life again. My own ignorance of the existence of clinical depression was woeful. I was determined to find out more about it when I was better.

  The children had been staying with their father over this period although they made the trek out to the hospital most afternoons to visit me. That meant a bus, a train and a long walk along a busy highway. They were all still in primary school and Jessica was responsible for shepherding them along.

  Tuesday. Feel so guilty. I just couldn’t respond to the children. I really wanted them to go. Jessica said,‘We’re sorry for hassling you,Mummy.’Oh, my God. What am I doing to them?

  One evening, the girls were sitting with me waiting for their father to pick them up as he did when he came by from work. We waited and waited and I was exhausted with the effort of trying to appear caring. I wanted them to stop talking, stop fidgeting, stop making me feel so guilty and such a useless mother. Finally I knew something was wrong and
made my way to the hall phone to ring his office. Luckily there was someone there, working back, but she was reluctant to tell me what was going on. I shouted down the phone at her, demanding to know, saying the children were stuck with me and had to be collected. Finally she told me that he was in the hyperbaric chamber at Balmoral Naval Base with the bends! He’d been scuba diving the day before. I remember my reaction. The world had become surreal. With great difficulty I managed to contact the base. He was okay but had to spend a few more hours there. He would contact a member of his family to come and collect the girls. It was so bizarre that I felt crazy laughter welling up. Finally the girls were whisked away. I found out later that a family member consulted a solicitor with a view to taking over control of the children. I suppose we did look like unfit parents!

  A day or two of medication will not see much change in someone suffering from depression. It might take up to two weeks or longer to kick in, and this is unbearably long for someone so wretchedly ill. Twenty years ago the main medications were the tricyclic antidepressants. They had horrible side-effects compared with what is used now—dry mouth, blurred vision, incontinence, the shakes, poor coordination, constipation, loss of libido, all to a greater or lesser degree. Some trycyclics have given me terrifying nightmares, nightmares in which all the senses are involved—seeing bloated corpses, tasting faeces, smelling the stench of decay, hearing screams, touching slippery, slimy fungus-covered cobblestones. Too often they have involved dismembered babies and small children being mistreated by adults, and they filled me with such revulsion that I have never forgotten some of them. The memories scare me still.

  Like so many people, I had been totally ignorant of what a mental hospital was like. Somehow I had expected that I’d be in bed or lolling around in pyjamas all day. It came as a surprise to find that everyone was expected to be up and dressed before breakfast each day. I only ate toast and drank tea. There was no point in bothering with anything else, as I couldn’t taste properly because there was an awful metallic taste in my mouth all the time, as if my amalgam fillings were being touched with silver paper. This was another drug reaction.