The Nervous Hospital

Nancy Davidoff Kelton

Word Count 867

I was 8 years old when my mother was institutionalized at a psychiatric hospital in Worthington, Ohio. Back home in Buffalo, I called it "the nervous hospital." That made my gloomy father laugh.  

During her stay, she talked to psychiatrists, had electroshock therapy and made necklaces with beads. My stomach ached when I pictured electricity in her brain. Still, I didn't miss her silence, her stern face or her somersaults in the living room. I certainly didn't miss her chicken à la king.  

Ever since I could remember, it seemed she'd get near me only to set my hair. She would come at me with a plastic bag of bobby pins, sit me on the stairs and stick them in my head. "You don't want to look like an unmade bed," she always said. One day, when I rushed home from first grade waving my first report card -- almost all straight A's -- she stood at the kitchen counter with her back to me. "Shhh," she said. "I'm making Jell-O." She didn't turn around. 

For my 7th birthday party, she insisted that the invitations not have the word "birthday."

"But it is my birthday," I said, choking up at the card store. 

"It's not nice to make people think they should bring presents," my mother replied.

 Of course they should bring presents. That was what parties were for. I moved away from her so that her meanness wouldn't rub off. Her request was a first for the saleswoman; she had no other children's invitations. We went from store to store until she finally found what she wanted. I refused to speak.

That evening I ran away from home for an hour. The following day, I disappeared for two. My family thought I'd run away again, and my mother called the police. They found me under my bed. My mother threatened to punish me by canceling the party. But my father said that was too severe. Later, when my friends R.S.V.P.'ed, I reminded them I'd be turning 7 and couldn't wait to open their gifts.  

My older sister, Susan, liked to say that I "learned to deal with Mommy." No. I got around her. One night, before she went into the hospital, when she came at me with her bobby-pin bag, I put an end to the pin-curling by locking myself in the bathroom. "Little girls aren't supposed to look like ladies who go to Cecelia's salon," I told her.  

"Everyone should have set hair," she said. 

"That's for your opinion!" I called out, refusing to emerge until she put her bobby pins away.  "That's for your opinion!" became my standard response.

The day she came home from the nervous hospital, I stood at my bedroom window watching her get out of the car. She wasn't smiling. That hadn't changed. But her hair was long and loose. I wanted to run out and kiss her but was afraid she wouldn't kiss back. Then I thought: How stupid. She's your mother, of course she will. I rushed down, and I tried to embrace her. She gave a little wave of her hand. "It's been a long trip," she said, moving past me. "I need to rest." Rest was all she'd done, beyond getting shock treatments and stringing beads! 

Her treatments made her less anxious, but the distance between us remained. For Mother's Day, a classmate sang this in the schoolyard: Dear Mom: We love you on Mother's Day and hate you on every other's day. I would have said it differently. I hated my mother on Mother's Day too.  

Her illness turned me to my father, whose presence in my life grew. We played casino and gin rummy every evening. When I went to overnight camp, he stood at the bus window crying. He wrote me every day. In the fall, we perfected my Ping-Pong game. "Nancy'll beat you left-handed," he'd tell my potential opponents, knowing I was a southpaw. At the ice-skating rink, he stood at the rail, waving as I came around. We oil-painted by numbers, took supplies from his office on weekends and went to Aunt Yetta's for pinwheel cookies and milk.  

When I began to apply to colleges, he knew what I had to do. "You're going out of town," he insisted. I married young. I wanted love. I wanted a child. I wanted to be a better mother. Some mistakes were like my mother's. More of them were different and my own.  

When my father died years later, my mother said, very formally, "My condolences to you."    Afterward, my mother lived in a nursing home. I lived with constant guilt. At first, when I visited and tried to hug her, she flinched. "I'm just trying to get close to you, Mom," I said.

She looked at me in silence. And then, perhaps out of fear or regret, she began to hug me back. We talked. She smiled. She even liked my hair.

"Daddy and I were proud at how you figured things out," she said during our final visit. On her last Mother's Day, I told her I loved her. I'm working on "every other's day" now.

Nancy Davidoff Kelton teaches writing at the New School, privately, and at the Strand Bookstore. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, AARP, McSweeney's, and Next Avenue, among numerous other publications. Her 7 books include: Writing From Personal Experience and her memoir Finding Mr. Rightstein which she is adapting for the stage. Link to her Next Avenue essay about the play: https://www.nextavenue.org/playwriting-lifes-second-half/