Mad as a Hatter
Bex O’Brian
Naomi Koffman
I arrived from New York to my sister’s house in LA and was immediately led out to the garden and thrust down on a sunbaked chaise. My eighty-something mother, swaddled in blankets, was already in an Adirondack chair. I had to fight the instant crushing claustrophobia I always felt when alone with my mother. Usually, I covered it up by being busy, doing dishes, cooking, generally bodging about. But my little sister, before disappearing to the cool interior of her home, hissed in my ear. “This is why you’re here. Don’t you dare move.”
Years of mini-strokes had reduced my mother in small ways, but she was in no way bowed. The impossible, opinionated woman was still there, ready to pounce and rip you to shreds. Once, I made the mistake of saying that the Iraqi people might not mind seeing the back of Saddam Hussein; from that moment forward, she pegged me a right-wing war-mongering maniac. With every subsequent conflict, she’d get on the blower and berate me over salivating for bloodshed. But my sister was right; I was there to spend time with her, so I asked how she was.
“Do you care?”
When I didn’t answer, she said. “Do you remember when you were a kid, and we all went to see Dr. Halpern?”
“Dr who?”
“Halpern. She was a psychiatrist. You were very little. You wouldn’t sit still and stole all the lollypops from her desk.”
“I needed a shrink as a baby?”
“Not you, well you, all of us.”
“What was wrong?”
“I’m not sure. It was your sister’s father’s idea. He paid for it. He must have thought something wrong. Which there probably was, I was married, after all, to your father.”
“So your ex-husband paid for us to see a shrink because you had a lousy marriage to Daddy?”
“It does seem odd, doesn’t it? He was probably terrified I might try and come back. By that time, he had found his second wife, whom he infinitely preferred.”
“All your husbands infinitely preferred their next wives.”
“Yes.” Mother pulled her blankets around her. “Why do you think that is?”
“You are selfish and thought them beneath you? What did that shrink say?”
“She seemed to think that having children from two different men would always leave my mind unbalanced.”
“Bitch.”
“I thought so. Years later, when I got pregnant again, I do remember wondering what this child would do to my brain’s balance. It certainly fucked up the balance of my marriage. Anyhow, David was very upset when I told her to fuck off. He was addicted to therapy; he blew through his entire inheritance and your sister’s on shrinks.”
I knew this part of the story and was more amazed at the idea of anyone in our family having the prospect of an inheritance. Still, I must have also absorbed the notion that shrinks were there to take one’s hard-earned cash because as I grew and developed my own mental anguishes, it never occurred to me to see one. To be fair, my suffering was run of the mill stuff. Panic attacks. A feeling at night that I was possessed (by what, not sure) or that I was shapeshifting (into what, again not sure). In relationships, I was the usual; clingy, or needy, or wanting.
I muddled along for years, relying on my own internal logic that the helter-skelter only took up, say, twenty-five percent of my brain and that the other seventy-five percent was being manned by someone in control.
Sitting in the lovely LA sun, I could see she was stewing on the fact that my older sister had been robbed of her inheritance by all that therapy. Had there been lots of cash around, it would have eased my mother’s own precarious financial situation.
“Didn’t you see a shrink?” I asked, trying to drawing her back in. “About twenty years ago?”
Mother pursed her lips, then sighed. “It was a moment of madness. I thought I would try and figure out my feeling towards my father’s madness. I was about his age and was afraid it might happen to me.”
Her father, like many of the men of his generation, was buffeted by history. Escaping the Lithuanian pogroms, he arrived in England, where he married my grandmother, a fierce Irish socialist (though not in those days). He served behind the lines in WWI then came home to start a family. By all accounts, he was a boring, unremarkable man until one day he went starkers and announced that he was a Duke. Apparently, there had been no signs, no warning. He just snapped. He ended up dying in an insane asylum. I could see why Mother would be frightened.
My grandfather’s sad end was never kept from us. In fact, his madness had become something of a comedy routine, something mother trotted out at dinner parties. His story even made numerous appearances in the weekly column she wrote for the Montreal Star.
“What did the shrink say?”
“He didn’t think it funny.”
“I suppose it isn’t.”
“If it isn’t funny, then it’s something else. I thought I was redeeming the man. When I tried to delve into what might have taken him over the edge, all I could remember was how bored I was by those long bus rides through the bombed-out streets of London to the hospital and the hell as he fussily arranged his tattered dressing gown and wondered when the courtier tailor was going to arrive to fit him before seeing the King. As you might imagine, my Irish mother was none too pleased with this turn of events. The doctor said my being bored wasn’t good enough. But it was the truth. I barely noticed my father until this ridiculous turn of events. It was an imposition.”
“What did the doctor say to that?”
“He said I was a narcissist. Which was a relief. I couldn’t imagine a narcissist snapping. So I stopped going.”
While Mother was looking quite pleased with herself for giving the shaft to yet another shrink, I felt quite queasy. The fact is, not so long ago I, too, had snapped. One instant I felt normal, the next completely unhinged. A lifetime of petty mental disturbances had burst its banks. To my amazement, I found myself admitting as much.
“Really? You? What happened?”
I told her the truth. Songs flooded my head. I was besieged. So much so that to think my own thoughts, I had to fight my way around whatever tune was playing loudly. The only way I could quiet the riot was to listen to other songs or talk radio. There was no silent reprieve. No moment without noise. It was a fucking nightmare. I struggled through a summer and a fall trying to deal with it on my own. Finally, at wit’s end, I gave in and went to see a therapist. For the first twenty minutes, I cried. When I eventually pulled myself together and started to describe what was blaring away in my noggin, the doctor looked horrified and then laughed. She laughed! Throwing up her hands, she said, ‘I’ve never heard of anything like this. This is the type of thing Oliver Sacks deals with!’ I left feeling worse than when I went in.
Mother reached out her hand while giving that distinctive, quick dismissive toss of her head. It was what she did whenever she wanted to make perfectly clear that there is no answer, no explanation, nothing to do but live through whatever ails us.
Bex O’Brian
Bex, who lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog, is the author of the novel Promiscuous Unbound and Radius both under the name Bex Brian
