When we moved to Connecticut in 2004 with our daughters, ages 4 and 6, I thought G was just a little overwhelmed, and I was a little depressed. After almost a decade of medical training, G had finally started his first job, and I was in Full Time Mom mode, managing our kids and our household.
Banks had loosened their lending standards, so we were able to get a no down payment “physician loan” to purchase a large but run down house on two acres of land. I made myself busy with our daughters’ school activities and scraping off old wallpaper in our ramshackle home, but I could not shake the feeling that something was not right. Was I missing my career? Friends? Maybe I was just a Midwestern fish out of water in the tony suburbs of the east coast.
About a year after our move, G’s overwhelm turned into something else. Where his old self was steady and calm with a healthy sense of humor, this new version was overly gregarious and at times, inappropriate. He started to withdraw and pace around the house. He would sit in another room endlessly doing crossword puzzles. He was not sleeping, and looked exhausted and emaciated. Our girls were walking on eggshells when they were around him. He would forget his thoughts or moods from day to day and would be surprised when I would remind him of them.
One day I noticed everything in the freezer was melting. The door had been left slightly ajar. I closed it. The next day, it happened again. I asked my daughters if they were messing with it and when they said no, I asked G. He told me I was imagining things. A few days later, it happened again. I asked my daughters, and they said no. I asked G, and he was cagey. I pushed him, and he admitted to it. When I asked why, he started out confident in his line of thinking: Since we were struggling to make ends meet, he was simply trying to lower our electricity bill. When I asked how, I watched his mind scramble to remember how this had made sense to him: If the freezer door was left slightly open… then… it would use less power! When pressed further, he got frustrated with me that I couldn’t understand the brilliance of his plan.
This was a turning point: The disruption in logical thinking inside G’s mind was finding its way to the outer world.
Finally, G agreed to see a therapist but downplayed what was going on. After a few sessions, when his symptoms continued to get worse, I found him another one. G knew “doctor speak,” and the sessions would end up being more collegial than therapeutic. He told the story that he was an overworked, magnanimous doctor whose wife was bitter and unsophisticated when it came to complex matters of the mind. They believed him, and sometimes, so did I.
It was not until G admitted to one of his therapists, “It’s not that I want to kill myself, it’s just that I don’t care if I live or not,” that the situation was taken seriously, and he was admitted to an in-patient behavioral health facility. There he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
We let our parents know what was happening. Whether incapable, unwilling or afraid, it was clear they were not going to be the kind of help we needed at that moment in the crisis. My father-in-law came to visit when G was released from the hospital and told us, “I was going to wait because it always seemed to hit when they got older, but… this runs in our family. G’s grandfather, he was depressed. A couple of uncles. One of them may have jumped out of a window or something like that.”
My parents flew to check in on us and admitted that when I had initially tried to explain what was happening in our house, they did not believe me. “We thought you were the one going crazy,” they said.
G and I continued to live together for a few weeks, but he was reluctant to accept his diagnosis and continued to manipulate doctors to under medicate him. I was afraid of the diagnosis and what it meant for us, and searched the internet for more information, scouring the psychology section of the library for clues of what was to come. The fact it ran in G’s family terrified me; the fact it was withheld from us infuriated me.
G was given a leave of absence from work and was now home all the time. I would not let him drive the girls or be alone with them. I started sleeping in the guest room. I would say to myself: “No, G would never hurt anyone.” And, “Yes, I am afraid.” It was hard to reconcile the man who used to be tender and safe with the man now telling me not to wear a certain nightgown, because he did not know what it might make him want to do to me.
I asked G to move to a hotel for a week or two so I could have space. He was very reluctant to do so, but I told him if he did not leave, I would leave with the girls. Eventually, he agreed. His parents — whose outrageous stories about G’s childhood now took on a different significance — told me I was overreacting; they did not want to hear that their brilliant son was deteriorating. My parents could not understand why I had asked G to leave — what about in sickness and in health?
I tried to explain to our young daughters what was happening in an age-appropriate way, but when they saw him, anything reasonable went out the window. One night, we met him for dinner, and he generated an entire poem on a napkin before we had ordered the meal. On another, he showed up at our house, sobbing, saying every nerve ending in his body was on fire.
One daughter started biting her nails to the nub, the other had facial twitches she could not control. He came to a school performance, and the other parents stared at him while he hooted and hollered in the audience. My daughters begged me to help him.
On days when G was in the hotel and the girls were at school, I would go for long walks in the woods near our home. One afternoon, I realized I was going to be late meeting the school bus, so I started to run. My lungs contracted, wheezing shut. I pushed and ran faster. I stumbled over a tree root. A ragged gasp moved past my heart, down to my stomach. Nausea. I doubled over, hands on my knees to steady myself.
Men with their stories. Men with their blessings. Men with their hands on me. Women with our closed throats.
A primal cry from deep inside, I let out a scream. An explosion, violent and luminous ― and for a moment the brightness absorbed everything.
The problem was not G or his bipolar disorder. The problem was me — afraid to live from the part of myself beyond the good girl/bad girl binary. Beyond books, my family, and God himself.
At the time, I was seeing a therapist, and she asked two simple yet revolutionary questions: “How do you feel?” and “What do you want?”
I feel scared.
I want to be safe.
Shortly after, I asked G to move out permanently. He was angry but found an apartment in a converted garage the next town over.
