My Mom's Bipolar Diagnosis

I knew there was something wrong with my mom because she slept so much. Then there was the terrifying night, at 12 years old, when I found her in the kitchen at 3am eating mayonnaise out of the jar with her hands. Yeah … something was wrong with my mom.

We lived in Harleysville, PA in a duplex within a development, that I now realize as an adult … was the single parent development. Almost all of the kids in my area lived with one parent and struggled financially. That was my mom’s biggest concern: not having money. We struggled a lot : rolling pennies for money, food stamps, the kerosene heater instead of using the apartment's heat. All of these were just stressors to, what I learned later in life, my mom’s mental illness. Well really not HER mental illness, I don’t want to put that on her (or anyone), it’s something she suffered from. 

My mom had three moods as far as twelve-year-old me was concerned: extremely happy, sleeping, or weird. For a kid, mania (extremely happy) was great. The mania was fun for a little because she was happy as hell and we’d do A LOT of shopping. But during the mania came the weirdness, because honestly along with what Bipolar 1 can do my mom also experimented with drugs. Mostly pills that her doctor gave and Meth from … guess who? Kermit the truck driver (see previous short stories). I didn't know where the illness ended and the drugs began. I just knew what both looked like from twelve years old. She’d be awake for DAYS and was usually convinced that bugs were crawling on her so she’d pick at her skin and wake me up in the middle of the night to see if I could see the bugs on her. Weird for a 12 year old. After the mania and weirdness came the depression aka sleeping for 2 weeks straight. I hated that time the most. I was alone and as I sit here writing this, I start to cry because I couldn’t imagine my daughter dealing with what I did. The instability of knowing if your mom is going to wake up. She would take whatever type of pill to go to sleep and man was it hard waking her up. I’d shake her and shake her and she’d just lay there. As a child, that’s the scariest thing in the world, asking yourself “is my mom dead and if she is who am I going to live with?”

My mom and I never really had a healthy relationship. She passed away about 7 years ago from COPD. We weren’t speaking at the time … we spent a lot of our relationship not speaking because as an adult, I realized I had to love her from a distance. While she was in hospice we had a nice talk before she passed. I asked her if she knew how hard my childhood was and she said she did and that she was sorry. She also admitted doing a lot of drugs with Kermit that didn’t help my childhood.