My Mother Is Bipolar
by Anonymous
Warning: This article contains details about mental illness.
There’s one question that, if you know me—really, truly know me—you will not ask me.
Posed to someone else, it is a harmless, maybe even caring question. To me, it’s loaded with 30 (mumble) years of trauma and being expected to take responsibility for someone who should have been taking care of me all those years. I wince—if not physically, then emotionally—every time a well-meaning friend or relative asks cheerfully, making small talk and trying to show interest in my life:
“So, how’s your mom doing?”
I forgive them, for they know not what they do. I breeze over it, not lying but also not telling the truth.
“I’m sure she’s fine! She’s keeping busy, you know.” But if you know me—really, truly know me—that’s code for “I haven’t heard from her for weeks. I can’t let myself care how she’s doing without causing myself pain. So she lives her life and I live mine, and when she pops into my life like the Manic Pixie Dream Mom she is, I keep it light and we skate through it and I don’t let myself get riled up by what I wish she could be for me. Also why the fuck is it my responsibility to know how she’s doing? Don’t I have enough to deal with? She’s a grown woman, she can take care of herself. But thanks for asking!”
Everyone who meets my mom is shocked—SHOCKED—that we aren’t close. She’s a social butterfly, dancing through life and being Extremely Quirky and Adorable™. She has hundreds of friendly relations (and just as many boyfriends). But the truth is, she doesn’t actually have any friends, not in the way I would define it. She has no confidantes, no one she shows her vulnerable inner self to. And I mean that physically, not just emotionally. I have seen my mother without makeup exactly once in my life that I can recall. The woman wears makeup to bed. To BED! Why? Because according to her, if there’s an emergency, the first responders wouldn’t want to help her if she were a hag. (For the record, my mother is one of the most beautiful women you’ll ever meet. But even if she weren’t…it doesn’t matter. Let’s move on.)
My editor will probably tell me that I need to get to the point and talk about her diagnosis already, and she’d be FULLY right to do so, but I’m deflecting. I’m still playing by the rules of being a child of the bipolar: dance around the issue, delicately slip around and skirt the landmine, gently guide the conversation away from the abyss and back to easier fare. Quickly say the thing I need to say and move on before anyone has time to digest it and tries to dig further. I didn’t even dwell on the word just now! I purposefully buried it in some flowery language to lull you into a sense of safety so you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable! It’s one of the many emotional reflexes I’ve developed, the mental and psychological gymnastics I’ve mastered to dodge and roll out of the danger zone of having a bipolar mom. (THERE, I said it, good grief.)
Those reflexes have served me fairly well and formed me to be a socially savvy and (calculatedly, defensively) charismatic person. But I think back to some of my behaviors that I picked up from her, not knowing they were the patterns of a completely unhinged woman living in a different reality than the rest of us, and I cringe. The attempts at getting attention, often for the wrong reason. The lying and exaggerating because…why bore someone with the plain ol’ truth? You gotta SELL it if you want it to be worth your while.
“they were the patterns of a completely unhinged woman living in a different reality.”
If I had to sum her, and the behaviors I inherited from her, up in a word, it would be “excessive.”
Excessively giving into urges to eat junk food or taking off on adventures on a whim or spend an insane amount of money. Excessive energy, staying up too late and paying for it later. Excessive need for admiration. Giving excessively extravagant gifts. Excessively throwing everything into a new project or fixation, just to abandon it when it becomes stale. Even her punctuation is excessive. I got a text from her today that was four sentences. Thirteen punctuation marks. She’s just…too much. Of everything. She is always on, the world is her stage, and she is nothing without the spotlight.
But the lying is the worst of it.
I don’t know exactly how common it is for bipolar moms have this quality, but my mom is a compulsive liar on top of it all. Maybe it’s just a Bipolar 1 trait, which is what my mom has. The mania, the promiscuity, the compulsion for attention, all of it marks my experience with her. The depressions were few and far between. The mania was the constant. The Mayo Clinic offers this sunny overview of Bipolar 1 symptoms: “abnormally upbeat, jumpy or wired; increased activity, energy or agitation; exaggerated sense of well-being and self-confidence (euphoria); decreased need for sleep; unusual talkativeness; racing thoughts; distractibility, poor decision-making — for example, going on buying sprees, taking sexual risks or making foolish investments.”
“the first time I read up on bipolar 1, I felt seen. there it was, in black and white, my mother to a tee.”
To people with moderately stable parents, this paragraph is not for you. Feel free to jump ahead for more of the juicy weird shit my mom is known for, I don’t mind. The rest of you, my fellow children of the bipolar: FUUUUUUCK, doesn’t that list read like a D&D Character Sheet of your parent? The first time I read up on bipolar 1, I felt so seen that it made me feel sick. There it was, in black and white, my mother to a tee. The realization that what has always been normal is actually abnormal is one of the most destructive forces a psyche can take, I think. Was there anything from my childhood that one could consider normal? I had no way of knowing, until I started researching the disease, and then it was like I had a Rosetta Stone to decode my entire existence. One of the most profound experiences I ever had was discovering “You Have Nothing to Worry About.” The first chronicle I ever encountered of being a child of the bipolar, photographer Melissa Spitz documented her experience with her bipolar mom. It’s one of the bravest and most vulnerable and deeply generous pieces of art I’ve ever come across. All at once, I realized the stuff I was used to was totally fucking deranged to everyone else, and I also realized I wasn’t the only one it was normal to. It was terrifying and freeing and I’m always going to be grateful to have stumbled across it when I did.
Anyway, back to the compulsive lying.
I remember one hazy afternoon, my mom took me and my sibling through a drive-thru. I remember this not because it was a special treat to get fast food (my mom never cooked and was notorious for feeding us garbage…again, flaky and excessive all at once), but because she paid in quarters. I think times were a little tough, because she’d scrounged up the loose change in the house and had me and my sibling put them in those flat kraft paper rolls so we could all go buy some 59¢ bean burritos and cinnamon twists (do people still put coins in little brown rolls to deposit them? Do kids even know what coins are anymore? I have questions. Also, I’m going to make a confession to you right here in the parenthetical, because I’m nothing if not self-aware of my own bullshit: I feel like I’m revealing too much with this business about being tight on cash, because my parents both peacock about having nice things and being flush, and having been tight on money is not on brand for us. So I’m being silly about fucking COIN ROLLS to deflect. And I’m burying this meta-examination of the defense mechanism of making sure everyone’s cool, and the urge to make sure we’re not getting too serious or vulnerable for too long, here in the parenthetical because that in and of itself is exactly what it’s like being a child of the bipolar. Bury the scary. Deflect with humor. Take care of everyone else and don’t make people uncomfortable. Rinse. Repeat.) I don’t remember this particular instance just because she paid in quarters, though. I remember because instead of just paying and moving on, she said to the cashier as she handed over the coins, “Oh! We just got back from Vegas, sorry for all the quarters! Just trying to get rid of them!”
And the instant lesson that my clever little child brain took from that exchange was “Oh, this is something to be embarrassed of. And when you’re embarrassed, you should come up with a story to make it land easier.”
Reader, I tell you, I did not stop lying until well into my twenties. (This is a story for another day, but the only reason I decided to get help was because a lie backfired spectacularly and it was time to begin the terrifyingly hard process of unlearning this lesson. These things have a way of forcing you to deal with them.) It was as natural to me as breathing, because I saw it so artfully done every single day. Anything was an opportunity to punch up the truth and make it something worth hearing. Put a little lipstick on the truth, because why not?
So when I started going to therapy in my 20s, I told my therapist, a brilliant and beautifully kind woman who has the emotional precision of a surgeon, that I had read Marie Kondo’s book and gotten rid of so much clutter I’d been holding onto. And I told her that I’d thrown away letters from my mom. Mean letters. Letters written in an icy rage to a teenage girl who was just trying her best. Letters meant to cut me down without having to confront me. If my mom is a silly intangible wisp on her good days, she is a ghost on her worst days. There’s no fighting with my mom. There is only cold silence, and, when she’s ready, a letter. A calculated distance that you can’t argue with, because by the time you’re reading it she’s in the wind until she’s ready to pretend it never happened. I saved all those letters, because part of me needed proof I wasn’t the crazy one. I needed something physical to show the faceless judge I imagined presiding over the trial where I convinced the world I wasn’t the problem. But I read “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”, and I took it to heart. And those letters did not spark joy. So I threw them away. It became the life-changing magic of tidying up my soul. And I proudly told my therapist this, ready for my Therapy Gold Star for a breakthrough. And my brilliant and kind and emotionally precise therapist just STARED at me. Oh no! I was not going to get my gold star! “Let’s talk about why you held onto those all these years.” So I stammered and stuttered and got to the heart of it. The truth that I never wanted to admit to myself: this was not evidence to convince a fantasy judge and convict my mom of being the worst. It was to show my future children. To absolve myself of inevitable future mistakes because, hey, at least I never did this shit! Look how terrible my mom was to me! I get a pass!
Oh, reader. If I can convince even one of my fellow children of the bipolar to go to therapy, all this anonymous soul-bearing will have been worth it. I am incomprehensibly lucky to have done the work I did before ever having a child. Because now that I have a child, I can’t imagine ever wanting her to know what I’ve been through, and certainly not in that context. Someday, if she wants to know, I’ll tell her about my experience. If she asks why her grandmother flakes on promises or goes overboard when she does come around, I’ll carefully explain that her nature is different than ours, and that we can be how we are, and she can be how she is, and it’s all okay.
I’m sure I’ll have to have that conversation at some point, because god, she is SO FUCKING ON ALL THE TIME. She is impossible not to notice (by design, obviously, but the intended effect and the actual effect are miles apart).
My mom wears cocktail dresses and spiky high heels and huge costume jewelry pieces. Not, like, on special occasions. That is all she wears. To work, to cook dinner, to the lake. She wears heels to Disneyland. If that doesn’t tell you she’s insane, I don’t know what will. It’s all a show. She’s Tinkerbell. She’s the glimmer on the wall when your wedding ring catches the light. She’s a beautiful sparkly thing that you can never grasp. She’s not real.
When she came to visit me after I brought my daughter home from the hospital, she wore her typical uniform. I didn’t mind it when she came to visit in the hospital, because the whole experience there was unfamiliar and strange and nothing felt like home. But it felt so out of place, that over-the-top energy coming into my cozy home with my cozy baby and her spiked heels clacking on the hardwood, that I had to swallow the urge to scream at the dissonance. I’m going to pull the curtain back for a moment and take you out of this narrative and bring you into the present with me, as I’m sitting down to write this. Of all the things I’ve written so far, all the hard memories and twisted patterns that have been normalized in my life, this is the thing that has made me stop writing and put my head down on my desk and cry.
Not for me.
For her.
“imagine thinking you have to be beautiful and admired and worshipped to be worthy of love.”
Imagine thinking you have to be beautiful and admired and worshipped to be worthy of love. To be worthy of being loved by a baby. To think that that’s what love is. My newborn didn’t give a shit if she had makeup and heels on. She was sentient sack of potatoes. I was drunk on sleep deprivation. Of all the times to take the mask off and connect, mother to mother…she couldn’t do it. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. And it breaks my heart. Because the only way I can stomach her is to empathize with her. In her mind, in her version of reality, she MUST act this way, she MUST do these things. We’re all crazy for not doing it. And to think back to that moment, to when I was at my most feral and raw and organic, all nerves and instincts and biological cues, she still had to put on the beauty pageant routine. And then she disappeared. She said she was going to visit someone else for a bit, and when I called to see if she could bring something back with her, she was already halfway back to the state where she lives, because she had a date.
You know the song “She’s Always a Woman to Me” by Billy Joel? Of course you do. But you don’t know it like I know it. I’m listening to it right now. I’ve been listening to it the entire time I’ve been writing…whatever this is. I remember listening to it on the radio as a girl, a fairly young girl, and thinking “Oh. This song is about Mom.” Not to get too musically meta, but this song is my version of Killing Me Softly. Billy Joel just out here singing my life with his words. Every word and hum, the dreamily lulling time signature, but the first lyrics most of all:
She can kill with a smile, she can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child but she's always a woman to me.
I simply can’t tell you how much this resonates with me. If you don’t know what it’s like to have an unstable mother, there’s nothing I can do to explain it to you. And if you have survived a similar experience with your mom, I don’t have to.
Some people with toxic or mentally unwell parents, after having children of their own, can sympathize with how hard their parents must have had it and begin to forgive them. Raising babies and children is impossibly hard, and my emotional constitution is fairly healthy (given the years of therapy and the wonderful support system I have in my husband and my friends…all of whom also somehow have troubled mothers, go figure). I can’t imagine going through it with the added burden of untreated psychological trauma while trying to navigate motherhood.
But I had the opposite experience.
Having a baby is what made me pull away even further from my mother and set wider boundaries. Because holding that fragile, perfect baby, feeding her with my very body and knowing my mom had abandoned me again, and had never fed me by choice (she still maintains breasts are for pleasure, not sustenance), my heart made up its mind. “I would do anything to nurture and protect this thing. I cannot imagine not giving her everything she needs. And all the damage done to me as a small girl, as a vulnerable adolescent, as a struggling new mom…it’s just unforgivable now that I know how cruel you have to be to prioritize yourself over your child.” And so now, as a mother myself, I have purposefully created deeper physical and emotional barriers between me and my parents. (Another unbearable realization buried in a parenthetical: my dad hasn’t been mentioned once yet. Not by design…well, not consciously anyway. But the one thing my therapist helped me realize that totally shattered my understanding of myself and my situation was not about my mom, who is CLEARLY unstable. Because of her instability, my dad and I were thick as thieves. He wasn’t insane, he was my rock, right? But with one question, one surgical strike, we destroyed that illusion. “He was your parent too. He knew firsthand how cruel she could be. Did he ever do anything to protect you from that?” RIP, notion that my dad was my rock. It was that moment, not another non-conflict with my mom, that finally undid me and allowed me to build myself back up as a whole, healthy, self-fulfilled person who didn’t need either parent to be there for her. A person could finally create healthy boundaries and learn how to have pleasant but intentionally shallow relationships with both of these people who had failed her.)
There’s a bravery associated with disowning your parents. And rightfully so. Maybe we all secretly fantasize about cutting them off for good and not letting them have power over us anymore. So I think a lot of us see those who have severed ties and we applaud them, and maybe beat ourselves up for “not being strong enough” to do it ourselves. But the truth is, we don’t for a variety of reasons, and some of those reasons make us brave and strong too.
Maybe we’re not ready to give up the hope that someday they’ll be who we need them to be. Maybe we’re not ready to end the dramatics and stop having them as a reliable source of stress and anxiety, because that constant is the only constant thing they are capable of providing us. Maybe we want to stay close to people who aren’t ready to cut them off yet, and it would cost us those relationships to be selfish enough to walk away (hi hello, this is exactly my situation. If you look at my byline, you’ll see that I’m not willing to let this come between me and the people who love my mom differently than I do).
So I think it takes a special kind of bravery and strength to continue to allow these people to be a part of our lives, and to let them have relationships with our kids or found families. To take extra care to find just the right amount of exposure and interaction to keep things civil and simple and safe, and maybe even enjoyable. Hell, to find ways to love them, even if you don’t like them. If you haven’t cut out your parents even after they’ve hurt you, if have them in your life without letting them continue to hurt you, you aren’t weak. You are so, so strong.
It’s especially tough for those of us with parents who are diagnosed but unmedicated. Because they have an out. You know? They have no excuse to continue hurting us, the solution is right there. They have been told “here is what’s causing this, and here is what you can do to fix it.” But to her, “fixing it” would be to destroy and unravel the only version of herself she’s ever known. She IS her mania. To tame that would be to give up the theatrics that feed her. When I started therapy, my therapist warned me that if I went on this journey, I would lose and alter relationships in my life because I was going to kill the old version of me and create a new version, and that some people in my life wouldn’t want to be around the new version. I jumped in, body and soul, because I was so desperate to escape the endless quicksand that surrounded my family and to find some sort of peace. And I have, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. But I can understand how hearing that would be the most terrifying thing in the world to my mom, because I know her nature. How could she, of all people, confront that? She can’t.
Because she hides like a child. But she's always a woman to me.
