My Son, My Legacy

When I was ten years old, diving into my very first private locked diary- finding out what I might reveal if I knew no one could hear me, criticize me, or stiffle me, I wrote my first poetry.  One of the first poems I wrote was about the movie "Somewhere In Time" with Jane Seymore and Christopher Reeves.  It was a somewhat sticky story about starcrossed lovers and ghosts.  I was so moved by the story that my body filled with an explosion of familiar emotion; a nuclear bomb of human understanding, sorrow, death, meaning, and irrespressable recognition of the most poignant themes any people scrape across in life.  I wanted to say "I know!  I know all about this even though I am only ten years old and have only loved one boy truly and not lived beyond bruises and terror and have no use for this body of mine!!!"

I have spent most of my life exploding inside to try and get out of my own skin.  As long as I can remember I have felt like my spirit is this enormous amorphous pool of explosives waiting for a match.  The match comes and I cannot contain myself.  It only comes out in stupid squeals of excited speech, in jumping up and down breathless to escape, it only comes out like an uncontrollable spazzy tick.  Like I might be calmer if I was made better, but there you have it.  There I am: this person with unholy light in her eyes and an incredible impatience to get all the words out right now.  Right now.  Right now!

I am strongly influenced by the stimuli of my life.  Theater, movies, music, and art all stir the bubbling pot of explosives.  I have to write it all out or I might expire my limit of body space and the extra energy generated will have nowhere to go.  Which is a serious physics problem.

I have just watched "The Fisher King" for the first time in about ten years.  I forgot what it does to me.  I forgot how raw it is.  I forgot how gorgeous and impossible the acting is and how strongly it reconnects me to my people.

My people.

Makes me want to write poetry without stifling or bridling the bucking enthusiasm.  To tell how sometimes films tell the truth and how you should listen to the stories of the mad because they have so much less agenda and are so stripped that what you get from them is something close to the animals we all really are.  They will speak to something inside yourself that you may fear, but which is beautiful and wild.  Photographs, paintings, dance, music, voices singing in the early hours of morning, and sometimes poetry are all capable of holding indefinitely what our spirits cannot contain. 

My people are mostly artists, writers, photographers, inventors, musicians, and artisans.  They harness what is most unpredictable and unsayable about life and make us listen, make us see, make us consider.  They show us our own underpinnings.  They refuse to let us become complacent.  Sometimes there are no words at all.  As a writer this is like death.  But that's when I look to the artists who paint, or assemble, and I feel better, I feel stronger, I feel buoyed by the wordless expression and I am stripped down to essentials by the beauty in wordlessness.  Not my comfortable place.  My people make me look anyway.

I make them think.  With words.  I make them face what their spirits are writing quietly in the corners of their heads that they will never say out loud because it fills them with the most abject misery and fear. 

We take each other to the edge of comfort and push the boundaries of the universe.  And we take you there too.  With us.  Because we are sometimes your real voice.  We are sometimes your vision.  Your ballast in a world of weightless uncertainty. 

I am thinking about the legacy I have unwittingly given to my son.  The heavy mantle he wears intricately woven of all the people before him whose voices he must carry.  The sheer weight of not being standard.  Heaving like the ocean to the stimuli around him, rising and rising and crashing back down into the deep.  Drowning one minute in the dredge of despair and being lifted to the sun in the next with all the enthusiasms and passions of a spirit that cannot fit inside the body it was given.  His father and I have given him this impossible mission to be a light for others, a voice, a shiny bright mind leading into the tunnels of being like a miner.

My own mission is desperately important.  I realized how important it was before I realized that it was for my son's sake as well as my own.  It started as a mission to lift myself from the quicksand of madness.  To recognize all that is positive in being mentally ill.  To let the light into the closet full of skeletons.  To deny anyone the chance to belittle me because my brain wasn't wired well.  To show anyone I could that a significant number of the most important people in history have been mentally ill like me.  That I come from a long line of very important people.  My people may not be easy to live with, to understand, to classify: but we are an important segment of society with significant gifts to offer.

How do I tell my son all of this without frightening him?  It is too much.  He doesn't even yet understand how different he is.  He thinks it's everyone else who is wacky and irrational.  In dark moments I know he feels it: how different he is, how separate he is, and how people treat him as "other".  And it hurts him.  Which breaks my heart.  Every time it happens I want to hurt the people who hurt him.  Who disregard his gifts, his brilliance, his irrepressable spirit which is much too big for his small body.

Tonight my son is sleeping at his friend's house.  He almost never goes to sleepovers because it isn't comfortable.  He feels strange being away from home.  It takes him too far out of his comfort zone.  But he managed it tonight. 

Philip and I played scrabble and watched "The Fisher King" and here I am now, time for sleep, thinking of my sweet boy.  Suddenly more accutely aware of the challenge ahead of us.  To raise a mentally ill boy and somehow help him realize what an intensely rich and valuable tradition he has been born into: creative thinkers, the portion of society that ultimately influences how we think, see, hear, feel, and understand the universe we live in.  I love how open he is to the galaxies in the sky.  How open he is to exploring answers, and yet how confident he is in his own interpretation.  Until someone puts him down. 

I have to admit I'm frightened.  Frightened for my son's future.  For how he will find his gifts.  I'm worried about him learning to value his tremendous potential.  Such a beautiful boy.  I often complain about motherhood because I find it overwhelming and incredibly painful- but in every way I am like every other mother in my deep love for my kid.

I have to admit that it is a little painful for me to have him stay away from home.  I love the freedom from his constant needs, yet I worry.  I am uncomfortable having the cord between us be so taught.  Worrying about his comfort because I know how teu                                    nous it is for him.  I understand how anxious the smallest things can make him.  My little OCD child.  My sweet baby who has half a mouthful of grown up teeth.  Oh god.  I'm so scared for my little guy who is getting bigger and stronger all the time. 

Now that we are on the road to getting him therapy I should feel more secure.  I should.  But the truth is that I know what he faces.  I know something about what's in his heart.  I know a little bit about the legacy I have handed to him unwittingly and I feel guilt.  Because it is so heavy.  So tough.  He's going to need a lot of counseling.

So seeing movies where our legacy is portrayed raw- this is good.  I am filled with the incredible truth, that our legacy comes with so much intrinsic value, that our vision is necessary, like we are society's secret x-ray glasses- we are needed.  We see in quantum theory, in light values, in unexpected twists of color, in surprising words, and most of all in unswerving bravery. 

My boy is brave.  I am so much less brave than him. 

Being a mother is so much harder than being crazy.