CHAPTER 1: I'm Nobody's Wife

The first time I can remember being depressed was when I was seven. It was a result of family Christmas traditions. Christmas always smelled special. It was a distinct time of the year. We didn't have to hold our breaths, fearing what would happen next. It was the only time of the year when our lives were predictable.

My mother had six brothers and sisters, and so did my father. We had loving aunts and uncles on both sides, and cousins galore. For Christmas each year, my mother baked for our relatives and friends. The house smelled wonderful for weeks. My father sat on the kitchen steps, day in and day out, cracking pecans with an old-fashioned nutcracker. All five of us kids picked the nut meats out of the cracked nuts, while my mother bustled around the kitchen making batch after batch of fudge and cookies. Mother and Daddy made a special caramel-pecan fudge that was simply wonderful, and I know that people looked forward to their Christmas packages every year, filled with divinity and fudges, stuffed dates, and sugared, decorated cookies placed around the edges for packing.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, my father went out and bought the biggest, fullest tree he could find. He usually had to cut the top off because it would be too tall for the living room ceiling. All of us would decorate it, using decorations my parents paid for dearly during the Depression, odd-looking ornaments from Germany made before the War, and very old bubble lights, along with newer balls and multi-colored strings of lights. Then, under the direction of my older sister, we would carefully drape every inch of the tree with icicles until it shimmered. Packages, wrapped by aunts and cousins and our own inexpert hands, would go under the tree until the pile of gifts brushed the lower branches.

We had visitors all through the season, aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, dropping by to pick up their boxes of goodies and to leave behind presents for us. They especially came to see my grandmother, who lived with us and was the matriarch of the family. The side door was never locked. They walked in all through the day and evening, expecting that they would be welcomed and never being disappointed by my mother. My father didn't always care for the confusion, but he was often at work at night and sleeping during the day, so he missed a lot of it.

The days before Christmas were filled with anticipation, with kindness and good humor. We had all ordered up a present from Santa Claus, and knew that we would get what we wanted. No one was scolded or belittled in the days before Santa's arrival. My mother told us later, when we were adults, that when she was a child, Christmas was strictly a religious holiday, and presents were exchanged on January 6th. She preferred it that way, but that my father wanted Christmas to be a big holiday with lots of gift-giving and joy.

Santa's coming was coordinated with my father's work schedule, but of course when we were little, we didn't notice. If my father worked evenings, (3 p.m. to 11 p.m.) Santa came at night and we got our presents early in the morning on Christmas, then attended Mass. However, if he worked graveyard (11 p.m. to 7 p.m.), we might go to church first and find our presents waiting for us when we got home. We always got a "big present," something we really wanted. My parents didn't have a lot of money but they always figured out a way to make Christmas work.

When I was five, I learned to ride a bike and wanted my own bicycle for Christmas. My older sister was eleven that year and wanted a full-size bike. My father bought her a new bike, then painted her older, smaller bicycle with snazzy enamel paint and left it for me beside the tree as a present from Santa. I was thrilled and never tumbled to the fact that it wasn't new. Other than our big present, we also got several smaller presents, clothes and toys that my mother, in particular, thought we would enjoy. Since we didn't get a lot of presents during the year, except at Christmas and our birthdays, the season was really a happy time.

However, after the mess was cleared up, and the turkey dinner with all the trimmings cooked and consumed, we knew the holiday spirit would disappear and things would get back to "normal." Normal meant never knowing what was going to happen next.

The Christmas that I found out there was no Santa Claus was the occasion that I became depressed. I was seven years old and in the second grade. Mrs. Cavanaugh was my teacher, a caring woman and a dedicated teacher. Some of the boys were teasing another because he still believed in Santa Claus. He insisted that there was a Santa Claus because "He comes to my house every year." The other boys answered, "Oh, you dummy, that's just your father dressed up like Santa Claus." Then, of course, Mrs. Cavanaugh stepped in to change the subject, but my mind was going a hundred miles an hour. I kept my own counsel, but I was shaken. I had never questioned the concept of Santa Claus; he was a given at our house and here were these guys teasing another for believing in him. I was troubled all day about it. I didn't say a word at school, but I remembered that every year we left out cookies and milk for Santa, and believed completely that he brought us gifts along with every other child in the world.

When I got home that day, I asked my mother about the boys' teasing. She admitted that there was no real Santa Claus, and explained that he was but a concept of love. She explained that she and my father actually did the work of buying presents and leaving them for us. I was crushed. Mostly I felt stupid for having believed in an elf that could travel the whole world in one night and give out presents to everyone. I should have known better, I chastised myself. I also asked my mother why she and my father had lied to me. It had been preached to me all my life that I should never lie and that lying was a terrible sin; why then, had I been lied to? For that's how I saw it, as a lie. Not as a parent would see it, as a pleasant legend that makes a child happy, but as a lie that had deceived me and made me feel small and stupid.

My mother, obviously upset by the question, just answered, "Well, it makes your father happy and he enjoys it." I crept silently away to think about the cosmic shift that had taken place in my view of the world. Not only had Christmas completely changed for me, but my mother, father, and older sister and brother had been lying to me this and other Christmas seasons because, and this floored me, simply because they enjoyed it.

Christmas was ruined for me that year, though I followed my mother's instructions and did not clue in my younger sister. I kept the secret to myself and began to keep my own counsel about my further thoughts. For, if Santa was a legend, what about God? Santa sees and hears children and knows how they behave, and so does God. Santa is made up by adults to please themselves, why not God? I had never seen God, though I had seen Santa's helpers downtown and even had my picture taken with one of them. If adults were capable of lying about one thing, why not another? If I couldn't trust my parents, how could I trust any other adults?

Though I didn't recognize it at the time, I became more and more depressed as I tried to sort out reality. I can remember sitting in a classroom during religious instruction and trying to determine why adults were all pretending to not only believe in God and but also to follow a certain moral code which they wanted so desperately to pass on to us. What was the purpose? For I knew then that they were all pretending. It was just like the Santa legend -- all made up to impress children. I finally decided that it was a power thing. It was important to them that we believe what they wanted us to believe. I can remember being really paranoid, thinking that priests and parents laughed at us behind our backs because we were so gullible.

Of course, I had no one I could share these thoughts with, because I thought the entire adult world was engaged in a plot against me and I, of all the children, was the only one to recognize it. I can only remember that after a few weeks, I began to feel better and that I came to the conclusion that no one could keep up such a complicated plot. The adults must really believe in what they preached. But I never really got over my feelings that the whole thing was a power play: and I never really believed in religion again.

My parents were pious and observant Catholics, and they expected the same of their children. One of the most important things to them was that we go to church daily and attend Catholic schools so we could be tutored in proper morals and in the teachings of their religion. It would have shocked and horrified my mother and father to know even part of what I was thinking, so I could not even share any of it with them. I grew up to be an atheist and don't know if my thoughts and feelings would have been different without this experience with depression when I was so young. But that's what happened and it influenced me from then on. I knew better than to discuss it with anyone. I continued to attend Mass and Catholic schools, but it was all a pretense, just as I had assumed it was for everyone else for a time.

CHAPTER TWO: And I'm Nobody's Baby

Bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness, is known to be inherited. It affects between 0.5 and 1.6 percent of the total population.# Children of persons with bipolar disorder have an increased risk of developing the disease. This risk is several times that of the general population; children of persons with bipolar disorder have a one in four chance of developing some kind of mood disorder, and a one in ten chance of developing bipolar disorder.#

What this means in a practical sense is that if the genes for bipolar disorder are present in your family, you are subject not only to dealing with the disease yourself, but also to be raised in a dysfunctional situation. While I can certainly see the gene at work in my nuclear family, I can also trace it back to my grandfather, whom I never met because he died years before I was born. I know him through stories I heard about him, enough to know that he suffered from it and undoubtedly passed it on to his children and grandchildren.

Here is a story I wrote about my grandmother, a strong and unique woman:

When we were teenagers we were subjected to the most boring and long-winded recitations; we would roll our eyes at each other and sigh, not believing that we had to listen, again, to what it was like for my grandmother when she was our age.

It couldn't possibly have any relevance to our lives and didn't hold any interest for us, but there we were, prisoners at the dinner table, and we had to listen again to what it was like for a sixteen-year-old bride on the prairie who had to keep house in a sod hut. She told us what it was like to have to feed her family on only black-eyed peas and sparse game because the first crop to go in after the sod was busted had to be a legume to fix nitrogen in the soil. (Hence, you must eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day to ensure good crops in the future.) She described her struggles to keep herself, her clothes, and her kitchen clean in a house made of dirt when she had to haul water a half mile, and it was more sensible to hang the frying pan on the wash line and let the maddening and ubiquitous wind scour it than to waste water on it.

She told of the Indians who would stop in and demand that she cook for them. Sometimes it took all the food she had in the house to feed them, but she was afraid, with her husband in the fields or in town, to refuse them anything. After all, she represented those who took their lands, killed the buffalo, and left them unable to feed themselves or their children. They left her without a word, never harming her, but always in fear.

After two years of isolation, plowing, (which is a tame word for breaking the virgin sod), building a shelter, performing incredible toil in the fields, hauling water, burning dried buffalo dung for fuel, starving, broiling in the sun, freezing in the winter, and living with the ever-present and infuriating wind, it did not rain, of course, when it had to and the wheat failed. With no other choice, my pregnant grandmother and her husband -- not my grandfather, for he came later, moved to Oklahoma City, where he could hope his dreams of fortune would not be so subject to the vagaries of fortune.

For he was a dreamer, with big dreams, first, of a homestead that would bring him fortune as a wheat farmer, then, in the city, with various schemes that would bring him vast wealth. Instead of wealth, he had a wife who was just a child but who could sew dresses for ladies as fine as anything they could buy back East. She became the seamstress for those who had made their fortunes.

She worked out of their home and became as much of a success as a woman could then, in the 1890s, with all of the rich ladies in town as her customers. He was known all over the city for his charm; everyone liked him and thought him a great guy. It was just too bad that he couldn't seem to find a way to support his wife and, by now, their three children. And, you know, sotto voce, he did drink too much. My grandmother, who was raised in Kentucky with all the baggage of the Southern belle -- and with all the strength of the true Southern lady -- kept her head up and her shoulder to the wheel, paid the rent, and kept up appearances. She didn't have any other choice. That is, until one day he simply pushed her too far and found the steel underneath the ladylike exterior.

He took her last $10 to town to buy groceries. When he didn't return in a reasonable amount of time, she knew he taken the money she had given him for food for the children and gone on a bender. That sweet Southern belle snapped. She knew just where to find him. She went to the Hotel Black -- the nicest hotel in Oklahoma City, where members of the territorial legislature were ensconced. She found him with three members of the legislature finishing a steak dinner, which he had bought with her hard-earned dollars. She proceeded to give those hail-fellows-well-met a piece of her mind, telling them that they knew what kind of a man he was, that they knew they were eating food bought with her money, that her children would now go hungry because of them. Furthermore, she expected them to file a bill of divorce in the territorial legislature and to get it passed for her. They did. Which is how my grandmother became the first woman to get a divorce in Oklahoma territory. This was a scandal and put her even further outside respectable society than her status as a working woman had done. Afterwards, she supported her children by herself, probably much better now that she didn't have to support her husband, too.

Later she married my grandfather, who was a widower with four children. So she had seven children to care for, then finally bore my father. Still she had stories to tell of this time, of a tyrannical second husband who had a strange hatred of Catholicism. She was forced to practice her religion in secret and to baptize my father in the dead of night at a stranger's home. A husband who was so abused as a child that he was denied education and was illiterate, but so proud that no one but her was allowed to know, so she read him every word of the newspaper daily and every paper he needed to sign. A husband who periodically disappeared without warning, only to return months later, bearing diamonds as peace offerings. Meanwhile she raised eight children and kept the home fires burning, sewing to keep food on the table while he was gone. All of those children, both her own and her stepchildren alike, adored her. She later bound her daughters-in-law and sons-in-law as closely to her as her children. She died at ninety-three. There were fifty grandchildren and great-grandchildren at her funeral and a half-page obituary in the newspaper; she was one of the best-known ladies in the city.

Well, you can see how her stories just nearly bored us to tears; after all, how would these experiences have anything at all in common with what we might face in our lives? We would never make any of the mistakes she made or face any of the hardships she did or wind up alone supporting ourselves.

Proud, now, that I was given her name. Wish I'd had a tape recorder then.

This story gives little information about my grandfather, but several clues. He was illiterate because his older sisters, who raised him, refused him an education to keep him working in the fields. This doesn't seem quite right at the start. My grandmother offered many times to teach him to read and write, but he had too much pride and was too stubborn to learn. He preferred to fake it, pretending he could read, always keeping someone from the family close by to manage reading chores or he would explain that he could not sign anything without my grandmother's approval.

My grandfather was a policeman, but was well-known in the territory and later, the state for his political savvy. In the 1920s, he took a leave of absence from his job to serve as campaign manager for a gubernatorial candidate who later won. Somehow, he was not rewarded with a state position, but continued in his job as a lowly cop.

He did carry out the duties of a policeman, but also was known to hijack bootleggers and steal their shipments to sell on his own. My father knew this, but did not know what he had done the times he had to flee to Cuba to wait for things to cool down before he could return home. It was on these occasions that he brought my grandmother diamonds to ensure his welcome home. My grandmother did not approve of his departures from the straight and narrow and was displeased by his criminal activities.

He was an abusive husband and father, who beat my father and demanded that my grandmother stay away from church. She was only able to baptize my father by doing it in secret, and had to educate my father in the Catholic doctrine without his father's knowledge. My grandmother would not divorce him, as she had divorced her first husband. She felt that she had committed a terrible sin by doing so. Even though there was really no other option, her religion told her that divorce was not allowed and she went to her grave convinced that she had broken God's laws by divorcing.

I believe that through these few clues about my grandfather, it is easy to see in hindsight that he was an intelligent man who was able to carry off involvement in enterprises that took more talent than his education and background would ordinarily have prepared him for. He was stubborn and eccentric, and thought nothing of being involved in criminal activities. Perhaps it wouldn't mean as much to someone without my family history, but when the next two generations were obviously touched by bipolar disorder, it leads one to believe that the gene has long been in the family. One of my psychiatrists, at least, believed these clues significant for my diagnosis. He believed from what I told him that my grandfather clearly suffered from bipolar disorder.

In the 1950s and 60s, people believed much more in nurture than in nature. This harkened back to World War II and the theories of the Germans and Japanese, who had put so much stock in pure blood and good breeding. This was rejected in the wake of the war, and inheritance was downplayed. Especially was it not thought that mental illness was inherited. You developed mental illness from the way your parents treated you, not from your genes.

I was skeptical of this, even as a child. I could see clear behavioral patterns that seemed to depend on inheritance. For example, when I was eleven, I noted that alcoholics on one side of my family were slow, steady drinkers who might consume a fifth a day, but who were able to go to work and kept their drinking off the streets and inside their homes. (There were plenty of drinkers in my family, for they descended from my grandmothers, both of whom were Irish-Catholic. Since it was my grandmothers, we weren't raised on the politics of Ireland, but on the superstitions and religion of the island.)

Alcoholics on the other side of the family were binge-drunks; that is, they drank for a specific time, becoming horribly drunk, not making it to work and generally making fools of themselves. One, my father's double cousin*, was a wino who lived on the streets. To even my young mind, it seemed quite possible that alcoholism was inherited, and even the type genetically passed down. This observation made me more likely to look at my relatives and their behavior, and to try to relate it to possible genetic inheritance.

But, in general, in our family, people were just the way they were. There was no suspicion of mental illness. People might be a little odd, or somewhat eccentric, but that was just their personalities. I had one cousin who suffered from severe depression. She was unable to care for herself and for her children, and her mother-in-law, my aunt, let everyone know how much she considered the woman to be weak and her son to have made a mistake by marrying her. The cousin had to be hospitalized, and that just didn't happen in good families. My cousin, according to the consensus of the family, should have been able to handle her problems without the help of mental health professionals.

My parents wrote her off as "stupid." If a person was mentally ill, there was no treatment except for the hospital or talk therapy. There was no percentage in being ill. You simply sucked up and did the best you could, shouldering your way through the depressions and assuming the manias were just part of life.

* My grandfather's brother married my grandmother's sister, so their child was my father's double cousin

Who could take time off work to talk to a therapist? Wouldn't do any good, anyway. Just go to church and pray about it. Things would eventually sort themselves out.

CHAPTER THREE: I Like It Like That

It was a big night at our house because my oldest sister was getting married. She was the first to leave the nest, and would be marrying in a simple church wedding the next morning. We had been planning for weeks and the big day was finally here. The house was cleaned and polished and full of guests. All four of the girls were in my big sister's bedroom, trying on pink dresses with American rose sashes, checking on hairstyles, and just generally having a giggling good time. We were all excited; this was unprecedented in our lives. Suddenly, without knocking, my father opened the door and stuck his head in. He had a last word for my sister. He didn't want to wish her well or give her a last piece of advice. He just said, "I'll be glad when you're gone. You are the one who causes all the problems around here." Then he left. Our party over, we slunk off while my sister had her cry. It was typical of my father; he was not the center of attention and the wedding had upset his life, so he took his hurt feelings out on the person he perceived to be the cause.

My mother was loving and stable. Occasionally she would become depressed, but this happened seldom. When she did become depressed, she had a tendency to see my father's side of things and you could have just flung up a chain-link fence around the house and called it a sanitarium. But most of the time we could count on our mother as a haven of sanity.

We never knew what to expect from our father. He was a brilliant man who was self-educated and knew something about everything. He could also build or repair anything. He was a great conversationalist and could explain anything to a kid. We had some wonderful dinner table conversations, but we had just as many when the tension was as thick as the beef we ate. No one said anything, then; it was too dangerous. God forbid you spill your drink; not even my grandmother could get away with that.

We never knew what would set him off. Something that was fine one day would be disastrous the next. Chaos ruled. For example, we shucked out of our shoes as soon as we came in the door in the summer. Periodically, but certainly not every time, he would get upset at the shoes lying on the floor, and then, screaming curses, would throw them all in the basement. This did not teach us to put our shoes up, but only to look for our shoes in the basement. Of course, he never asked us to simply pick up our shoes in a reasonable manner.

As another example, I can remember that I was reading the paper one day when I was about twelve. We kept our schoolbooks on a wide window ledge in the dining room when we weren't actually working on homework; that way, the books and papers were all together in the morning in the mad dash to get ready for school. We had done that since we moved into the house six years before. On this day, he suddenly asked me what all the stuff on the window ledge was. Not taking him seriously, without looking up from the paper, I answered, "Those are our books. That's where we keep them." Suddenly, he was on me. The paper was ripped from my hands, and, screaming that I would never "talk back" to him again, he was striking me. He would not hit us when mother was in the house, so obviously she was not home at that time.

When something like this happened, which was often, we kids would scatter, either going outside or upstairs, out of his sight. We stayed away until we had to assemble for a meal or until summoned by our mother. We all had our ways of staying out of the way. My older sister took dance lessons daily, becoming one of the premier dancers in the city. My brother went away to school when he was fourteen, leaving me, to my distress, without my protector. I spent most of my time in my room reading books, devouring at least one a day. My younger sister insists that she spent several years hiding in the closet.

He was unhappy that God had seen fit to give him only one boy, and let us know that he did not value girls or want them. I early expressed a desire to go to college, and he informed me that I would not, because "education is wasted on women. They just get married and have children, so there is no need for them to go to school." His children were not really people, but extensions of him. Everything we did reflected on him, so we were expected to behave impeccably, and it was a given that we would all make straight As in school. No excuses were allowed.

He had all the emotional maturity of a two-year old. He had to have his way, and he insisted on being the center of attention at all times. He had no insight, and could not see that he had problems. If anyone had problems, it was the person he was upset with at the time. He resented his children because they took my mother's time and attention away from him, and he let us know how unhappy that made him. He often told us, in so many words, that he wished we had not been born, that we kept him from doing things that he wanted to do, and periodically told us to leave the house and not come back. We would, of course, simply stay out of sight until Mother returned. We didn't tattle on him unless he got too out of control, then we would let her know that he had been hitting us. She would always calm the situation down.

Her method was to protect him from reality as much as possible and to make his life run as smoothly as possible. She handled the money because he could not be trusted to do so; she had taken over money management when they were first married during the Great Depression and it became obvious that he could not restrain his spending.

He worked at the same job for forty-three years, never receiving a promotion. He worked the night shift for the night-differential pay, but I do not believe he could have handled the social interaction with the men on the day shift. On the night shift, he worked with only one other man. I am not at all certain he would have kept his job for as long as he did without union protection. At one point in his career, he had a boss who was trying to fire him, and he reacted by becoming physically ill. Doctors could find nothing wrong with him, so he went to several clinics, some of them out-of-town prestigious hospitals. Again, no physical reason for his pain was found. Tranquilizers were prescribed. He refused to take them, and took his pain out on our mother. We would wake in the middle of the night to his cursing at her because she did not care for him and would not believe that he was sick. She finally managed it by slipping the tranquilizers into his morning juice, thus solving the problem. His pain went away. She did that for years, until he got a boss who was easier to get along with.

He seldom acted out in front of our friends, which was a blessing, but left us in the situation of hearing about what a neat father we had. We simply agreed since you couldn't explain that he was just using his company manners. However, there were times when we were dating that we wanted to sink through the floor.

He considered the parking place in front of our house to be "his." No matter that it was a public street, it was where he wanted to park his car and nobody else better park there. Our dates, in all innocence, would park their cars there. My father would come home from work and ram his car into one of our date's cars because he felt it in "his" parking place. It was difficult to explain and often ended our relationships. Those that hung in learned to park elsewhere and to tread carefully around him.

He often told us how unhappy he had been when the company he worked for intervened when he tried to enlist in the Navy, doing submarine duty, during World War II. They had insisted that his job was essential on the home front and he stayed home. All of us kids wondered how he could have possibly adjusted to military discipline and to being away from our mother. We felt that while he may have truly have been upset about missing out on the biggest happening of the century, that he was secretly relieved at not having to face the adjustment of leaving home and joining the military. For him, it would have been a tremendous wrench.

We had never heard of manic-depression or bipolar disorder, but we knew our father had problems. We didn't know the diagnosis, or even that what he had was considered a mental illness. My mother handled it in such a matter-of-fact way that all of us simply lived our lives around how my father was; we just adjusted our lives to fit his.

Later, when I got married, I paid for my own simple wedding. I let my mother buy me a new dress because she begged me to. But I did not have my father walk me down the aisle or have any part in the planning or execution of the wedding because I never forgot those words he said to my sister. I wasn't going to give him an opportunity to rain on my parade.

If he was depressed, he was stressed out, and in the extreme, expressed it with somatic disorders. He refused to accept the fact that his depression could cause him to be ill, but my mother handled it. When he became manic, he could be pleasant and even fun for a while, but eventually he would become irritable and finally out of control. Everything, even normal problems of living, was too much for him to manage. My mother took most problems off his back and tried to make his life run as smoothly as possible. What she did not know is that she could not smooth out his moods no matter how hard she tried. Chaos would always be the rule of the day, depression swapping with mania, both of them demanding more of him than he could handle.

After my mother's death, he fell into a deep depression, and was prescribed antidepressants. It was the first time he was offered medication for any of his moods. Of course, he refused to take them. He proved that he could not live without my mother by dying of "respiratory failure" exactly 51 weeks after her death. No one but family came to his funeral, and not even his children were saddened by his death -- only by the fact that he had lived such an unhappy life.

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