p19. Broken Hearted, not a loss for words.

I just sit with chills when I read stories of senseless crimes. Somehow it can be connected to struggles of those with mental illness; sometimes I know they are not.

An upscale neighborhood, three brothers, a lovely old house, divorced parents; the mother is the custodial parent. Two of the boys attend one of the most expensive catholic private schools in the city, the other – the middle boy who is 15/16 has attended numerous schools, and just returned from boarding school after being asked to leave. The oldest brother who was to his high school graduation in the following week, was just laying on a couch – then his life was gone, beaten out of him with a baseball bat. Later his middle brother would clean the blood off of himself in the public fountain in the public square of the most prominent shopping area in town, before he asked a stranger to call 911. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

I know the news media seems to be not the best source for … well news. So I have to take it with a weary view, but the details are just odd. Principals are attesting to the goodness of the middle son, having educational problems and being moved repeatedly because of them. Well this is what one principal said, it just so happens to be the principal of the “model” parochial school for LD and SBH students, in fact other Catholic schools are studying their very successful program. Da went to many schools – her boarding school sent her home too.

Given I have few details, and hearing that the defense is looking into psychological testing – someone please tell me he has been tested before; someone please tell me that this family recognized he had issues and kids just don’t shift from schools like this, please tell me that a diagnosis of schizophrenia vs. psychopath was ruled out years ago.

I have heard he was a drug user and was dismissed from schools because of violent behavior, this from people that knew his family. Please tell me this child was given a chance to treat an illness with prescription drugs before he had to self medicate.

I can’t understand this, I am having such pain for this family, this senseless death, this confused teenager, the poor memories the younger brother will now have and the pain this mother and father will never recover from.

Please explain to me how a parent can go on after a tragedy like this.

Please explain to me why mental illness is an embarrassment or is hidden.

Please how do you let someone go with such frustration of knowing something is not right or with the lack of diagnoses. Please tell me that this young graduate lying on the couch didn’t die because of this.

p.18 A Four Year Olds Perfect Family

As much as I can blame Da's bipolar disorder on the baby swing (p2), I can also blame it on her other mother - the one from the West Coast.

We have heard for years that the world was going to end when California legalized marijuana and the migration to the state would cause all of the landmasses on earth to slip into the ocean. Well this did not happen yet, thus Da had time to be born to a mother in California.

Most young children can have the special friend that others might not see; my husband’s favorite movie was about a big white rabbit named “Harvey”. There was something special and kind of longing in the friend of Harvey’s - Mr. Elwood P. Dowd, a sense of acceptance regarding who he was in the world and how he fit amongst others. I am guessing this is how we would all like to feel, a bit calming for the times we live in – maybe this is why kids can create a “friend” to be themselves with.

Now Da, she didn’t have a special friend, she just created a past that went with her present, and we had no idea at the time – future. This was in the form of her “real” family, the one that lived in California. I guess we should have been surprised that our 4 year old decided to have a more interesting family tree that was not near our Midwest/Southern roots, but heck, it wasn’t like everyday didn’t have a surprise.

A four-year olds perfect family… one imagines castles with white horses grazing on grassy knolls, while waves softly break along the coastline (yikes, I just remembered all those “My Little Ponies”). But remember the world of this bipolar kid was not what we would think is ideal. Let’s face it – you see one castle you’ve seen them all and who the heck wants a princess for a mother? Nah, give Da a mom who is serving time in jail. Yes that’s right, our little princess’ mother is really a lady doing hard time on the west coast for burning down her house. I can’t remember if anyone was in the house at the time and for some reason I don’t remember a dad at all. Yep it’s always the mother’s fault – here we go again.

Da could spend hours in glowing detail vividly describing her “other family”, I am sorry I did not write some of the stories down. It was really a bit bizarre that it was not a really idyllic existence, but one a bit more hard-core than the environment we had created.

By the time first grade rolled around, Da had accepted the fact that she would not be seeing her real mother any more. She was not really upset about the fact that some incarcerated woman out west would no longer claim her as kin, so it was her decision to just find an alternative… that special teacher!

Everyone should have one teacher they fall in love with, not necessarily romantically, but nonetheless they should be the apple of your eye, the cherry on the sundae, the person on the pedestal, most of us do. Da’s first grade teacher was a first time teacher, which meant she was very young, very pretty and had a lovely southern drawl. She taught at our parish school, where her sister had been teaching for a few years.

At the first parent teacher conference, Da’s real/not in California dad looked this new teacher square in the eye and said “what is your curriculum for religious education?” well you can just imagine the keg parties she had just put behind her and all the college type things that went with it to become a real adult melting into the floor. This question caught her totally off guard. She stumbled a bit, but then Tom jumped in with “we do expect her to enter the convent after high school”. She gracefully picked her lower lip off the floor and gave a few teehee’s then likely thought we were the strangest people when we left –she didn’t know our sense of humor, nor did she accept Da’s strange behavior as a bit off, well not until she had to baby-sit her in the seventh grade – but again that’s another story.

Needless to say this first conference was the start of true love! Da had it all figured out; we just didn’t figure it out until the school year was almost over. At our final conference the teacher looked at Tom and said “thank you for all the gifts you have sent me through out the year”. It was Tom’s turn to pick his lower lip up now. We had, as we did with all her teachers, become pretty close so it was fun to watch her dish it right back. It turns out, that unbeknownst to us, Da had been wrapping little tidbits she found around the house and giving them to her teacher with a note of unrelenting love from her father. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter - after this conference we were all at the dinner table (the teacher was not there) and we asked her about the gifts. She just gave a giggle and didn’t say much of anything. So I asked her, “if dad marries Ms. B., well Da what would that make me?” she thought about it for a second and just looked me square in the eye and said… “The maid”.