“That would be great, thanks,” Alex says.
The twins throw their arms around my neck, and I pretend they’re hugging me too hard. “You’re too strong! I’m not sure how long I can last!” I groan as if I’m in pain. This of course makes them laugh harder, hug tighter, and eventually I give in and squeeze them back. “Happy Hanukkah,” I say, ruffling their hair and dropping the kind of too-loud kisses they pretend to hate on top of their heads.
“Make sure Cassiopeia has her water in the purple cup,” Alex calls, and Javier holds it up, grinning.
“How do you even bring yourself to discipline them?” I ask as the trio clomps upstairs, Cassie already telling Orion how she’s going to get him back at dreidel tomorrow night.
“Oh, somehow we manage.”
I’m pushing my own bedtime again, but I think I needed this. Alex disappears into the kitchen and returns with two glasses of wine, watching as I gulp down half of one.
“Should I get you the whole bottle?”
“I’m cutting myself off,” I say as I pour his glass into mine. “After this one.”
“I was about to ask if it’s been a long week, but it’s only Monday.”
I wave my hand. “Long week, long month, long year.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“My boss. As usual. When isn’t it my boss? And thank you, but . . . I’m dealing with it.” Or I will be, with the ever-polite but still mysterious Russell Barringer. Tomorrow.
“Well then,” Alex says, sliding onto the couch next to me, “I wanted to talk to you about something.” He plays with a frayed edge of a blanket, and—oh. Javier must have taken Cassie and Orion upstairs to give us some time alone. “It’s about Mom.”
I wish I could undo the visceral reaction this sparks in me. I hate that those three words conjure up the kind of anxiety that makes me want to sprint upstairs and hide in a child-sized bed. “Okay.”
Alex takes a deep breath. “She’s at a psychiatric treatment center.”
A cold front rushes in, filling my brain with static. “She—what? Is she okay?”
His expression softens, but his words remain serious. “Ari. It’s a good thing. Or—it’s going to be, at least. She went to the ER yesterday after calling 911. The guy she was seeing, Ted? He broke up with her last week. And it brought all her emotions to the surface in a really extreme way. They told me she was having a panic attack when she called, and she was convinced she was going to die, and that—that she was going to die alone.” He pauses to collect himself, running a hand down his freckled face. “It sounded like she didn’t think she could take care of herself. But she’s safe now. That’s the most important thing.”
Okay. She’s okay. She’s safe.
I can barely process the rest of it because I can’t quantify the number of times I’ve wanted my mother to get help. I can’t visualize her in the kind of hospital I’ve only ever seen in medical dramas.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I really understood something was wrong, and then it became so crystal clear. Hindsight: that precise and painful thing that made all the fragments of “that’s just Mom” click into place. In high school, when she was teaching me to drive and she broke down sobbing in the middle of the freeway because her boyfriend had dumped her via text. In middle school, when she shut herself in her room and refused to leave for three days, and I begged Alex to help me pick the lock because I didn’t know if she was still alive. In elementary school, when our dad told her he couldn’t be around her anymore, that she was bringing him down, and couldn’t she just be happy for once in her goddamn life? For a few years after he left, he sent cards on our birthdays. The last one was for my bat mitzvah, and I didn’t bother keeping it.
When my mother was deep in one of those moods, it seemed like nothing brought her joy—not her job, not family outings, not working in the garden, which she loved on her good days. If Alex and I were excited about something, she couldn’t muster even a tenth of the enthusiasm. She used so many sick days, I was shocked she was able to keep her job, and she’d make snide remarks about my appearance I told myself she didn’t really mean.
Then there was the revolving door of boyfriends who ranged from scumbag to fixer, calling her “hysterical” or “batshit” or “crazy.” Alex and I learned how to be independent, how to cook if we needed to, how to use public transportation if she wasn’t up to driving us somewhere. It wasn’t all the time, which made it easier for us to pretend nothing was wrong. Sometimes she’d go weeks or months without an episode. She’d go back to gardening and we’d pile on the couch to watch a movie together and I’d think, This is okay. Everything’s okay now. But then she’d swing right back.
In high school, I started feeling off. Withdrawn. An acute sadness crept in that I could only occasionally attach to something specific. At first, it was easy to ignore because I was usually too worried about my mother. So I didn’t tell anyone, just let it live alongside me and turn my world grayer.
I went to therapy for the first time in college, the heaviness I’d lived with for a few years making it impossible to concentrate, despite how much I loved what I was studying. It scared me, how similar it looked to what my mother was going through, that for a while I assumed it had to be normal. I slept too much and had trouble making friends. I didn’t know when it took root, only that I was having fewer and fewer good days in between bouts of hopelessness and lethargy. I didn’t know if anyone in the campus clinic could help me, but at the very least, I figured I couldn’t feel any worse than I already did.
“I just feel . . . off,” I told the therapist. I learned there was probably a name for what my mother was struggling with, even though she’d never been diagnosed, never talked to anyone, never taken medication. I learned that all the reasons I was furious with Amelia Abrams and found her emotionally draining to the point where I’d need twelve hours of sleep the next day to recover from a visit home—they were beyond her control, to a certain extent. She was suffering, too. But she wouldn’t help herself.
And then I learned that the thing weighing me down wasn’t just an adjective, but a noun. Depression. I was clinically depressed, and I wasn’t going to let it control me. My mother had always been against medication. She said it was because of the side effects, but she wouldn’t even take Advil when she had a headache. But I wanted a life on the opposite end of the spectrum from my mother’s, so I filled my prescription.
It had been such a relief to have a name for it—until I came home for winter break and tried to explain it to her. Some part of me hoped she’d see herself in my diagnosis, that it might spark her to get help. “We’re all depressed,” she said instead, brushing it off. “The world is fucking awful. We just have to learn how to deal with it.”
I wouldn’t let her pull me back under. For almost ten years, I’ve been on meds and in therapy, and they’ve changed my life.
“It’s a great place. I checked it out online, and it has solid reviews,” Alex is saying, and I briefly imagine a Yelp for psychiatric hospitals. “She wants to change, Ari.”