On This Birthday I Promise It Will Never Be Like This

“In spite of illness, in spite of even the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.” ― Edith Wharton

My mother stands in my room – not my room, but the room I use when I visit my parents – and she tells me I am missing school, missing the bus, late for high school. She is eighty-six, I am fifty-three and no one is supposed to be at school. She will not drive me; I must hitchhike as I did when I was in high school if I overslept. Her tone is urgent and slightly frightened. I say, “No Mom, go back to bed, go back to bed. You’re dreaming.” She disappears and I lie there in that room that isn’t my room, in the bed that is single and narrow, and I try to fall asleep again, but it is hard. I am afraid she’ll come back and scare me like she used to when I was little and the night had lasted forever with my father shouting, the sound of glass breaking, my mother’s pleading about something, more yelling, possibly a car starting – who will die tonight?

photo by Matt Bennett

I have been here a week and I feel insane. The days are dominated by discussions centering upon my father’s depression, his thinness, his sleeping and staring and barely speaking. Or food. My mother’s energy is focused upon planning meals and his doctor’s appointments. She was an architect, they both graduated from Harvard with advanced degrees, he was the funniest, most brilliant person I’d ever known but now they are this. Daddy summons up his best moment when I walk into the room and holds his head up and tries to smile but it isn’t real. His eyes are scared. We are all scared, but no one can talk about the fear, the secrets, there is no mercy here. Each morning, early, before they are awake, I tiptoe down the stairs and drive to an AA meeting where I sit in a circle with others, some familiar, a girl I knew in high school, a boy who partied with my oldest sister, my now dead oldest sister, others not from before but from earlier years when I flew in from Chicago and tried to fix this shattered globe, the curved glass that once held the farmhouse, the professor and the architect and their three beautiful girls, The Three Graces daddy called us, jagged and missing. 

Sometimes I speak, sometimes I listen, always, I leave feeling tethered, safer, better able to re-enter the madhouse. It’s what I do, what I’ve done for decades now, through death, marriage, divorce, remarriage, motherhood, divorce, success, remarriage, failure and everything else this life generously offers.

He has threatened suicide so the helpful geriatric consultant my helpful life coach sister has sent tells me I have to bring him into the emergency room and wait for a bed in the nut house. Yes, the nut house is what we call it and so it is exactly that. The three of us drive to the hospital where I was born and get my father processed. Five hours later I drive my mother home, order her to eat and return to where they have stashed my dad in a curtained alcove. He lies on a gurney, his eyes closed but he isn’t asleep. Nothing has been done to hasten his processing. The emergency room doctors don’t know about his genius, his stint in an orphanage, his eight novels, his expertise as a Joyce, Yeats, Dickens scholar. He is just an old man with a mouthy middle-aged daughter. We wait. It is cold and after a while my father stirs.
“Molly?”
“Yes, Daddy?”
“Are you cold?”
It’s the first time he has asked me anything about myself since I arrived.
“Maybe, a little.”
“Take the extra blanket. This is terrible, isn’t it?” “Yes.” It is now three o’clock in the morning.

I walk into the emergency room and I address the doctors and several nurses. I tell them they are very bad people and that my father is a great scholar and has lived in Princeton for fifty years. I tell them I was born in this hospital, and they should be ashamed of themselves. I tell them we are leaving. We leave.

I take my father home and then realize my wallet is missing. If I don’t have my wallet I can’t go home. I drive back to the hospital and skulk into the emergency room where I just made my stirring speech and ask if anyone has seen my wallet. No one says anything. When I return to the car, I see it is lying on the roof of the car next to mine. The next day I take my father to therapy, and she asks to see me. I speak like a responsible adult daughter, but when I describe my mother’s telling me to go to high school something breaks. She listens and tells me I have PTSD from my childhood. Oddly, this is comforting.  

On the flight back to Chicago, the plane loses all its compression, and we go into a nosedive. We land on foam in Pittsburgh. Eighteen hours later I am home. My son asks me to take him shopping and on the way we have a fight. I start to scream at him and he gets out of the car at a red light. I leave the car running, doors open and chase him yelling his name. He doesn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop either. I drive home and get into bed with our two cats. When my son comes home I tell him I am sorry. He says it’s all right. I tell him I have PTSD and he smiles. We both laugh.

–Molly Moynahan