WE LEARN HOW TO FORGET
I will never forget the first time I realized my mother was crazy.
It was a look I saw in her eyes as I studied her face in the moonlight the night she told me the Virgin Mary had appeared to her to tell her the world was going to end, that I could instinctively decode was a threat to my survival
While I didn't have the emotional or intellectual capacity to understand the psychosis behind her narrative, I somehow knew at that moment that my mother, the only person who had truly loved me - the only person who had cared for and protected me, was no longer safe.
When my mother told me the following morning that we were going to Washington DC to warn the President of the United States about the Virgin Madonna’s big ultimatum, it only confirmed what my little body knew the night before - something terrible had happened to my mother, and it was up to me to protect us all.
I ill never forget riding in the passenger seat of her Pontiac Grand Am as we drove to the airport and the panic I felt as my mind raced to find to find words to convince her to drive me back to school. I remember contemplating jumping out of the moving car to run away, but deciding against it because I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving behind my baby brother. I remember tugging at her shirt while she booked our tickets at the airport counter, and the vice-like grip of her hand as she dragged me across the terminal towards the gate as I begged, "Mama, please. I'm scared. I don't want to go.”
But my most heart-wrenching memory from that day, the one that etched itself inside my soul for the rest of my life, was the indignation in her eyes when she looked at me and told me to shut the fuck up with such unbridled rage that my heart shattered into countless fractured pieces.
My father, my brother, and I have never been able to agree on the exact sequence of events that followed that day at the airport, but we do know that my father flew to Washington DC to retrieve us from the hospital where a police officer had taken us after finding us outside the White House gates at three in the morning, several days later.
My recollections of my time in DC remain hazy to this day, with only a few fragmented images remaining - the vivid contrast of my mother's fiery red hair against the white walls of the psychiatric ward, walking with a strange doctor on the hospital roof, and the smell of my brother's vomit on the hotel room floor.
But I wouldn’t remember any of this until many years later, because I tucked away every single memory of this experience, as well as every traumatic event that followed, into the deepest, darkest recesses of my subconscious.
One of the most profound human desires is for a sense of control over the world around us, and when learn as young children that we have no control we grow into adults who want nothing more than to be in control - and it is that grasping, yearning, and battling for control that has defined me for most of my life.
As I grew in the years that followed Washington DC, I learned more than anyone should ever know about what it means to lose all control from "that look” I saw in my mother’s eyes for the very first time that night.
I learned that I had no control over when that look would come and that it often came at the most pivotal moments of my life. It didn’t matter if it was my birthday, my best friend's funeral, my wedding day, or Christmas morning, it would inevitably come to hijack my entire life. I learned that I had no control over how that look would transform my mother - sometimes, she’d laugh with the wild abandon of a child, other times, she would burst out of the back of a hospital, gown slipping off her bare body, screaming, “don't take my baby!" while I watched as three doctors wrestled her into a straight jacket and dragged her back inside.
I learned that look sometimes left my mother feeling so hopeless that she'd overdose on pills and hemorrhage off the bed while my ten-year-old brother tried to save her life. At other times, it filled her with such grand delusions that she'd drive topless, performing wheelies and tossing beer cans out the window, while she shouted "Happy National Beer Day" in the local convenience store parking lot.
I learned I had no control over what followed "that look" - meaning how long she would vanish, where I would end up in her absence, or what version of her would re-emerge when she came back.
I learned over, and over, and over again that I could stop my mother from leaving me, and that every time she did, I was forced to rely on strangers to protect me - and that no one ever did.
Through these experiences, I have learned that humans have a potential for resilience that is far stronger than one could ever imagine.
But in the absence of any power to control or escape stressors that are beyond our body’s ability to cope, we only have one way of coping with the overwhelming feelings and sensations we experience in these moments - we adapt ourselves to survive.
So, six-year-old little Christina, left on the streets of D.C., already learned an invaluable lesson on coping with the loss of control she experienced that day….