It's Not Business, It's Just Personal

I have a story for you. It's about single motherhood and court systems and poverty and helpless, useless anger.

Once upon a time in a Red State with wide open spaces, opportunistic plants and animals that were either fleet or able to burrow, a woman married a man in one of those really cozy and creative ceremonies that stood for their individuality.

She was tentatively diagnosed as bipolar. He was concretely diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, albeit of the High Functioning kind.

What's a high functioning schizophrenic? First of all, that's the kind who often knows their hallucinations are not real. Secondly, they have a good idea of what delusional thinking looks and feels like so they are able to fight against the maligned thoughts. Thirdly, they know what steps they have to take and what nuances they have to portray in order to be treated more normally and to feel more normal. They spend less time hospitalized and can maintain a fringe-normal existence most of the time.

For this woman, the odd but workable functioning of the man was acceptable. She was a free thinker, after all, and loathe to allow conscious beings to be boxed and labeled for all time.

At his heart, the man was kind and thoughtful and fought hard to maintain his sanity. He put in a colossal effort, bordering on heroic, to live freely and double-check his thinking. Still, he was the victim of a psychotic illness and was at the mercy of how well medication worked and if the very insidious delusion of medication being harmful was actively tearing him down.

Tentatively bipolar? What does that mean?

That means there were plenty of outside factors acting on the woman that caused her deep grief and a tendency to disassociate. The factors were as follows; PTSD from sexual assault incidents, a dying thyroid, and a tendency towards major depression. The dying thyroid wasn't figured out until a few years after its actual death. Put all these together and you can have a pretty passable version of bipolar disorder. What the woman lacked was manic episodes, destructive manic behaviour, and psychotic features. No hallucinations. No delusions. No way to put all together into a solution, either, so the diagnosis stood for nearly a decade with a big question mark after it in all the paperwork.

About three years into their marriage, with the woman truly understanding that she would be the rock, the provider, the hausfrau and the witching rod for reality, the man decided that his then-current medication was killing him.

After much fuss and wringing of hands on the woman's part, the man and his doctors went ahead with a medication change that ended up being a mortal wound to their relationship. Yes, it made the man more energetic and peaceful in his center, but it also made him more aggressive, less emotionally sensitive, and gave him a sense of entitlement with a twist of inability to see outside himself. The fundamental personality change that the woman feared (because of years of research and personal observation) became the new reality.

The woman lost her gentle bear, but refused to give up on her marriage and her husband. She was a good woman with a ramrod moral conscience and she determined that she would Make This Marriage Work. It would simply (hahahahaha!!) be a matter of strength of will and ability to adapt on her part. She was sure she could do it. She was sure she had no choice.

Years later, with the scars and resentment binding her heart into stone silence, it took a triple-punch of incidents to finally obliterate her tenacity and self-damaging loyalty. Their relationship ended with all the typical drama plus a little police intervention and a David Lynchesque scene of blue and red lights, mumbling and prophetical man in the driveway, weeping child under the dining room table,and granite-faced woman gathering her things in a pillowcase and lying to her child that everything was okay.

Walking into the courtroom for the temporary custody hearing, the woman was devas tated but confident in the outcome. The man had been hospitalized time and again while they were married, the boys in blue had been involved multiple times, his diagnosis was the biggest, baddest one you could get short of Insane, and he had no ability to work to support his child. Meanwhile, the woman's diagnosis had been morphed into bipolar II. Tendency towards depression, no psychotic features or incidents, no manic features. She ran hot and hard at times in order to plow through the chaos around her and at times cried for days (nights, really, when no one could see). She worked, she provided, she kept house and she kept her house stumbling along.

She wished desperately that her soon-to-be ex-husband would never again become psychotic. She had prayed for years for him to be spared his awful burden to no avail. All she knew going into the courts was that the danger of a slip in reality for the man was a direct danger to their child. The slips were fast, he was secretive about them, and it often took days for him to finally seek help if he did so at all.  She also knew exactly what the agony of those days was to anyone within range of the man. She had been the feather wall between her husband in illness and their child. It was inconceivable that he would be granted custody. She figured he'd get weekends and some hours after school with their child. After all, the child adored his father and it was good. She had faith that the Justice System would do actual justice because this case concerned a child.

The Judge handed down this decision: Week on, week off custody. Legally, the man and the woman were equally capable of caring for the child according to his decision. What had never been a 50/50 split in caregiving (or providing or housekeeping or feeding or sanity) was suddenly, coldly, the way it would be.

The woman fought it. She fought it for about fifteen thousand dollars. She fought it all the way to the devastation of her savings and way past her ability to get any more loans from her family or the bank. It took that much money for her to realize that his backers had no intention of stopping his funds. He was in it for twice what she was and had no signs of slowing the spending.

Finally, out of desperation and extreme poverty, she came to see a way through.

Custody agreements. They will separate your liver from your body and you will learn to live with a great big, bloody hole in the center of your self.

And now? What does the woman do now? She tried running away. That didn't work and she will now learn that patience is a virtue. So, she waits. She waits for the inevitable with the man and she will be always vigilant, always injured, always compassionate for his burdens, and never forgiving for his arrogance. She will wait for the day when she has to pick up her child who has just seen far too much from someone he adores.

What then?

I can't tell you that. I really don't know. I'm living in fear, anticipation, sadness, and hope. Every other week I am calm and unafraid. Those are the weeks I have my son. In the meantime, I watch. In the meantime, my child is doing just fine and I guide my compass by that.