For hours, I sat in the back of our little AMC Concord, lost in my little head, happy to escape the wall cloud of anxiety emanating from my mother in the driver’s seat. Her terror spread throughout the vehicle, intermingling with the cigarette smoke that fully encompassed my siblings and me. We were plucked from school to take an unexpected trip, unaware of where we were heading and why she looked so frantic.
I stared out the window as rows of cotton whizzed by for miles and miles like corduroy stretched over the horizon. When you get the angle right, driving by cotton fields is hypnotizing–a soothing, perfectly consistent pattern of white and brown lines that race past you and seem to emanate from a stationary vanishing point. It’s the visual equivalent of the satisfaction you get from running a mallet across a xylophone.
The further northwest we traveled toward Lubbock, the more frequently the oil pumps came and went. I used to imagine they were T-Rexes, the only carnivorous dinosaur known to seven-year-olds back then. The motion of the pump looked like they were repeatedly bending down to tear chunks of flesh from their prey. Prime source material for a young boy’s imagination. In order for those pump jacks to extract the valuable crude nestled in the earth’s crust, they must operate with balance and rhythm. Only with ingenious design, impeccable manufacturing, installation, and maintenance will the pumps function properly. The crank rotates pushing and pulling the head up and down, drawing the oil upward. Everything works as it was designed, the life of the T-Rex is consistent and reliable. It’s balance and rhythm.
My trance was broken when my mother cracked the window a bit which pulled a stream of gray cigarette smoke up and out. She had the familiar look about her that haunted my dreams as a child, one that indicated she was in the throes of a manic spell. In that state, she didn’t sleep for days at a time, her eyes were slightly wider than normal with sepia tones where the white should be. It was difficult to discern where the skin ended and her eyes began. Her hands would shake and she compulsively bit the insides of her mouth. She wouldn’t say much because she was thoroughly engrossed in whatever delusion had hijacked her consciousness. It was evident that she had swung drastically this time, probably off her meds and exacerbated by alcohol use. No balance, no rhythm.
Leading up to this surprise road trip, the nightly fighting had ramped up significantly between my parents after we were put to bed. Shouting, insulting, accusing, even getting physical with each other. We always slept with our bedroom doors open. Why they exposed us to the fighting is beyond me, my dad especially. I can only surmise that he was in survival mode himself, unsure of how to unravel the distorted knot his life had become. They could have simply closed the door.
Sometimes we arrived home from school to find my mother in a catatonic state lying in a dark bedroom with curtains drawn. I would make attempts to draw her out of the darkness with humor, thinking, if I could just make her smile, bring an ounce of happiness into her life it would make a difference. I would act goofy, make faces, crack jokes–the roles of child and caretaker reversed. At times, I was successful in these attempts and she would smile or even get up out of bed. These experiences were the origin of an awareness of the suffering of others and a desire to end the suffering.
We snacked on what we could, played Atari, and missed soccer practices. Some days we would snack too much after school and spoil our dinner. On one occasion, none of us had any appetite left by the time we sat down at the table. My mother was clearly agitated, and after increasingly insistent commands to eat our food, she stood up and screamed in a primal and terrifying tone, “EAT, JUST EAT, GOD DAMN IT!” She lifted her chair and threw it over the table crashing into the wall behind us and retreated to her room. We sat there looking at each other, terrified, trying with everything in us to bring a bite of food to our mouths, chew, and swallow–difficult because the rush of cortisol left my mouth bone dry. Eventually, I went into my mother’s room and found her lying on the bed with eyes open, but not responding to any outward stimuli. Seeing her that way sent a chill through me. I ran to my room as my heartbeat accelerated in panic. I was hyperventilating and scared of the incomprehensible thing that was happening to me, my first anxiety attack at the innocent age of seven.
Acute anxiety attacks progress with exponential speed. You notice something is happening, which elevates the fear, which exacerbates the symptoms, which further elevates the fear, spiraling like Fibonacci’s sequence–reaching back and launching forward. My sister sat with me and rubbed my back, soothing me until I calmed down. We learned to rely on each other for comfort. My mother’s condition, not remotely understood by any of us at the time, was in a free-fall, spinning out of control.
That morning, driving through cotton and oil fields, she had absconded with us, intent on taking us away from our home and our father. She showed up at school to get me and my brother, who had just finished up his half-day of Kindergarten. I was at lunch and watched her enter the cafeteria with a sense of dread and embarrassment from her disheveled appearance. Her hair was messed up. The whites of her eyes were the same bland oatmeal color as her skin. She wore a knee-length purple quilted coat that was unevenly buttoned as if she had left home in a hurry. I knew immediately something was not right. We picked up my sister at the intermediate school and headed out of town.
The AMC Concord was weathered by this point. The dashboard faded to pink, the upholstery fading and dotted with cigarette burns, and the pile of the maroon carpet in the floorboards was worn down almost in the shape of shoe prints. When we were younger, I would lay on the back dashboard, my sister below me in the back seat, and my younger brother would sleep on the floorboard. We had outgrown that now. My sister and I shared the back seat and a sense of confusion and dread. We had been through things like this before–like this, but never quite this.
“Momma, where are we going?” she asked.
No answer–just a frenetic forward stare, checking the mirrors, white knuckles on the steering wheel. We didn’t dare ask again for a while, but soon I knew we were headed to Levelland, my parents’ hometown. I had memorized certain geographical features of the drive, particularly the series of hills just outside of my hometown of Stephenville. We made this drive every Christmas, and I loved to look out the back window at certain points where the repeated peaks and valleys in the road looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. I knew where we were going, but I didn’t know why.
When we hit the interstate, we traveled the frontage roads, entering the freeway only when there was no other option and exiting as soon as possible. My mother had an irrational fear of freeways and traveling at high speeds, but it seemed like there was more going on this time.
Later in life, I started piecing together her delusions. Perhaps this was the one where vigilantes were looking for a young girl, all grown up now, who lined up their little sisters along the schoolhouse wall and mowed them down with machine gun fire. For years she had managed to evade them. She married and changed her name, moved to the city, back to the oil fields, to the gulf coast. She ran and ran to find new hope to hide behind. She hid behind the fleeting novelty of her own children. But again, they were on her trail. They were searching the highways for her, there above the embankment of dead grass, above the overpasses. She would avoid them at all costs. This delusion that she had shot her friends in high school and their families were seeking revenge was just one of many fantasies she was haunted by in her manic episodes.
Traveling in this way, along the frontage roads, took hours. We grew hungry, but none felt brave enough to voice that basic need. Maslow’s hierarchy had been cut into strips and tossed into the air.
“Momma, where are we going? Where’s daddy?” I asked
Snapping out of her trance, she answered, “We’re just going to see Grandma Davis,” my great-grandmother. That was all the explanation provided, but at least we knew she had a destination.
When we arrived at Grandma Davis’ house, she was clearly surprised to see all of us there, unaware we were coming, and shocked at the physical state of my mother. She greeted us with a hug, but I could see right away she knew something was not right. My mother visibly, audibly relaxed when she crossed the threshold into Grandma Davis’ home. It was clear there was a deep-seated sense of security she associated with her grandmother that assuaged her delusional terror. Grandma Davis made some coffee and they sat to smoke a cigarette together.
My father worked long hours, and probably had no idea what had occurred until he came home to an empty house late that night. He started making phone calls immediately and before long figured out where we were and what had happened. The next day, he flew to Lubbock, picked us up and flew us home. He could have left my mother then and there and taken custody of us, but instead, he directed her to drive the car home, alone. He either couldn’t, or didn’t know how to give up on her, to untie this Gordian knot. She returned home the following day and agreed to be committed to the state hospital in Wichita Falls, a danger to herself and others.
Buried deep in the folds of gray matter, there is a faint and flickering image of my mother crying and saying goodbye to me. I think it was this moment of separation, but I cannot be sure. She was suddenly gone from our daily existence and I could not comprehend why. Unlike the perfectly arranged rows of cotton along the highways, this period in my young life had no predictable pattern, no consistency, no vanishing point. It more resembled a game of Pick-Up Sticks when rods are scattered in a pile on the ground. Unlike those West Texas T-Rexes, there was no balance and no rhythm.