I have no childhood memories of my father sleeping. Or napping on the couch. Or sitting still.
When he was diagnosed with manic-depressive/bipolar disorder when I was about twelve and my parents' marriage had hit the fan, I began to understand what those big words meant, and why my dad (when he was manic) had seemingly boundless energy and creativity. He could think about forty different things at one time, and would change his mind at least that many times an hour. And that meant our family life was always in flux as we all tried to keep up. When you were with him, it was a wild ride of fun and entertainment. As long as you could keep up.
If you fell behind, couldn't read his mind, or weren't quite ready for the next high dive into adventure you were criticized and castigated and left in the dust. He was the center of attention, the class clown, the life of the party.
Until, of course, he wasn't. Gravity is a fact in a psychiatric sense as well, and what went up eventually had to come back down. When the emotion, money and energy was spent, everything would crash to the floor and he would disappear into a pit of depression that would last maybe days, weeks, maybe all winter.
When he was finally diagnosed and started on the bumpy road of medication and management, a lot improved even though there were and still are permanent consequences. Burned bridges don't repair themselves. But even in the pockmarked moonscape of recovery, there are remnants of beautiful things, and it would be remiss to ignore them.
Something wonderful about my dad was his constant love of learning. He collected tidbits of information like other people collect ceramic owls. I could ask him anything about the world (provided he was in the right mood) and he almost always had an answer. If he didn't, he'd drop everything and we'd go marching off to the library and do some research in the stacks. He was interested in everything, and all of life was an opportunity for learning and for teaching.
The troubles of manic-depression are devastating, but I believe in the discipline of looking for the blessing in the trial. That ability to learn exponentially, to be interested in a myriad of topics, to be always learning, always curious about how the world works - I think that is part of the blessing of bipolar that I've seen in the life of my father.
When I was diagnosed with bipolar myself ten years ago, at first I was in anguish at the thought of repeating my father's life. The statistics of divorce and suicide were almost overwhelming. But as I got better, I saw that history doesn't have to repeat itself. I can't change my genetically inherited propensity to this disorder that I got from my dad, but I can make different choices as to how I live with it.
Would I change it if I could and pick a different set of genes? Maybe. But maybe I'd be giving up a lot of my personality. Maybe I'd just be exchanging for a different set of problems. But anyway, I can't change. I can only be responsible for how 'I play the cards I've been dealt,' as Kay Redfield Jamison writes in the excellent book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.
But if I have to live with the struggle, I want the blessing too. My dad's love of and insatiable curiosity for the natural world, for history, geography, politics, agriculture, foreign culture, philosophy and on and on and on marked me for life. I want to be that kind of teacher to my kids, hopefully with more patience and less criticism.
I'm passing on the same genetics. Let me also pass on a good part of my dad's character, the 'blessing' if you will, of bipolar disorder.
