My mother is not a candidate for madness. Let me make that perfectly clear: she looks too normal.
If you saw her, across a street, if you even noticed her, she would look like all the other normal people on the same street quietly going about their business: into a drug store for a bottle of cough syrup, up to the library to exchange a book or off to the dentist for a filling. Anybody in the street touched by insanity would be flailing their arms wildly, or screaming obscenities at their gods, or directing the traffic with no clothes on. (That's what mad people do. Isn't it?). And you'd titter and put your hand over your mouth because, even though you think it's quite comical, it isn't nice to laugh at those less fortunate than yourself. And you'd walk on, with your head down, distracting yourself, distancing yourself, from the lunatic's wailing by examining the cracks in the pavement, cemented with discarded balls of pinkgrey gum.
And you'd have forgotten all about them before you reach the end of the street.
My mother has never done any of those things. She has never shouted at somebody who wasn't there. She has never yelled at the sky or waved a fist at somebody none of the rest of us could see. She has never attempted to assume control of traffic direction. She has watched her world go round through brown eyes (somewhere between the colour of dark chocolate and the rich depth of coffee), eyes which are reflective of her serene constancy: they are always exactly the same shade. Mine flash blue green: barometers to my changing moods.
Until Mum got sick, and to begin with we didn't know that she was sick - awkward, sad, distant, irritable, but not sick exactly - she had the fabric of our lives tightly woven together in a pattern of comfortable familiarity, so that you always knew exactly what was coming next. The texture did not change, and though the colors did, there were no Stop-sign reds nor even cautionary ambers amongst the harmony wrought of blues and greens and pale violets. Until Mum got sick, she ironed the fabric of our lives to perfect smoothness.
And when she began to change, when she began to mutate from solidly dependable to shakily defective, it was as if somebody had picked up a pair of shears and cut roughly through a wrap of ordered contentment, bluntly shredding our comfort blanket. One minute Mum was with us and the next she'd gone. No, no, not gone as in disappeared off the face of the planet gone. She was still with us - in person -but her disillusionment with life severed the umbilical cord of motherhood so that we couldn't reach her anymore. Her despair, her disorientation must surely - I told myself - have been spawned by a nightmare: I could swear she was with us last evening at bedtime when she tucked us up, and yet by dawn her essence of self had vanished.
And Mum - as I knew her - had been replaced by a stranger. One who never stopped crying without being able to tell you what provoked the dissolving sadness she suddenly found herself drowning in; one whose hair was standing on end because it hadn't been brushed; one whose lips were pale and dry and cracked (beccause she couldn't be bothered with lipstick) and quivered almost imperceptibly with an inarticulate grief.
She still looked the same Goddamnit (if you discounted the red rimmed eyes and pillow tousled hair).
But somehow that was worse.
If her appearance had morphed with her mood, perhaps it would have been easier to accommodate Depression's presence?
