Living Around the Blues

Happy-ness Is Busy-ness

Anthea Rowan — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:18:59 +0000

My mother had a kitchen soap dish once; it read ‘Happiness is Busyness''.

Trite. But true. I wonder, now, who gave it to her?

I tick the long, lonely hours of my days off in tiny, tiny achievements. Like stepping stones across a quagmire in which I might drown without a trace, not even a single bubble, were I to slip and fall in. I tread carefully upon each one from the time I get up in the morning to the time when the sun begins to sink and I can crack open a cold beer in brief self-congratulatory praise at having got from one end of my day to the other.

So I gather 18 baby tomatoes from the vines which have flourished in the rains. I drop them into a white dish as I count them ... one, two, three ... and I note their plum rose full cheeked redness against the pallor of pale china. And I hear them fall, one by one: small, slow applause. Clever old you, they murmur. I harvest five maize cobs. I will, I tell myself, strip the kernels and serve them in a cheese sauce, bubbling brown, for Hat and I for lunch. I will tell Hat, ‘My mum used to make this for me, when I was little'. And it will taste good for the memory and the comfort that comes with warm, salty, nursery foods.

I trail about the garden and half-heartedly do a spot of weeding and wonder where to plant rocket, parsley, a patch of carrots. I make a batch of doughtnuts, and a basin of muesli, tipping floury oats into a basin and stirring in softsage green pumpkin seeds and glossy ivory sunflower pips with my hands and I add molasses-black raisins, like fat little ladies who have spent too much time in the sun. Tomorrow - at breakfast - my husband will say, as he helps himself to a bowlful, ‘Oh great, muesli'. Later I will make the telephone call I have been avoiding, I will load the washing machine, I will sort out the ironing. I will think about what to feed everybody for supper.

Mundane, banal, some of it smacks of 1950s stereotypes in white pinnies (note to reader: I never wear an apron). And most of it could wait.

But I, you see, cannot.

Despite all the time in the world, I cannot wait to fold fresh linen into piles.

For it is in the waiting, in the hiatus between being occupied and being idle, that Depression is wont to slink in. If I keep my bodyweight pressed firmly against my front door shouting, loudly and rudely and determinedly, ‘Go Away! I'm busy! Can't you see?' perhaps I shall be safe. It is no guarantee, of course; I am sufficiently well acquainted with Depression to know that there is no surefirequickfixcure just as there is no warranty any one of us will never succumb. For therein lie's Depression's greatest skill: its cunning.

And that is when I remember how lucky I am. Because I know the nooks and crannies and tiny gaps through which chilly Depression can squeeze.

And I know how important it is to try to fit draught excluders into every single one.

In Celebration of Insanity

Anthea Rowan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:43:15 +0000

Jeanette Winterson writes in praise of the crackup.

And I am reminded of a year-long project when it seemed imperative to celebrate the creativity born of madness. (Or the madness born of creativity?).

Sometimes madness must be justified. Sometimes - because every effort to weed it out has failed and it remains rooted, in my case, in the deep, dark ringed eyes of my mother who stared at me mournfully across the breakfast table whilst she feebly pushed a slice of toast around her plate - it must be celebrated.

For what else is there? It remained soggily in residence anyway, saturating her every sense and by cold, seeping association, mine too.

It's there. That's that. Acceptance is good, acceptance is a start. But often it isn't enough.

To seek some redeeming quality, some bright little spark, amongst the dead-weight indifference of Depression is essential to coping with it.

Putting Up With It.

And so, at some point in my life, when acceptance of Mum's illness was beginning to fray to complacency, when my reading about sick minds and what ails them had stalled and when my patience was at a low ebb, it seemed necessary to elevate tolerance to something akin to salutation.

Something like Counting Your Blessings.

And so I decided, one day in November 2003, to demonstrate - if only to myself - the proximity of madness to genius. Literature, I decided, should be the medium of explanation. Why? Why was it important to undertake a seemingly pointless task - after all the connection had been proven many times before? Because I needed to reassure myself that mental chaos was not objectionable. Because I needed to prove that mad doesn't equate with ‘bad'. Because I needed to substantiate an argument I was trying to describe: that dismissing those who live with the spectre of mental illness (one which presents its shadowy self in many guises: depression, bipolar, psychoses) is to reject the gifts that frequently come with it.

Because I needed something to do?

Whatever the reason, the excuse, when I was 38 (bittersweet irony: the age mum was when she first succumbed) I was overtaken by a passion to understand mum's illness better, to ask questions I had never asked before.

The first person I wrote to on a list I compiled of Those Who Have Written About Their Madness was Lewis Wolpert. His book - Malignant Sadness - was the first book Mum recommended I read about Depression; I felt as if somebody had taken me by my hand and led me so close to the experience of the illness I could feel the intimate chill of Its skin.

Over the next few months I contacted more than thirty writers. Some put me in touch with others; writers spreading the word. A literary chain reaction. But the celebrity of those I wrote to was not nearly - as time passed - as overwhelming as their incredible generosity or their honesty or their unswerving support. They told me their stories, they offered - tentatively and kindly - advice. We discussed the importance of a frank, unveiled ‘kitchen sink' approach to mental illness. One writer reminded me of the importance of courage, humour and ‘above all, irony'. I wondered (aloud, in the silence of an online discussion) whether those with whom I corresponded would forfeit their creativity, their literary talent, their genius in order to be relieved of the ‘madness'. 'Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death', said British Psychiatrist R D Laing. ‘Perhaps', replied one, ‘it is romantic to suggest all mad people are creative geniuses, but I doubt if there are any creative geniuses who are entirely balanced. Besides, it's a great comfort to all of us who are definitely on the verge of madness to believe we are harbouring creative genius, and we should not be denied that.'

We discussed, in the comforting, liberating anonymity of our cyberspace cocoon, that the phrase mental fragility should supplant that preferred by the experts: mental illness. Indeed. For perhaps without the fragility of her mind, My mother's intellect would not be as fine. Perhaps without her vulnerability she would be without her astonishing astuteness, her zest for the written word, her gentleness, her generosity, her compassion and her courage, her extraordinary wisdom, her enormous insight into the souls and psyches of others.

Perhaps you can't have everything.

Perhaps without the one flaw, the brilliant bits would not be as bold, would be blunted by a cloud of complacency, perhaps the cracks heighten her awareness of her world?

Perhaps I tell myself these things because it makes the difficult times easier to bear.

Perhaps that's the best I can do.

Creating Gaps. Closing Doors.

Anthea Rowan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:47:43 +0000

I think that my mum's illness, its sly and stealthy onset so that at first we could believe what she told us - I'm just having a bad day - coincided with the collapse of her role as mother.

Not entirely, of course, the job is never taken away entirely: once a mom, always a mom. But its shape morphs and evolves and moves so that at times it is difficult to grapple with, to grasp firmly, to pin down: that's what I do: I'm a mom.

When children go to school. Start college. Leave home.

You're never out of a job.

But you can feel redundant.

As if of all the balls you were juggling, you had dropped one. Or two. Or all three.

And it's in the searching, in the flailing about that follows, that Depression can slide in. Unseen. Innocuous. Into the cool gap left by departingallgrownup children.

Mum has always maintained the Depression is about loss. Loss of direction. Loss of self-confidence. Loss of self.

See. Here's the thing. Become a mother - like she did, like I did, like my maternal grandmother did - at 25 (such neat symmetry: you'd think there'd be some tidy security in that?) and do little else than raise one, two, three, four children for 18, 19, 20 years and you become defined by them. By their needs, their demands, their presence.
And then they are gone.

They no longer need you to remind them to clean their teeth, brush their hair, you no longer drive them to school, help with homework. And as they grow up so you are, quite rightly, and perfectly healthily given that they must seek their own way, carve out their own niche in the world, relegated to Second Place.

That's not the part that's hard. The part that's hard is in the rededication of the self. Yourself. Myself.

I put my son on a plane bound for school. I will not see him for two months. He is a head taller than me now.

And when I am safely back in the car, I find myself crying.

Why don't they get easier? These partings? The umbilical cord that anchored him to me was cut 18 years ago. But the emotional one, binding me to him, is powerful still.

He does not cry. Of course he doesn't! He is a composed young man excited at his adventures. Poised to take flight. And I am happy. Happy that he does not cry. Happy that he relishes his return to learning, peers, football with such palpable energy.

I cry because when I come home it seems emptier. And bigger. (But not in a good way).

And I vow to keep busy.

I sit at my desk, open my laptop and as I begin to write I notice a draught.
And I get up to close a door.

Firmly.

Hiding Cracks

Anthea Rowan — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:11:16 +0000

Imagine a table magnificently set for dinner with the finest bone china and cut glass, the most brilliant silver, each place laid with thoughtful precision, every knife and fork and spoon at exactly the right angle, imagine a vase of beautiful flowers neatly arranged as a centerpiece.

Now imagine a child at one end of the table, fidgeting in his seat, swinging on his chair, imagine that he tips his seat with such energetic enthusiasm that it begins to fall backwards, he reaches out in a panic for support and the only thing that comes to hand is the edge of a the neatly pressed snow-white linen table cloth. As the child - eyes wide with terror - falls, clutching the fabric tightly in his fist, so the tablecloth begins to slide across the polished surface of the dining table. The child hits the ground and every item on the table follows him.

There is a metallic crash of cutlery, the smash of plates, the shattering of a dozen crystal wine glasses, the drowning of the salt in the water which spills from the vase, the stain of red wine upon pristine white as it bleeds slowly from a bottle lying on its side.

And then there is silence - before the child's indignant scream - a deafening, hollow silence.

That's how it feels to watch a person slip into Depression. You can see what's about to happen, you can see a catastrophe unfolding, but you are completely powerless to do anything about it. It happens anyway. And before you know it, you find yourself surveying the wreckage in dismay - shards of glass, fragments of china, all the good plates strewn about you. Broken.

And you know you'll never be able to fix it, not without knowing there will always be cracks. Even if nobody else can see them, you will always know they are there, a fragility beneath the façade.

Roots and Wings

Anthea Rowan — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:59:21 +0000

My son was eighteen last week.

My eldest daughter begins at boarding school next week.

Small pieces of me are breaking away; splinters of myself.

My mother remembers the feeling well. The loud fluttering of young wings that faded to silence when we'd all gone. Gone to school. To college. Away to work.

Gone.

She thinks it might have precipitated her first episode of Depression. Loss, she says. Loss of definition. Loss of direction. Loss of self really.

I am defiant. And determined. Not to suffer similarly.

I tell myself it's easier for me. Easier to stay in touch. How obliging technology is: at the pressing of a few buttons I can reach any one of my children. If they'd only pick up. But as much as I try to tidy my apron strings, tighten them for the slackness is disconcerting, so my manchild son is trying to disengage himself from their long reached trailing.

He doesn't pick up.

Learning to let go, to let be, is hard. Learning to understand that they need their Space is challenging when you are swallowed by the stuff. Space. Too, too silent space.

I tell myself it is easier for me to sidestep the same hell that enveloped my mother. I will not get Depressed. I will keep busy. I will focus. I will understand that they are only doing what is natural - making their own way in this big, big world. I say it out loud. Into the mirror. As if to persuade my reflection I can do this. Forewarned (my mother's own ghastly experience) is Forearmed. I tell myself.

Give them roots and let them grow wings. I read that on the wall of my pediatrican's office once. Years ago. When I was still busily immersed in a world of diapers and broken nights . I thought mine would never get to the winged stage. They needed me too much. I was in constant, greedily plump fisted grabbing demand. I read it and I smiled indulgently. I thought it was sweet. And I thought mine would never grow wings.

But they have done. And they are stretching them and beginning to beat them tentatively.

And I must hope that my own roots are deep enough to withstand the gale force of the winds of change that will surely buffet my own tiny world.

Shhh ... Whisper it ... She's well.

Anthea Rowan — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:10:36 +0000

My mother is well.

Right now she is feisty, happy, fulltothebrimbursting with joie de vivre and laughter and energy and positivity and smiles.

I'm always afraid to say it out loud: my mum's well.

Afraid I will tempt fate. Afraid that Depression will overhear me, misinterpret my delight as complacency. And clamber back in.

Hah! You thought you'd got rid of me forever!

We are on holiday together. Mum and I. We shop and eat out and drink wine and she outdoes me in her exuberance.

Depression's never far away when it's been around this long. It's there at the breakfast table in her dose of Efexor; it's there come bedtime in the shape of another slimline pill.

It's why I'm afraid to say it out loud: my mum's well.

It's there because she has a scheduled appointment with her psychiatrist.

What will you tell him? I want to know.

That I am well, she says, and she smiles.

Depression has not taught me to be afraid of my mother's happiness. It has taught me to grab it with both hands and manipulate every last delicious moment out of it.

Much like she does.

And it has taught me that you never, ever take Happy for granted.

Family Skeletons

Anthea Rowan — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:38:38 +0000

Somebody I know, somebody I know well, somebody quite close to me, said, ‘You know: you shouldn't write about your mother's illness the way you do; you shouldn't do your dirty laundry in public'.

Dirty laundry? Dirty laundry! My Mum?

Oh please.

Everybody's got family skeletons. Family skeletons locked up in cupboards.

The problem is: if you don't let them out, the skeletons, they rattle feverishly and loudly and relentlessly.

Until you do. Let them out.

Best air them before they get too noisy. Allow them to step into the light whilst there is still a modicum of composure left, enough energy to explain, if that's what you need to do:

My Mums' got Depression.

What does Madness look like?

Anthea Rowan — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 04:26:07 +0000

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?

Loneliness

Anthea Rowan — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:51:17 +0000

That's what it does to you sometimes.

Loneliness.

It messes with your head.

And that's what I am. Often. Lonely. An isolation borne of my geography. My far-flung African outpost living.

(But you can be lonely anywhere my friends in London and New York remind me impatiently: it's not an accessory exclusive to a remote lifestyle, you know).

Loneliness unhinges you. Reduces everything, in the enormity of the abandonment you feel, to smallness. Tiny in comparison to the big scary, deeply unfashionable, emotion that overwhelms. And - in your head - everything distills. Thoughts swallowed. And collected in the small void that your mind becomes. Where they rattle around in discontented irritation.

Does that make sense? (Oh but how silly! How could the flight of what feels like sanity make sense, for God‘s sake!)

It could be island fever. Loneliness is an island. My home life is too. I'm not surrounded by cobalt seas: I am surrounded by khaki scrub and white high-powder skies. And nothing. Just miles and miles that stretch taut. To breaking point.

So my thoughts are distilled to a potency that sometimes make me lose sight of sense. Lose my head. For a bit.

Trap too many thoughts and you will begin to obsess. You will. Unless there's a way out. And often here, often from loneliness, there isn‘t. Not, at any rate, an obvious well-marked one. Way Out.

So my husband said, ‘let's go camping'.

And let's leave the worries and the frustration and the week's disappointments (for there had been a few) behind where they can keep each other company instead of haranguing you and needling you to fretful, tearful wakefulness all night.

So. We packed the car and the kids and the dogs. And we drove hours into the big blonde savannah that spills recklessly in all directions and we struck camp and we built a fire and I walked and walked and walked and I felt so far away that I didn't feel lonely anymore. What peculiar irony. I felt that if I spread my arms out wide, I might be able to fly.

Sometimes my solitary life keeps them claustrophobically pinned to my side so that I am straitjacketed by myself.

Be not solitary, warns Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy. (Why? Will I go mad?)

Sunsets and sunrises that got caught, briefly, in the snagging embrace of thorn trees before struggling free (like me: I must go, really, I must) and big skies and the distant, gentle, rattle of cow bells and the call of doves and dust in my hair and the taste of woodsmoked tea.

Could there really be better balm for the soul?

When I got home, I found that some, not all, but some, of those worries had got bored of waiting for me.

They'd hung around for a bit and then shuffled off to bug somebody else.

And I felt my head empty and still.

And without my rudely jostling, finger-pointing worrisome anxiety, I felt less lonely.

Funny that.

Waving Not Drowning

Anthea Rowan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:15:11 +0000

Now, now in high blue white African winter (a misnomer, surely? winter? in Africa?) the pool is brittle blue cold. The sun dances a waltz on the bottom, holding hands with the water. Shifting. Swaying. It'll slow and then stand still when I turn the pump off.

The wind whips across the water's surface in the morning. Nippy, chippy oyster-grey dawns. I don't swim at sun-up in the winter. I swim close to dusk. When the lengthening shadows are not so long that the pool is cast in shade but when I hope the sun is low enough that it won't seek me out and burn me.

A mother with Depression. And an African childhood. What's it going to be then? A mental illness or skin cancer? Neither I say, defiantly. And slap my Factor 50 on thickly so that my daughter asks, in some concern, God Mum, you're so white! Are you OK?

In the winter then, I swim late, in the hope the water has borrowed a modicum of the day's warmth (for my equatorial African winters are just a bit cooler than my hot summers). I don't inch in. I leap. And gasp. And then, goggles on, I plunge and feel the iciness seep right through me. It's delicious. And painful. An oxymoron? Deliciously Painful.

And then I begin to swim. I plough up and down and I watch the waltzing sunlit water beneath me, puddles of brightness in the blue. And I listen to my breathing. In. Out. In. Out. And I hear the quickening of my heart rate. And I plough up and down.

They say exercise is good for you. They say that the endorphins it inspires - the surge of Happy Hormones it urges forth (come on guys, she's gone to all the effort, make her feel good about it for God's sake!) might even help to protect you from Depression.

I have often bullied Mum, when sick, ‘Let's have a walk Mum'. Sometimes she'll agree. And sometimes she won't. Depression hobbles her.

The thing is: I don't think exercise would cure you. Not if Depression had attached its leaden ball and chain weight to you so that you couldn't move. But it might, if you keep at it, with religious daily zeal, stop Depression in its tracks. Before it got a toe-hold.

I swim and I don't know why it feels good. Because I can't hear anybody, anything, except for the steady, reassuring In Out of my breath. Because I am almost birthday-suit naked and cocooned in the womb of cold, clear water. Because all the thoughts and worries and crossness and impatience empty out of my head and words and inspiration and happy thoughts glide up from beneath me. I don't know. But whatever sore mood I might have tipped into the pool with has evaporated by the time I get out.

When I'm done, when I've ploughed (and that's what it feels like, thrashing through water, arms swinging up and over my head until they ache) for the requisite length of time - twenty minutes, half an hour, half a kilometer, three-quarters, whatever it takes - I climb out and lie flat, quite flat, arms outspread, like a starfish, on the sun-warmed stones around the pool and I still my beating heart. I can feel it pounding. And then I can feel it slow and there is a peculiar attendant calm to its quieting.

In our African summer, when we steal the sun from the north so that it faces us full on and bright, I swim at dawn. I slip from my bed and leave my husband slumbering and I slide into water that must match that of my body - blood warm - for I cannot feel it. Like my skin. And I swim and I watch the sky lighten and I see the big ball of fire lumber up over the horizon and above the trees, turning everything it touches to gold. Like Midas.

If I swim fast enough, far enough, often enough, perhaps Depression will only ever be somewhere back there in the distance where I can see it.

But can't ever feel it.

Friends ask: why do you swim?

That's why.