Chapter 5: Sunday Evening

“Are you guys asleep in here?” Tara’s voice broke the silence.

I blinked my eyes against the sudden light. Tara was silhouetted in the doorway. She was wearing stretch jeans and a tight-fitting yellow top, so her silhouette exaggerated her feminine curves, all those curves that she had and I didn’t. I swallowed a brief surge of jealousy and took notice of where I was. Dan was sitting on the floor of my room, his back against the wall, his legs stretched out straight in front of him, his eyes squinting against the light. Maybe he had been asleep. I’d started off sitting on the floor next to him, but by the time Tara opened the door, I’d slipped down and draped myself over his lap. I hadn’t been asleep.

Well, maybe a bit!

I sat up, and then pushed myself up the wall to get to my feet. “Nah! We were just chatting.”

“Dad’s in the living room. He wants to talk to us,” said Tara.

“What about?” I asked

“Dunno!”

“Where’s Mum?” I asked.

“She went straight into their bedroom as soon as they got home.”

“Did she say anything?” I asked.

“Nah! She just walked straight in and closed the door.”

“Good! I hate her! I don’t want to talk to her!” I said.

“Bec, please don’t talk like that.” That was Dan, still squinting in the light. “Let’s go listen to what Dad has to say.”

He struggled to get himself up, but his legs had gone to sleep. I reached down and offered him my hand, as if that would help. I mean, he’s twice my size, maybe more. Tara stepped into the room and held out her hand as well. Between the two of us, we managed to get Dan onto his feet.

“You know what he wants to tell us, don’t you?” Tara wanted to know.

“More or less,” said Dan.

“Is it terrible?” asked Tara.

Tara’s usually confident voice sounded different. Looking at her face, I saw that she was really worried. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe Dad was going to tell us that something was terribly wrong with Mum. I flashed back to the days and weeks and months when Nana was sick with cancer and I started to panic.

“Dan? Is Mum sick? Has she got cancer too?” I asked.

You might think right now that I’d start crying again, but that didn’t happen. Maybe I was cried out. What did happen was I felt this cold rush of fear sweep through me, leaving me empty, hollow. The hands that I used to clutch onto Dan’s arm were trembling.

“No, she doesn’t have cancer,” said Dan in a calm voice. “It’s not like that. Please, let’s go talk to Dad.”

Dan obviously knew what was going on. He said it wasn’t cancer and I trusted him. But there was obviously something wrong, something important. Tara was clutching onto Dan’s other arm. Her face had gone white when I mentioned cancer. When Dan said no, her eyes showed a bit of relief but not much. Maybe I felt the same way, I don’t know. I couldn’t really tell you what I was feeling. Like I said, I was hollow and empty – no feelings!

With the two of us clinging to Dan like limpets, he steered us into the living room. Dad was sitting in his usual chair holding one of Angie’s drawings while Angie perched on the arm of the chair and explained the drawing to him. Like most of Angie’s explanations, it wasn’t making a whole lot of sense, but Dad was making all the right noises, despite the distracted look on his face.

Dan seated himself on the middle of the couch. I sat down next to him, with my side pressed firmly against his. I wrapped one of his arms around me, clutching onto his hand with my arm, as if maintaining as close contact as possible would protect me from whatever was about to happen. Tara sat herself on his lap, her back against his chest, her legs draped over his, and held his other arm protectively across her tummy. I silently cursed myself for not claiming his lap for myself. But then again, I’d had Dan with me for ages, maybe it was her turn. I reached out my spare hand and clutched hers, letting our fingers twine together. This left my forearm resting on her denim clad thigh. I don’t think the three of us could’ve been joined more closely together if we tried. I felt Tara’s hand squeeze mine and I squeezed it back.

Angie’s story finished, and Dad managed to get her to play with some Legos on the floor. He looked over at us and frowned slightly. I realized he was a bit nervous. He cleared his throat a bit, then put on a really forced grin and a forced cheerful voice and said, “Well, I guess you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here tonight!”

I think he was quoting from some stupid old movie. I think he was trying to be funny. I didn’t laugh. Tara didn’t laugh. Dan didn’t laugh, but he did sigh in frustration.

“Dad, the girls are a bit freaked,” said Dan. “You really need to explain what’s going on.”

“Ah! Yes! Well! I guess you noticed that Mum was a bit more, er, intense than usual this morning. Well that’s not the first time she’s been like that. In fact, she’s been having little episodes like that virtually all her life.”

“What are you saying, Dad?” I forget who asked that, it might’ve been Tara, it might’ve been me. If I didn’t ask, I was certainly going to.

“I’m saying that for most of her life, your mother has had episodes where for a short time she becomes totally obsessive to the point of er ... mania. During these episodes, she finds it hard to manage er ... she finds it hard to see how what she’s doing affects the big picture.”

“Mania? Are you saying Mum goes mental? Is she crazy?” asked Tara.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have said mania! Some doctors have described this as a mental condition called Lambrecht’s Syndrome. Your mum’s not crazy the way most people use that word. She doesn’t hear voices in her head. She doesn’t see things that aren’t there. She doesn’t believe things are happening that aren’t. She’s not depressed.

“Most of the time your mother functions normally. Just every so often she gets into this state of mind where she finds it hard to tell the difference between what is important and what isn’t. A major episode usually lasts anything up to three or four days. Then she goes back to normal.”

“How come we’re only finding out about this now? If Mum has had this thing, this mental illness thing all her life, how come you’re only telling us now?” I asked.

“The major episodes don’t happen that often. The last one was last November. It was pretty mild and your mother just locked herself in her studio and painted for three days. It didn’t seem to worry either of you at the time, so we didn’t say anything. The one before that was two summers ago when you were both away at camp. The time before that we thought you were too young to understand what was going on. We sent you to stay with your grandmother. You both thought it was a great holiday.”

“I remember that week,” I said with surprise. I always wondered why we suddenly got to stay with Nana for a week.

“I remember a few sudden trips like that,” said Tara with a bit of a scowl. “You should’ve told us and not sent us away!”

“Maybe you’re right! Maybe we should’ve told you right from the start. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

“What about this time?”

“Usually I can pick the start of an episode during the day before it starts, she usually kind of builds up to it. If there were any signs this time around, I missed them. I didn’t know anything about it until this morning at breakfast and she’d well and truly started by then.”

“Ah Dad,” this was Tara. “No offense, but breakfast this morning wasn’t that unusual for us. I mean, we never had a breakfast like that before, but none of us were exactly surprised. You two are always pulling stunts like that.”

“Yeah!” I added. Okay, it wasn’t a brilliant comment but I felt like Tara needed backing up. “Our friends who know about some of the things you do think our whole family is weird. Not bad weird, just weird weird.”

Dad sighed and nodded. “Neither your mum nor I had what most people would call a normal childhood. Partly because of that we have some different ideas about parenting than most people. So, like you said, we often pull stunts like this morning at breakfast. But Louise went way beyond what the two of us had decided on for this morning. As far as I could tell, she deliberately stirred you two up two or three times so you would start screaming at each other. She also deliberately humiliated you, Bec, to get the same effect. She wasn’t thinking about the impact on you when she did that. Normally she would never have done that just to get at Dan. That’s what I mean about her not seeing the big picture.”

“Potty!” Apparently Angie had decided to join the conversation. I kind of agreed with her.

“I wanna go potty!” said Angie.

Oh! Okay, so I was distracted, I didn’t get it at first.

As soon as we figured out what Angie was saying, Tara and I jumped up and led Angie to the bathroom. This amazing, life changing conversation we were having about Mum having a mental illness and going stark raving bonkers every so often (well okay, it wasn’t as bad as that) got put on hold while we took Angie to the toilet. All the time, of course, we were both praising her for being so clever as to tell us she wanted to go potty. Then when she was done, while we cleaned her up, we had to praise her some more for putting her poo in the potty and ... well you get the picture. Neither of us had anything to say to each other about The Talk!

When we brought Angie back to the living room, Dan and Dad hadn’t moved. They probably hadn’t even said a word to each other either. They might have, but I doubted it. We told them what Angie had done and they both praised her for how clever she was. Funny how having a three year old around means family discussions can quickly become all about poo.

Angie climbed up onto Dan’s lap and started tracing the patterns on his t-shirt with her fingers. Since she was quiet like that, we left her there and Tara and I sat down beside each other on the low coffee table near Dad to continue our conversation.

“How did all this start?” Tara wanted to know.

“We think she’s always had this. Apparently it became really noticeable when Louise reached adolescence. She became fairly unpredictable. She’d be normal for a while then get really over-the-top obsessed about something. Her mother, your nana, thought she was just being a teenager but her father didn’t think so and had her committed.”

“You mean he put her in a mental home?” I asked.

“That’s right! She spent quite a lot of time in those places as a teenager. Her parents apparently fought about it all the time. That’s probably a lot of the reason they ended up separating. Eventually your nana pulled her out of there and threw all the drugs away. They’d kept her pretty well doped up in the hospital and your mum hated it. Ever since then, she’s hated being medicated and she usually refuses to take her pills. She says they makes her feel fuzzy.

“Your nana had to go to court to keep her out of institutions. Apparently there were doctors arguing that Lambrecht’s Syndrome didn’t exist and it was just at the extreme end of normal behaviour. Your nana used some of those doctors to get custody of Louise and permission to keep her at home. Since then, everyone has simply handled her episodes when they happen. She has taken some medication a few times if the episode is severe and she can’t afford to make mistakes, but she hates it because, as I said before, it makes her fuzzy.”

Dad fell silent and I took a moment to let the stuff process through my mind. This was pretty big. Not as big as Tara and I had feared, but still pretty big. One question occurred to me pretty quickly. “Dad, where is Mum now? Why isn’t she here helping explain all this?”

“Louise was pretty distressed when she realized what she’d said to you. I said she gets a bit obsessive. Now she’s obsessing about how she’s a bad mother. We went out to get a new prescription of her medication and some sedatives. She’s taken some and is lying in bed right now trying to figure out how to make it up to you.”

Tara and I glanced at each other, and then together we stood up and walked straight towards our parents’ room. Dad looked a bit startled, I think he expected us to talk some more, then he got up and followed us. Dan, with a wriggling Angie on his lap, gave us a wave and kept playing with Angie, who seemed to be trying to turn her top inside out without actually taking it off.

We walked straight into Mum and Dad’s room and, without hesitating, crawled up to sit on the bed beside Mum. Dad followed us into the room and quietly sat on a chair beside the dresser to watch. Mum was stretched out on the bed in her shift. Her eyes were a bit puffy and red from crying. They were also a dull and lifeless. She turned her head to look at me, and her movements were all slow and sluggish. Mum usually had so much energy. If this was what the drugs did to her, then I hated them too.

Mum tried to hug me and started saying over and over again how sorry she was, but I stopped her. I told her to stop being silly and how what she said hadn’t been all that bad. She kept saying she was a bad mother to have upset me like that. I told her that was silly and I’d over-reacted. This went on for ages and maybe about the fifth time I said it, I started to believe what I was saying. Maybe I really had over-reacted. Sure, she’d pointed out to my family that I was getting boobs. But I mean, they were my family, none of them were going to try to embarrass me about that, except maybe Tara, and she was perfectly capable of spotting stuff like that and giving me a hard time without needing Mum’s help.

This was all going on in the back of my brain as I tried to reassure Mum that she really was a good mother. Tara joined in and we talked about all the stuff she did for us. It was a bit weird really. It was usually Mum reassuring one of us when we got upset, and here we were being the “parents” and trying to make her feel good about herself.

In the end, I don’t think we convinced her that she wasn’t a bad mother, but she did accept that she did some good things. We did convince her to stop taking the medication because we didn’t want her to be all fuzzy and that we could cope with whatever consequences came from that. She seemed relieved by that.

Finally we all fell quiet and Dad indicated that we should leave her alone so she could sleep off the pills she’d taken. As we left the room, Dad put an arm around each of our shoulders and squeezed us briefly to him. “I’m so proud of both of you for what you did in there today. I’m also surprised you’ve taken everything so well. Maybe I should’ve told you sooner and not waited until the situation forced me to talk to you.”

“Yes Dad! You should’ve trusted us.” Tara gently scolded him. “You keep saying how smart we are and then you keep a secret like this from us.”

“It’s all okay now though, Dad!” I put in. Dad wasn’t good at casual affection. We got touches and hugs from him so rarely that I wanted to enjoy this one and not wreck it by being cross at him. “So what happens now?”

Dad released us and led us back into the living room. “Well, I guess we get ready for a little ‘out there’ behavior from your mum for the next few days. I’ve never known her to do anything physically dangerous, but we do need to stay alert and redirect her if she does. I’ll hide all her credit cards and leave her one with a two hundred dollar limit, so that she can’t bankrupt us if she goes on a buying spree. One time, back home, she saw toilet paper on special and bought several years supply of the stuff.”