Truths — Part Two

According to my friends (granted I wasn’t yet 10 years old at the time), it was unusual to see your mother taken from the house on a gurney. My step-father just always said that she was “sick”. I don’t recall worrying much because she always came home. But I knew there was something wrong when the man who delivered (yes, delivered) prescriptions came to our front door a lot. When no one was around I’d snoop through my mom’s seemingly endless array of purses looking for loose change. And when I would look through the drawers in their bathroom, there was an unending array of prescription pill bottles. I’m probably fortunate that I never decided to pop any of them, but that propensity would come back to haunt me in the future. I wouldn’t even know what depression and manic/depressive disorder meant until years later, when the term bipolar disorder became the more common way to refer to this malady.

I believe that my maternal grandmother had the gene, but it just wasn’t a known commodity and I believe that she fought her way through it. She was a proud, hard-working West Texas woman — not the typical stay-at-home grandmother, but one that went out and worked at a job every day in order to put more food on the table. It was that work ethic that probably saved her and those around her from the illness. But who’s to say?