I am not suicidal, but my daughter is.

Or so she says. Or so she would like to be. Or so she is when she is electric air, the feeling, the flashback. Or so she is when she relives any memory of cruelty. Or so she has been since those fucked up, peer-related, bullying experiences come back, repeat themselves. White hot. They bleach her out and a desperate feeling triggers faulty coping, impulsive remedies, remedies that are not solutions.

She becomes an equation of self-mutilation, a formula of self-extinction, a spontaneous, aggressive brain calculation, the sum of having been targeted, having been the scapegoat, having been brutally ridiculed in elementary school day after day.

She:

a) is not worthy

b) will never be liked

c) is a freak

d) all of these

The answer is d) all of these.

She is a master of maladaptive conclusion.

She is vulnerable when she is alone in her room, vulnerable at night when her thoughts are free, vulnerable when she is free from my vigilant eye, vulnerable when she is lonely, for weeks on end, wishing for a friend. She is vulnerable in her room, vulnerable when she is caught in white hot memory. She is vulnerable at night, though often there is no aspect to the day that indicates when this night might be one of those nights.

She likes our rituals. Before bed, we sit together in the living room watching television, usually a cooking show. She likes Chopped. Our rituals do not cure her sadness, but they keep her feeling safe.

And then there’s bedtime, and thereupon all hell can break loose.

Dear genetics: you are a maniacal, predatory great white shark. If I were the Chief of Police in your beach town, I too would blow you up by shooting the oxygen tank you hold between your teeth, the one that you stole from my daughter. I can see it in your filthy mouth.

Her birthmother is impulsivity.

Here’s the thing: my daughter was a funny, language-rich baby. She was an imaginative little girl, complete with elaborate storytelling, a princess here, a castle there, imaginary brothers who went with her everywhere.

She is thirteen now.

At twelve, my daughter was hospitalized for suicidal ideation. At eleven, she was diagnosed with a critical mood instability. At ten, she was bullied horribly – because at nine, she underwent an aggressive puberty. In September of 4th grade, I sent her to school with a make-up case containing sanitary pads. Her teacher was male. I had to let him know that she might need to use the restroom without scrutiny. Meanwhile, thus begins her journey to a nonbinary identity.

Kids began taunting her. Walking home from school, “MANLY, MANLY, MANLY,” they’d say,  because she was suddenly so big, so much bigger than their sorry asses which were so skinny and small. My daughter wouldn’t tell me what was happening, so it went on for months. She began acting anxious. The anxiety carried over into school because the bullying carried over to the playground, into the lunch room, to birthday parties, though she would very soon no longer be invited to them, and so on. I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what until another child told me.

I told the principal, who didn’t believe me.

Her feelings became extreme, too big for her, too big for others, too big for functioning. Her grades began to slip. My phone would ring at work nearly every day, sometimes several times in a day. She’d cry at school inconsolably. Finally, the counsellor believed her, but then nothing effectual was ever done.

When she’d get too quiet, I would go into her room. I’d pat her, tell her stories she’s heard before, stories that soothed her, stories that revealed her beingness, her certitude, the grounded pluck she once had but is now lost. She’s in pain. Big fat existential pain that washes her down. Acid rain. Strident, bitter cold, electric rain, and then, late at night, she’d want to end it. Or, even though she didn’t understand that part yet, she wanted the pain to stop. She didn’t really want to die. She’d use wishful thinking, fantasize a dramatic rescue from a hero, not like Mighty Mouse, but more like a hero in the form of someone with a YouTube channel. She’d fantasize he would lift her off the tracks and take her to California, where they’d live together as platonic roomies. Because that’s what she wanted, that’s what she wants, a friend. This scares me. I fear she will one day run off with a stranger, so I have taken her electronics away.

And then there’s this: my daughter is adopted. I adopted her alone. The judge was fine with that. He told me, “we learned a long time ago, one good parent is by far better than two bad ones.” So, she grew up (and continues to grow up) fatherless. Here and there I’d hear comments, as if in the distance, from people “thinking out loud” for me – and the fatherless issue always came up and so would adoption.

The psychiatrist assures me this is not a father fantasy.

We sit in her room and sing Prince’s “Purple Rain.” “I only want to see you laughing in the purple rain;” she and I are sticklers about singing song lyrics correctly. It’s a game we play. “Purple Rain,” though, is both past and present tense – so I cheat here; we sing the whole song into the present, about presence. About being. When we do this, she sings dolefully while making eye contact with me. She’s got soul and good pitch. She’s in key. (She didn’t get this from me.)

Singing brings her back. She sings true emotion and looks at me as she does this. I am her ground, a return path from pain, a direct connection to the earth. I rub her back. I push hair off her forehead. “Ready?” I say. She knows what this means. She smiles. Then I stand and play air-guitar, head nodding, chirping and hoo-hooing like Prince, pretending I can make my imaginary guitar squeal and scream, with the perfunctory outcry of “honey, I know, I know, I know… .”

“Okay, okay,” she says, smiling through her sad eyes. “You’re a terrible singer, Momma,” she says to save face, though it is true, and I will go to sleep tonight with pain in my heart, yes, but with ease because tonight she will not hurt herself.

Sometimes, in truth, in secret, I feel differently, and I feel guilty about it. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life”(Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”) is a more accurate litmus of my strength, or lack of it. For her, though, I pretend. I pretend otherwise. I pretend I am strong because no one cares for your child the way you do. Despite the wonderful practitioners we have, the doctors, the therapists (there are kind people all around us) still no one cares the way you do. This is their work. She is their client. This is your heart. She is your being, your mind, your compass, your life.

As she struggles, at the end of the day, the two of us are all alone in this.

She fights in all the wrong ways.

Children here are rotten to my daughter. In this, we are alone among the many. We are the outsiders. We are the losers, the disturbed, the failing ones. You know who we are. Bus-stop-parents, you’ve been very unkind to us. We’ve changed schools, changed doctors, changed therapists, changed friends, quit teams. We stay home where the isolation is terrible but social events are worse. On a happy day we eat fast food. Sometimes we walk our dogs. We wear earbuds in parks and public places.

Today, she’s in the shower, and I play the Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” but I change the words: “please allow me to introduce myself, I’m not a man of wealth and taste.” Ha, ha. Clever of me, the single mother with a humanities job and its humiliating salary. But really, I live an invisible life. I am a single working mother of a struggling teen.

Actually, I have two jobs. Won’t you guess my name? Are you with me? Can you guess my name?

There’s more too. “Pleased to meet you,” we have health insurance. Now that I’ve removed my child from the public school where she was treated horrifically, I have tuition money for you too, so, yes, you’re pleased to meet me, come in, come in, by all means pleased to meet me, welcome to the private school where you can feel a little sedated, momentarily, by the aroma of money which of course is no solution to anything, but it is the only available option.

Here we go to the fancy school. What are you doing over spring break? (One night, we watched a Gregory Peck film during our break.) Meanwhile, the public school gym teacher, the one whose sons were brutally mean, went to Myrtle Beach with a bunch of other families in the neighborhood. Who does that? Who the fuck are these people who go on vacation only to replicate their small town condition? It bothers me.

Myrtle, Myrtle, Myrtle.

The private school rolls differently. During a community service event, making small talk, I ask a seventh grade girl with long curly brown hair if she has plans for spring break.

“Yes, we’re going skiing,” she says.  We live near a popular ski resort in New York.

“How fun! Where are you going?” I say.

“The Alps,” she says in stride, innocently.

The fucking suffocation. Either your children are fools (example A) or your children are aloof (example B) and regarding the latter, there is very little to say. I am just wordless.

The fools, honestly, are by far worse. We live in a small town by necessity, not by choice. The fools here are drenched in ignorance, a small town mentality, a poor education without even knowing it and a fairly easy standard of living, that is if you’re a high school graduate. Here, where it is easy to be a home owner without much skill, education or preparation, and if all the while you come from this town, you become a name in this town, with all those names reinforcing one another, high-fiving each other, perpetuating sameness, perpetuating racism, perpetuating homophobia, perpetuating xenophobia, perpetuating ignorance and vacationing together.

Welcome to the twenty-first century: you missed the memo, people, and I hate you for it.

Listen up, fools. When a child is tagged, she becomes what’s feared. My daughter is now “monstrous, big and manly.” Dear Gym Teacher, do you know what this has done to her? Fuck you. Fuck your children. Your wife wears way too much black eyeliner. She looks like a meerkat. Fuck the school principal, and all the rest of who were “seemingly nice.”

The doctors know. There are statistics on this, data, which in their world is the thing that makes it real. I like doctors who know that something is wrong by the way my daughter stands now, shoulders rolled forward. In the way she eats now, leaning over her plate, two hands turning food upward and into her mouth, the horror of her own recognition that she’s scared, terrified and muted by life.

The psychiatrist says there’s an abandonment issue.

She can, sometimes, fleetingly encounter her healthy self, though these moments happen less and less now. Then she gets that look in her eye, a pleading, a desperation, because she can’t sustain wholeness like she used to. Then off she goes into nonsense talk, stupid shit like reciting height and eye color of fictional cartoon characters, proudly bending her thumbs over the backs of her hands, a double-jointed magic trick, reciting vapid data obsessively, caught in a loop of information that is empty precisely because it is nonthreatening, precisely because turning your back on assessing experience is the only way to stop the truth that you have been targeted.

No matter where you are in this town, kids will say shit on the school bus like “who will ever love you?” and then confirm it in a text message, and then in social media, and then at Target by the gym teacher’s three sons who will taunt you, “Hello Manly,” as they walk next to their mother who is wholly unaware, or is she, that her sons are doing this at each incidental cart pass down the soup aisle, the seasonal bargain corner, the paper towel lane.

I witnessed this.

At the public school, when I asked for a meeting, no one believed us. The best of them look at you sadly. The worst of them don’t look at you at all. Cowards. Burn outs. Dear teachers who hate their life: close your doors down, you motherfuckers.

I’m losing my child to mental illness. The doctors think my daughter is who they see, the transformation, the intransitive verb, the transmogrified feeling. I tell them this is pain. I tell them she’s in there like the kitten in the storm drain. They can’t see it.

I can show you pictures, I say.

Here’s the thing, I say to her. Remember how proud Judge B was to run into us at Sam’s Club? Remember how his assistant said our adoption announcement always stayed pinned on the bulletin board next to his desk? Remember how I told you your birth parents were not allowed to regain custody of your older siblings? When you were born, Judge B saw an opportunity to save you from suffering. You are adopted, but not because you weren’t worth keeping. Your birth mom knew on some level that she couldn’t raise you safely. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have gone to the local hospital, where the nurses and social workers know her, to give birth to you. Judge B told her you would be placed in a pre-adoptive home right out of the hospital. And that’s what happened.

It’s that you were worth saving.

And then when you came into our family, it was like The Lion King. I put my cupped hands up in the air, “ahhhh, Simba.” It was like that. You were so worth saving.

I tell this to the psychiatrist. I am worried that I tell my daughter too much. He says I am doing all the right things. I dunno.

I have woken at night to the sound of someone crying only to realize I was crying in my sleep. This has happened to me only a few times before: during the dark pain after my sister’s death, during the dark pain of my divorce, and years later in the guest bedroom of my ex’s apartment (in the bed that had been our bed that had been a wedding present from his parents) the morning after taking him to and from chemotherapy, waking to crying.

Mourning is here again – and my daughter is still living.

 

Mary Mahoney is an associate professor of English in New York and Director of Medical Humanities. She is the recipient of numerous writing awards, including the Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Header image: Mahoney furry family members