Guest Blogger: Inside the Padded Room

I was ten years old when I realized that my mother hated me. Until then, I alway though of her as someone who needed me. I though that if I were quiet enough, danced well enough, or was elected class president, that she would be okay. Until then, I thought it was me. I thought I could fix her, make her right, make her happy.

I was ten years old when she told my father that I had tried to kill myself and had me committed to a psychiatric hospital. I hadn’t. Such things had never occurred to my ten-year-old mind. Rather, I considered running away; every, single, day, I wondered how far I could get. I wondered how I would eat. And I resigned myself, every night, to the fact that I had nowhere to go. But suicide? It never occurred to me. That was her secret wish.

She was better at telling lies than I was a telling the truth, and really, who wouldn’t err on the side of caution? What kind of parent would make such things up? Keep me safe, that was the priority. So, they locked me up where I couldn’t do any damage. Not to me, not to her.

I remember driving along the freeway to meet the new doctor. I remember his office, his reasonable request that I just take a look around, and if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have to stay. I was a reasonable kid; I agreed.

Out of the office, down the hall, into the elevator, DING, the doors open, turn to the right, see the doors, two sets of doors, with wires criss-crossing through the glass, a woman in a small room behind the doors, buzzing people through….. “NO!” I stopped dead in my  tracks, grabbed my daddy’s hand. “NO! I don’t want to stay! I want to go home! I don’t like it here! Daddy! DADDY, NOOOO!!!!” I turned to run but strong arms held me, carried me, forced me toward the doors. I grabbed for the door, arms and legs splayed, like a cat on a bathtub, I refused to bend, to let myself move forward, but they were strong, and I was ten years old.

They put me into the padded room. Who knew such things were real? I though they only happen in cartoons. But they are real. And lined with cork, to keep in the screams. And mine had a little window, high up, where I could barely reach to see out if I stood on my tippy-toes and held on to the sill with the tips of my fingers. I could see into the hall, see my parents, see my mother’s smile as she shook hands with the doctor who had lied to me, see my daddy’s tears as he held onto my mother. I saw them and screamed, tears and snot mixing, running down my face and into my hair. I didn’t understand that they couldn’t hear me, that they were leaving me in that little room, with strangers. It was unthinkable. Suicide began to make more sense.

Eventually, I sobbed myself into exhaustion, and They let me out of the little room to show me where I would be sleeping and introduce me to my new roommates. During late night, whispered conversations, I heard stories of horrors I wouldn’t have believed, if I hadn’t been abandoned into this alternate reality. In that place, I could believe anything. No story was impossible, no nightmare couldn’t become reality. I heard their stories and mine began to make sense.

Parents could be evil.

My mother was evil.

It wasn’t me.

In that dark place, during those weeks, the proverbial scales were lifted from mine eyes. I saw my mother for who she was, and saw that my father was to blind to save me from a danger he wouldn’t admit was real. And in that house of literal horrors, as the nightmares of others woke me every night, as I saw children damaged beyond hope of recovery, I knew what I would do with my life. I found purpose. I found hatred, and it fueled me toward freedom.

I told the doctors what they wanted to hear. I “worked the program”. I earned points that brought me freedoms like television and visits. I was tested and found to be smarter than I had a right to be. Smarter than they knew what to do with. Apparently, I’m some kind of genius. So they diagnosed me with depression and sent me back to that which had depressed me and never looked any further into the matter.

Adults are morons.

After I was home again, installed in a new school and at open war with my mother, suicide weighed heavily on my mind. She had given me the idea, after all. But what I knew, with my newly official genius, was that my death was what she wanted. Nothing would fulfill her role as Tragic Hero better than the loss of her beautiful, golden-haired daughter. And because she wanted it, I refused to go quietly into that dark night. I resolved to live, just to spite her. I let rage and betrayal keep me afloat and sang Pat Benatar songs at the top of my lungs. I told everyone I met that she was sick, wrong, that she hated me. I just wouldn’t shut up, and she began to wither.

Not long after I came home, she collapsed into a psychotic break that vindicated me. She too, was ensconced in a padded room, and lost her belts and shoelaces, and eventually, any grip on reality. (I took bitter joy in the reports of her shock treatments.) She found medication, then she refused to take it. None of it was very surprising.

What was surprising, what continues to surprise me, was that I held onto the knowledge that she was the problem, that it wasn’t my fault, and I managed to hold on until my parents’ marriage finally collapsed and she left us. The courts mandated visits for a few years, but I wouldn’t go. And on my fifteenth birthday, when she took me out for a birthday lunch, I told her goodbye. We’ve not spoken since and I’ve lived my life as if she died that day.

I don’t know that I thought of it in those terms, then, but now, as a (relatively) healthy adult and happily married mother of two, I know that I’ve grieved for her. I’ve grieved for the loss of the woman she could never be and the mother I never knew. I found other women willing to love me, nurture me, tell me I’m worthy of love. And I’ve learned to be a mother, myself. I’ve survived. And that survival began inside the padded room.

Lori blogs at Shnerfle.com and can be found tweeting @shnerfle.