Madness Cries Wolf?

Remember my last blog post about how the ownership and possession of firearms by a mentally ill person is a bad idea? Uh huh, well, yesterday, my mother’s husband wrote on his Facebook wall.

One word.

No caps. No punctuation. Just a terrifying word floating on his otherwise ignored Facebook.

This man never speaks in shorthand. He writes rambling interminable e-mails, corners you for an hour while he complains about his taxes and compares the rotation of a bullet to that of a football and then follows up that conversation with a thirty minute phone call just to make sure you did not miss anything he had said earlier.

One word. That's all he wrote.

sorry

As soon as I saw it, I knew.

This one word was a suicide note.

Not wanting to panic or over-react and scare everyone, I thought the most rational course of action was to run around the house screaming “Oh my God, he’s gonna kill himself!”  But, apparently, that does not accomplish anything so I also called his daughter and went to the police.

Long story short. He’s fine. Maybe he was not planning suicide and that one word was a cry for attention or a warning that he was about to go shoot up a shopping mall but whatever it was, three squad cars full of men in blue let him know IT WAS NOT COOL.

You see, for two days, his bail bondsman had been calling me looking for him. He had not checked in. And, he had not answered phone calls from his daughter and a multitude of other people either.

First of all, I’m like wait - whu - huh?  He gave MY NAME to his bail bondsman as a reference?

I tried to play it cool when they called but for real, my mother’s husband hates me! This is not just any ol’ hate either. This is a deep-rooted “she’s some kind of voodoo witch” mixture of fear and hate. AND, I am part of the reason he even HAS a bond in the first place since he assaulted my brother-in-law after he was ordered out of the house for griping at my sister for twenty minutes about what? Taxes and ME. I’m evil. I’m the worst person he’s ever met. He’s going to make me pay one way or another and he has a gazillion guns so if this was 150 years ago, he could solve this another way.

But yeah, dude, go ahead and use me as a reference on that bond even though a protective order prevents you from coming near my house.

Weird. But that is how illogical this guy is.

Anyway, even though the panic is over, I’m still shaking. I was certain this man had done something foolish or was about to and even though he physically abused my mother and assaulted my brother-in-law and causes the rest of us more grief than I care to share, he’s still a human being. No doubt, he is dangerous. But what hell must go on inside his head that he would remind us so often that suicide is a way to escape it?

There has to be something more we can do besides fear this guy, blog about him, and pray that he does not hurt himself or somebody else. His daughter is trying to get some help from his psychiatrist, my sister had a chat with his neurologist, and I called our attorney today. I asked if there is anything we can do. What if he was trying to kill himself yesterday? Isn't that enough to force him to get help? A judge cannot rule on "what if"s, she said. And, I have said before, it is not against the law to be mad. Crazy is not a crime. Mental illness is not illegal and nobody can force you to get treatment.

BOTTOM LINE: If you are mentally ill you have the right to refuse to get un-mentally ill even though you are not un-mentally ill enough to make that decision.

Until my mother’s husband hurts himself or somebody else OR somebody in a position of authority gets legal documents declaring that he is a danger to himself or others, he has every right in the world to be mad as hatter.

When our mother was refusing mental health treatment and her husband was blocking us on top of that, we kept hearing over and over that we needed to get a mental heath order. Her condition was deteriorating at an alarming rate and a mental heath order was quickly becoming our last and best hope. But, we did not want our mother taken away in handcuffs. We could not put her through that. Then someone said something that changed the way we think. She said, “if it was my mother, I’d much rather see her leave in handcuffs than in a body bag.”

We found the courage to make tough decisions after that.

And, I stopped watching Forensic Files.

When Madness has Rights

One thing both sides of the gun-ownership versus gun-control argument can agree on is that we don’t want people who are mad as hatters running around Wyatt Earp-ing it up with loaded weapons. If you crack like Humpty Dumpty, you no longer have gun ownership rights. Right? At least that’s the way these things are supposed to work here in Texas.

In theory.

This is a very real and personal issue for me and my sisters because my mother’s husband has threatened to shoot us. SHOOT US! Oh, he's clever about the way he words his threat so the District Attorney cannot call it a threat of bodily harm but when a man clenching his fists and snarling through his teeth says he will make you pay and then lines up his rifles by the door and readies his pistol drawer, he is not asking for cab money.

Let me bring you the last two years in twelve sentences:

Mom was mentally ill to begin with.
Then, Mom developed dementia.
Daughters tried to get Mom help.
Her husband launched a war.
Verbal assaults. Physical assaults.
We all went to court.
War over. Sanity won.
Mom in assisted living.
Kids have guardianship
Hired dragons to protect mother.
Husband still out there.
And, he’s mad.

The recent Casey Kasem stories have brought me to tears. No joke. He is old, infirm, and living with Alzheimer’s disease. Like my mother, he is at the mercy of his care-givers and like my mother, it appears that his kids are doing everything in their power to get Kasem the mental and physical help he needs, only to be thwarted by his spouse who publicly questions their motives and sabotages his care.

So... let’s jump right on this mental illness issue.

Actually, lets talk about guns.

Okay, let’s do both.

That disturbed young man who murdered six people and wounded 13 others in Santa Barbara legally owned three handguns. Three. Only three.

My mother’s disturbed husband owns 65. No, that is not a typo. He legally owns an arsenal including modern semi-automatic guns and black powder antiques, pistols and revolvers, rifles and shotguns. He has it all. Guns are his passion. His life. He also does this cowboy-gun thing where he shoots black-powder weapons on the weekends so the garage is a workroom full of gun powder, pellets, muzzle loading equipment and stuff to make his own bullets.

The angry and confused man that took his revenge on his fellow students had been spoken to by authorities on three occasions in the past year.

The angry and confused man married to my mother who has threatened revenge on her daughters has been spoken to by the police about a dozen times in the past year, most of those events since January and for family violence.

The agitated student in Santa Barbara made rambling manifesto-type videos.

My mother’s agitated husband sends us daughters rambling manifesto-type emails at wee hours of the morning.

The student in Santa Barbara was once charged with assault this past year and that was when he tried to file charges on his roommate but police discovered he was the aggressor.

My mother’s husband has been charged three separate times for assault, had three separate emergency protective orders issued against him and one is in place right now. RIGHT NOW. You see, after we took Mom to the mental hospital, he went to my sister’s house, threatening us daughters and then when my brother-in-law ordered him out of the house, that old guy punched him in the face, grabbed him by the throat, and then the punched him again.

The Santa Barbara shooter had been treated by multiple therapists and managed to conceal his mental instability for quite some time.

My mother’s husband has been treated by multiple therapists and managed to conceal his mental instability from the police, Adult Protective Services, and even his own attorney for quite some time. It’s out in the open now. One psychiatrist fired him as a patient and another doctor told him (with my sister in the room) to get his guns out of the house because his nature is just too unpredictable.

So why does my mother's husband, this man with a history of violence and a documented mental illness, who has written rambling unstable letters, who has a history of assault, and threatened me and my sisters have a right to own 65 guns?

Primarily, because nobody has made it a priority to try to take them away from him yet.

According to the Texas Government Code, 411.172, a person cannot keep, own, possess all those guns if he’s mentally ill BUT there needs to be evidence from a licensed physician. Okay, well, plenty of doctors know he’s unstable but what is the process for getting a declaration of mental illness for the purpose of removing the guns from his home and how long does it take and who is going to do it and who is going to protect us from his rage when he learns we got that ball rolling?

If he keeps all those weapons, we are in perpetual danger. If we seek to get the weapons removed from the home, we are basically provoking him and putting ourselves in even more danger.

This is a man who has threatened suicide, who flies into a rage when any minor thing doesn't match his recollection, and who will not hesitate to lunge for your throat or throw his fists to display his superiority.

Can you even imagine what a person with that kind of rage and that many weapons would do if provoked?

Sure, you can. Just turn on the news.

The Madness Equation

Congratulations, it’s a bouncing senior citizen. The judge did not even bang his gavel as he solemnly awarded guardianship of my mother to “Team Sybil”, her squad of four adult kids who had sought champions for two years in this battle against mental illness until we realized we had to don the capes and tights ourselves.

Today, the children of madness became the parents of madness. Now, we can legally work as the super-hero team we had to become to make sure our mother’s physical and psychological and psychiatric needs were met. We’re her guardians, her watchmen, her protectors. She will now see the doctors she needs to see, get the medication she needs to get, live in a safe place, and be supervised by people trained to care for her.

This is HUGE!

In our case, we not only had to find a way to get psychiatric help for our aging mother but we had her abusive spouse to contend with, a man who legally had the ability to make choices on our mother’s behalf but who we believe is dealing with his own mental illness and suffering dementia on top of his underlying personality disorder.

So... we had Mom,  mentally ill with we don’t know what - narcissism, borderline personality disorder, histrionic behavior and maybe some schizophrenia -  and then suffering from dementia on top of her underlying illness, who married a man who is so Jekyll and Hyde that he seems to have a dissociative identity disorder and sociopathic tendencies but is also now dealing with some age-related dementia of his own.

When madness marries madness, it is NOT madness times two. The ripple effects on friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, doctors, law enforcement, government agencies, the court system and every person this pair interacts with is madness squared. SQUARED!

In another post, I’ll talk about the abuse we endured at the hands of both of these people, the altered reality they lived in, the threats, the accusations, the intimidation and how Mom's husband has been so obsessed with her back taxes (which is a non-issue because we've had IRS auto-drafted from her checking account monthly for over years now) that every doctor, police officer, banker, and mailman that crosses this guy's path hears about his tax woes.

But all of that is for another day.

With this court ruling, we’ve changed the madness squared equation. Now, when our mother wanders out the door naked, it will be into a hallway, not onto a sidewalk. She is not in danger of being hit by a car or even hit in the face by the husband who cannot understand why she is an often childlike, confused and unreasonable little-old-woman version of the strong, argumentative woman he married six years ago.

Guardianship awarded. Physical abuse proven. Visitation by the husband denied.

As the attorneys all side-bar’d at the judge’s bench, our mother’s husband shot us a glance of combined bewilderment and rage. How had he, a scientist and the smartest man in every room, lost to three such ignorant women and their idiot brother? Even the court reporter shivered when the attorneys turned toward him and his “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too” face astonishingly morphed into a victimized old man, tragic and court-weary, longing only to visit his beloved wife whom he never once bothered to ask about in the six weeks since she’d been in supervised care. Never a “how’s she doing?” or “is her room nice?” or “are the new medications helping?” or “does she need anything?” Nope. Nothing but a bombardment of the same Jekyll and Hyde emails we had gotten for months, complaining about Mom's back taxes and threatening to sue us for assault one moment (apparently, if you come to the house to give your mother her medicine or drive her to the doctor, that is assault) and Mr. Nice Guy the next (begging us to stop these unnecessary assaults and still complaining about taxes).

But. we’re tuckered out little super-heros with tattered capes and runs in our tights and our heads ache from our crash course in justice from the real-life Justice League of attorneys, judges, and agencies in this state. We now know that  we can, indeed, leap tall buildings, but not in a single bound and never faster than a speeding bullet.

When it comes to mental illness, the solutions are complex and when we fail as a society, we fail big. People get hurt. People suffer. People die. Why, oh why, oh why? Because protecting a person from himself and protecting the public from a potentially dangerous person sounds elementary on paper and even less complicated in comic books and movies but the reality of our obligation to NOT rob a person of his rights, be unjustly invasive, or cross moral and legal and ethical lines with regard to a person’s liberties is an olympian sized conundrum when it comes to our ability to address mental illness at all.

It’s not as simple as identify it, cope with, treat it, and regulate it.

You see, madness is not against the law and people have a right to NOT get treatment.

That’s right. People have a right to be crazy. Period. If they aren’t a PROVEN danger to themselves or others, their odd behavior and subtle threats are “harmless”.  And that burden of proof is great.

For example, if your mother’s 73-year-old husband says he is going to “make you pay” and mentions he has 65 guns and could “resolve this another way”, it doesn’t matter if he is a red-faced volcano squalling in your face and clenching his fists, those words were not, by law, a direct bodily threat because he did not say “I will shoot you” or “I will kill you”.  You have to wait for that volcano to erupt.

- - - Like when he goes to your sister's house uninvited and punches her husband in the face. - - -

Yeah. THEN people believe you.

Talk about madness!

Today, I found great comfort in the Bible verse where Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a person to force somebody with a mental defect to get psychiatric help.

Except for the part about THAT’s NOT WHAT IT SAYS! And, my own cheese must have slid off own my cracker if I’m re-writing the Bible (and plagiarizing Stephen King) to justify the maze of agencies, cries for help, phone calls, doctor visits, and complexities of the legal system that we have maneuvered, hurdled, and trudged through.

And, I was only kidding. We had no capes.

But it’s true. You cannot force somebody to go get help. You cannot make them. You can’t. They have rights. So the conundrum is, if someone is really functioning in a diminished capacity and refusing to get treatment -

they are not capable of making decisions about their own safety and welfare but they have every right to make decisions about their own safety and welfare. 

Our guardianship hearing is only part ONE of the battle our team of super-heroes faces. Because, you see, our mother’s husband is still out there, bombarding us with emails where he has translated things we've said in the real world into the language of his fractured world and then spit those words back out at us in a venomous rant of victimization.

Heaven help us.

Guardianship means nothing to my mother's husband. Her business is his business and he cannot let go. He's making phone calls he is not allowed to make, writing letters he is not allowed to write, and is even showing up places he is not allowed to show up due to protective orders against him. And, even though he has proven himself mentally and emotionally unstable and even though he has proven himself violent to my mother and to her four kids, it's not legally a threat when he says to us if we get in his business, "I WILL STOP YOU".

The madness continues.

Growing in the Dysfunction

Imagine you find a magic fountain or genie in a bottle or a Super Mario warp whistle or some other source of enchantment that would allow you to go back in time and then erase the worst moments in your life. You could simply banish that awkward moment, foolish error, or painful loss from your history so its vindictive shadow can never again make an ugly uninvited appearance in your memories. Poof! It's gone. What might you delete from your life so that it can no longer haunt you?

How about a big fat nothing? Cuz, seriously, imagine a butterfly effect in your life where you selfishly erase that horrible, embarrassing, awkward moment your junior year when your tampon leaked and you had to wrap your sweater around your waist like it was 1950 even though it was 110 degrees outside and even though erasing that moment in life would get you the best prom date in high school and the dream spouse of your life and a yacht and a pony and full time personal trainer and so many diamonds, you would sink to the bottom of your Olympic sized pool, it would also result in a tsunami that kills 30,000 people. Can you live with that? Would you let 30,000 people die so you can watch a shirtless pool boy named Mauricio glisten in the Miami sun?

But, I digress. Stay with me, though, I have a point in here somewhere.

Now, my question to you is, "do you like who you are?"

If you do, then you can throw away that genie in the bottle and walk away from that magic fountain because everything in your life - good, bad, odd, joyful, devastating - has made you who you are. Your passions, your goals, your likes, and your motives are all a composite of your journey in life. Remove the bad car wreck when you were sixteen and you remove that cautious driver at forty who now makes sure her teenager slows down on service roads.

Maybe there is no valid argument for accepting death, crime, and other tragedies as growing pains but for me, personally, I can say that if I could go back and remove the physical and mental abuse, neglect, embarrassments, fears, and life with a mother suffering from an un-diagnosed mental illness, I would not. I would have much preferred the Ozzie and Harriet life, but the dysfunction I suffered growing up has not stopped me from becoming a functional person and I think the reality today is that more and more families are so increasingly dysfunctional that I'm worried my third grade nephew's class schedule will say Math, Reading, Recess, Recovering from Addiction, Living with a Schizophrenic Parent, and Suicide Prevention.

There is no shame in the dysfunction I grew up with. It was not my fault.

I was sexually abused by not one, but BOTH of my grandfathers. I was a small child with one and not yet a teen when it began with the other. Victims of childhood sexual abuse are not responsible for what happened to them and even though it may take many victims a lifetime to accept it, the truth is that children are subject to the authority of adults and are not accountable for what adults do to them.

But WHY ONE EARTH would I say I would not go back and erase the madness?

Hang in there. I'm getting to that.

It's weird that while I despise the mention of the name of one grandfather, the harm the other one caused is kind of an unemotional memory because I was so young. I rarely discuss either one of them at all. But my memories of them have starkly contrasting emotions attached even though they both did nasty, unspeakable things to me.

With one grandfather, I remember pain and fear and shame and a tremendous sense of invasion and the need to protect my sisters from this monster. I remember telling my mother what he was doing and getting a curt "Oh, Mary" in her "just stop it" tone of voice and wondering why this was okay with her. I remember wanting to run away and to sleep forever because sleep was the only time the pain in my life went away.

Such is the memory of an almost teen.

With the other grandfather, the bad things that happened are kind of dream-like and far away because even though I remember it clearly, what I remember more vividly is him brushing my hair, giving me baths, reading me books, taking me to the five and dime store and making up the most ridiculous stories about the monkeys who lived in the traffic signals and railroad crossings. There was no fear. I felt nurtured and protected despite the ugly things happening to me.

Such is the memory of a small child.

Were they both monsters? Both just sick men? Both situations are messed up beyond decency. Both should never have happened. And if I could back and erase any of the unspeakable things that happened to me, I would not. Not one single awful, terrible, nasty, ugly, violent moment because I like who I am today.

They say survivors of childhood physical or sexual abuse can become abusers and that most sexual predators were once sexually abused as a child. Well, I say that while all poodles are dogs, MOST DOGS ARE NOT POODLES so to lump all childhood victims in the same pot is as ludicrous as saying rape victims will become rapists. And, more victims of childhood abuse become advocates than abusers.

Childhood sexual abuse is vile. Dysfunctional childhoods are a tragedy. Living with a parent who has a mental illness is nightmare. But we can grow through all this ugliness to become human beings that leave positive footsteps and prevent others from experiencing the lives we lived.

What living a dysfunctional life did  for me:

• Knowing what is like to not have food in the house has taught me care if people are fed.
• Knowing what it is like to be slapped and struck has driven me to fight for the physically abused.
• Being verbally abused, belittled, insulted, and made to feel small has taught me to treat people with kindness, compassion, respect and dignity.
• Being sexually abused as a child has made me a fierce advocate for children
• Feeling unimportant has taught me that everyone needs to know that they matter.
• Feeling helpless has instilled in me a passion for victims of all kinds
• Feeling afraid as a child has given me the courage to stand up for what I believe in as an adult

And, there's more. Much, much, more. But, this post is already too long. What has being a victim of dysfunction taught you?

There is actually ONE thing I'd like to go back and change. I have a fear of the sound of an automatic garage door opener. When I was a teenager, my sister and I shared a room above the garage and when that door went up, our room would shake and roar. That meant Mom was home from work and we were likely about to get screamed at, accused of something, cursed at and slapped for - oh, I dunno - not putting the vacuum cleaner away or forgetting to bring the mail in.

So, if I could change something, maybe it would be my irrational reaction to automatic garage door openers.

But, then, ten million acres of rain forest would probably die off somewhere so I guess it's just a good thing we converted our garage.

Monsters and Madness

For weeks, I've wondered how to begin this blog. Just how does one tell the stories of sane people who have lived on the outskirts of madness? How do you write with kindness and humor and demonstrate genuine affection for the lunacy that made you who you are? And how do you  not offend people's delicate sensitivities by using the words "madness", "crazy", and "mental illness"?

If you know the torment of living with schizophrenic, manic depressive, or suicidal family members or have been coping with somebody else's assortment of personality disorders, dementia, Alzheimer's or some similar mental illness or disorder, then you know me. We have a common bond. But if not, then we cannot meet in that dark corner of acknowledgment, in that secret place of silent head nods where only people who have felt mad for being sane have hidden, where only those of us who have had our inner peace beaten with somebody else's crazy stick have curled up in a fetal ball and surrendered to the utter hopelessness of it all.

That is not to say that the rest of you won't find my stories interesting in a human oddity kind of way. If life is a circus, then certainly there are sideshows, freaks and human marvels that people pay good money to gawk at, pity, and feel ashamed for being fascinated by. No shame here. Gawk away. I hope it helps you or somebody you know. Mental illness is real and if it hasn't touched you yet, it will. Such is our world of chemicals, stress, biological enigmas, environmental deterioration, and hereditary conditions.

There's no cure for crazy. No matter what category it falls under - personality disorders, dementia, disease, brain injury. There are medications to help control it, maybe mask the effects, maybe slow the progression. But there is no cure for that result, that behavior, those consequences of madness that affect our society and inflict themselves on everyone else's comfort zones.

Growing up, I had a difficult time identifying the monsters in my life. I had a Mommy Dearest childhood mixed with the stuff that nightmares are made of - things children should not know of or remember. This made it difficult for me to separate "bad people" from "good people who once did something bad" or "people who aren't right in the head". No doubt, monsters are real. We see them on the news every day. But to a kid and to many adults, mental illness or deficiency makes people automatically monsters or sub-human in some way. This is just wrong. There's a huge difference in being a danger because of mental defect and being a danger that needs to be locked in prison. Both exist. Both consistently prove the system doesn't work. Until it does. And then it doesn't again.

What I hope and pray is that we, as a people, do not forget that the madness --or mental illness or whatever word fits your particular situation -- is the wake of what the brain is doing and that the brain is functioning inside a living breathing human being with rights and feeling. Today, my siblings and I are fighting like hell for the safety, security and welfare of the very person who, when we were kids, never fought for ours. Talk about an unfair circle of life.

But it is life.