The warm North Dakota mud felt wonderful oozing between my toddler size feet. For the lack of better things to do on the first warm, sunny spring day my sister Linda and I played in our dirt driveway. I liked to pretend I was racing a boat using leaves found from beneath the melted snow in the ditch near the driveway. Linda and I were at the age where our mother still thought we were young enough to dress like twins. Even though we were two years apart, we were two peas in a pod anyway so it was fine by me.
Once the ground was dry and summer was in full bloom, my mother would spend Sundays in the yard with our newest family member, Billy. Just an infant but a perfect live doll for all 4 of us girls to enjoy! I had no idea what my family was about to develop into as adults. Who would know? Back then there was no such thing as “depression” or “Bipolar”. It started with my Father going full force with his stubborn Norwegian “man of the house” stature. There is a lot to love in your family, even though you may grow apart and have disagreements. I am not going to post as a “poor me” character, but I will tell the truth, as I think I have some stories to tell that I know I have learned from.
Fast forward 10 years and it was inevitable the divorce would happen. The many nights of drinking and fighting to the point of abuse became a problem and had to come to an end gratefully. Now a teenager myself, I looked up to my one and only sister that was in college, the smart one, Linda. She held my hand and included me in everything she did as I grew up. Even though I was an over-hyper snotty kid myself, Linda always treated me with respect and kindness. Scolding me when I needed it. At this point in our lives our family is drifting apart. Not just my parents, but my two older sisters had moved on to adult-hood and rightfully so. Linda was off to college so it was Billy and I left in the house with my Dad and his new bride. My mother has disappeared to find work and some sort of faithful friendship from a new man herself. Being near the bottom of the age ladder in my family, I didn’t think my mother had much of a chance to form much of a relationship with me other than to be my Mom. I never knew her feelings or thoughts about things. But that was okay by me. I knew we all had to move on.
So It’s me and Billy, navigating through yet another volatile home situation with my Dad and Beverly. Beverly was a country girl. She was a very warm and expressive individual at first meeting. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that my brother and I were competition for her or perhaps just a temporary thorn in her side. I was not an angelic person as a teenager, but I didn’t know very many who were, so I felt quite ordinary. A cheerleader in school, sang in the choir, went to High School keggers. That’s what you did back in the 80s anyway. Before I knew it, Billy was adapting to his mischievious boy nature. I don’t think he knew what to do with himself. Constantly searching for approval from Father, he never seemed to get it. A true trait of the Norwegian Lutheran people of the “old country”. Kids are to be seen and not heard…this was not my Fathers’ fault. He was a product of his own childhood environment.
Before you know it, we are all adults. Billy has moved to Mothers’ and has adopted a smoking and drinking habit at 16. 5 Years older than him, I thought it just to be a typical high school thing. But after trashing my mothers’ car, twice and ending up in the hospital, twice, I knew something was wrong. And I was only 21. I felt a compulsion to stick up for him everytime a family member would roll their eyes at the mention of his name. Billy was a sweet person. He worked very hard. He had nothing but love but had succombed to his pain. Time went on as it does, and Billy had been sent to a Psychiatric are of a hospital when he ran his car into a building wall. They had prescribed him with Prozac. He didn’t like it, said that it made him feel worse sometimes. He stopped that for a while and had some good outcomes with treatment in a stint or two.
In and out of treatment centers, having to do prison time and struggling yet more with his pain, it ended in fear fleeing from a police officer. He was unarmed, but the officer was not.
Now of course the “tie in” to the rest of the family didn’t occur to me until many years later. And I will tell you why. There are hints of mental stress that have been overlooked by my family my whole life and I am sure has happened to others. This is why I have chosen “Bipolar” as one of my blog topics. People need to be aware that a real human being is inside that person struggling with life. We like to label people and then treat them all the same. This doesn’t work. This is why so many people fail with the old methods of treatment and discipline. You can’t create a cookie cutter fix for an individual that suffers from depression of any kind. I hope to continue to learn and see the amazing beings we become as we learn more about ourselves and each other rather than become angry. We are after all, only human. Only God has all the answers.
The Big Picture 