The Bipolar Nanny Diaries

Shame alley-ooped my fear. I worked with children and I had a mental illness. They were antithetical.

I loved Pearl. Her gap tooth. Her three-year-old questions soggy with God. Her miniature record player, which she utilized like a professional, blowing on a record softly to clean it. Her seriousness while scribbling. Her tall halo of gold curls. The way she’d hold my face and squint at me for minutes at a time, breaking into giggles. It was a good job. To rub her belly when she was constipated and feed her crackers and chamomile. To be a bear on all fours chasing her across the carpet, into the closet, where she was less afraid than I. To wind up her little toy diver and watch him part the bubbles in her tub while she sang an unintelligible tune.

I loved her parents. Louisa with the jewelry business in the basement. How careful she was with beauty, treating jewels like rare diaphanous beetles, threading gold chain with gold chain in quietude, laying a gift across my neck come Christmas, calling me family, never acting interrupted or weighted or bothered, forever ready for Pearl and me to join her in the workshop for a moment of hellos. I loved Adam, his young head of grey hair, his electronic band, the way a smile overtook his face like a season, the hide-and-seek he gladly indulged Pearl whenever she wanted. How he and I would throw up our hands, shouting “I have no idea where she is!” while she peeked from behind a skinny lamp. I loved them both and would often stay an hour beyond when I was officially off the clock to talk while the sky darkened. Louisa and Adam, who trusted me with their car when I first met them, rathered I didn’t use the bus at night, wanted me to get home safe. I drove that huge clunky car all the way to my town, my hands cherishing the wheel in a time when my own parents were so distant and unforgivable.

I loved their home. A converted Church: spacious, wooden, intrinsically holy. Where the pew had been, a fireplace. On the second floor, directly underneath the steeple, they’d planted their bed. Louisa had set up tiny cinematic scenes all over the kitchen using plastic animals, thimbles, and old photographs. She was a curator, beauty’s co-conspirator. There was too much light to know what to do with. Too much gentleness. They craved the old-fashioned, the strange, the precious. A bookcase made from a horizontal wooden ladder. An ancient orange juice press which looked like a torture device but made a glass of OJ bright as a bee’s pollen basket.

The week before it all ended I had switched my medicine.

*

I left behind 900 MG of lithium. Though I’d been stable and thriving for two years, my quarterly blood tests were coming back high and there was talk of potential thyroid damage. While famous for its long-term efficacy, lithium is equally notorious for long-term negative effects, including but not limited to thyroid and kidney damage. My doctor thought we’d test lamotrigine out, see how it goes. She said, “You need to know: a very rare reaction is Stevens-Johnson Syndrome,” which scared the shit out of me. I knew Stevens-Johnson Syndrome well. It had almost killed a childhood friend. He’d reacted to a medication, was rushed out of fifth grade and into the hospital for the rest of the school year, where his entire skin burned slowly of its own accord, leaving him scarred as if from a fire.

“If you see a rash,” my doctor reiterated, “call me immediately. It’s life or death.” A week later, I saw a rash. I called. We took me off it. But it was too late. All it took was that little window, that gap of medicine-less-ness while lithium slowly titrated back to fullness, for the mania to wrap its electric cord around my neck. Suddenly—driving back from somewhere—(where?)—I found myself in a snowy field, running my palms along the body of a tree, crying. I am following my breadcrumbs home, I thought to myself and began to sing, every step I took profound, every thought a cosmic poetic tapestry. I sat in my car and wept to Tori Amos, considering old fissures with my family, capital D Destiny, and feeling a sorrow so choking I had to roll the windows down.

Once it was clear what was happening, I called my parents. A calm panic gripped them, hearing the clarity in my voice. This was the third episode I’d experienced in three years, but this time the hellish roller-coaster was brief. I was not dead or near dead as so many of us sufferers end up mid-episode. I wasn’t dead even though just last night at a cafe, a six-foot tall stranger singled me out, called me “luminous” while my brain sizzled, and offered we go somewhere together. (In that state, what if I’d said yes?) I wasn’t dead because even though my manic logic told me that my heartbeat was literally in my brother’s chest, I had a trusted therapist to tell such things. I would not be left to wander icy fields alone, suckling my delusion like a rotten tooth. After hearing my (many) revelations, my weeping that “I don’t want to be hospitalized again,” my therapist Claudia gently leaned toward me and responded with “Shira, I’m not going to hospitalize you. I just want to know, if this is all so good and big as you say, then why are you so afraid?”

It’s hard to explain how a beloved face can flip the record. I walked out of her office knowing there was a patternless blaze engulfing my mind; it dawned on me, I hadn’t slept (in how long?). Mania’s exhausting drug was just that: exhausting. I was clear. Clearly sick. There was no magic here, except that I could see through illness’ magic show. I would not drown. My parents heard it in my voice on the phone, “Please come.” I would not leave them like last time. I needed and welcomed their help.

I just want to know, if this is all so good   and big   as you say, then why are you so afraid?

That night I confided to my housemates what was happening; the symptoms, what I’d need, what this meant. Hearing that my insomnia was physically painful, the irritability incapacitating as jagged thoughts piled senselessly atop one another, my housemate Cory came and sat in my room with the lights out, as a presence to help me fall asleep. Cory, who had buried my cat, stroking his dead fur before releasing him to the earth, as if he could feel her. I closed my eyes and felt the flipped record whir, needle settling into rightful grooves. I remember Cory wore a small headlamp to read by. I’d open my eyes and see a soft dot. My friend, the lighthouse.

The next morning, my father arrived. We embraced in a way that said Daughter, not Sick. Night after night for weeks, there were pots of beef stew, reruns of Third Rock From the Sun, and him snoring in a sleeping bag on my hardwood floor.

*

I’d told the three families I worked for that there had been an emergency, revealed no details, and requested an unofficial medical leave. At first, no questions were asked; only condolences and “get-well-soon”s were offered. But then Louisa and Adam wanted more. To know. To be treated like “family.” But my family told me I owed no one an explanation. Their advice came with concern: You will be judged, you won’t be rehired. Then a fresh email from Adam arrived in my inbox: We’re not here to judge you. Here I was, trying to recalibrate after sleepless weeks, after a fall into chaos and crisis. My father sleeping on my floor, his breath a compass for my ease. Here I was, reading Louisa’s email: There’s a little girl involved who had a friend disappear on her with no warning . . . I know that you felt you could not continue your work but we would have really appreciated you seeing her somehow a couple times . . .

Me, reading with a brain gauzed in insomnia and tender from fireworks. Me, thinking how those on land have so much to say to the drowning. Me, wondering what I owe, to whom. Me, crafting email after email and never sending it. Me, a month later, returning to work for all of the families but theirs.

Luna’s moms welcomed me back without a blip, no second-guessing in the eyes. “The diapers are in the bag, enjoy your stroll!”

Joseph’s mom, Ellen, who I’d worked for the longest, cornered me by the garage my first week back: “We have to know . . . We need to know what you’re sick with . . . It’s for the safety of our little boy . . . I had an aunt with Schizophrenia . . . I watched her suffer. It scares me. I need to know . . . I’m sorry, have I said too much? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry. I’m just scared . . . I’m sorry, I’m here for you.” Not once in the two-and-a-half years that I loved and cared for her son did she hug me. But after the confrontation, high on anxiety, she pressed a hug against me, then recoiled, not knowing what to say, do, or be. I must have been a terrifying mirror, built inch for inch of questions. Ellen had always been so meek, impossible to get a word out of. But in this moment she couldn’t help herself. I saw what being a mother is, right there. Right by her car, in pure sunshine. Do you know what it’s like to go back inside, back to work, after this?

Should I have told them all? My parents said, “Protect yourself.” My therapist said, “To request that information is against the law.” My heart said, “Tell everyone, tell the air, the old tree, the mothers, I am sick, I have sickness in me, I was and am and will be.” But I wasn’t ready. How could I be? Fear gilded me. Shame alley-ooped my fear. I worked with children and I had a mental illness. They were antithetical. I wanted room to be sick without being interrogated. If I’d had the flu, would she have asked me to see Pearl? If I’d been in a car accident? Or, was it just the not-knowing, the being shut out? The questions ricocheted inside me. In the midst of addressing Louisa’s emails, Ellen’s phone calls, I was trying so hard to blink instead of letting the guillotine of lethargy fall. I was holding my father’s hand as he drove me to pick up medicine. In the midst of reckoning with such a life-threatening disruption, I leapt between desiring to be seen and deserving only the respect and privacy of healing. What I did know: Where there were incessant questions and demands therewasnobreathingroom.

In the end, I was fired from both jobs for not disclosing the details of medical leave. In the last email Louisa wrote: We don’t want to have bad feelings, part on a bad note . . . We had lots of great times with you. I just want you to know that the way that things ended could have been a LOT better and that you bear some responsibility when you take on a job like this, being immersed in someone’s family life . . . We spoke many times about trust. We trusted you and so did she . . . I couldn’t respond. Heartbroken is a valid word except it leaves out the throat; I was throatbroken. I was the oldest tree in the world, and from me illness swayed its devastating fruit. Ellen left a voicemail on my machine, longer than I’d ever heard her speak. I stood on my front porch in the rain, holding her voice to my ear: “I used to tell everybody ‘I just can’t believe how much she sincerely loves to play with him!’ You could just play with him for hours and hours and you seemed to really like it, the games, everything . . . ” her voice too chipper, her goodbye thin—still, meaning it.

I didn’t think of it until I moved to another state and needed to get a new job, but I’d lost nearly three years worth of references. In those three years, a blank space. If in one month’s time three years could be erased, what was time? What was I, then? A ghost? In a world of shadows, where one’s aunt was Schizophrenic, so the nearest nanny-on-leave is Schizophrenic, who else could I become? I wanted to be tall and open as a door, but I was sick. A sick daughter. I needed my father’s hand across my forehead. To feel unequivocally allowed. Allowed, then lifted. Lifted, then trusted. Trusted, then trusted.

This is what I choose to remember: Weeks before I got sick, Pearl and I are outside in the snow. There is so much of it, it’s almost to her chin. We are stomping around the Church in constant circles, laughing hysterically. Adam finds us and somehow this is funnier; Pearl hams up the affair, purposefully falling face-forward into the snow, immersed completely, smothered and screeching. I scoop her up and toss her to her father, who wrestles a hug. Her mother is a few feet away, downstairs under the blinding ground, binding loops of precious metal, setting a black stone into a pocket of silver. Nothing is wrong. No one needs to know anything. Everywhere we look, there is a white depth. We are climbing through it. We must.