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Unit 8

LOVE AND RESENTMENT

Barbara Bick

1.

I straightened up from my weeding as the frenzied mutterings of anger reached me from the house. My muscles tightened. The screams were so muffled I could barely hear them. \

2. I moved cautiously through the overgrown bushes, up against the bathroom window, straining to catch the exact words. I want to understand my daughter. \You always do everything wrong. Incompetent bitch?\The flushing toilet drowned out the rest. I moved away quickly, shaken once again by her wild outbursts. Sometimes she frightens me when she is clearly out of control. But this time I was reassured; she didn't want me to hear. I bent to my weeding as she opened the screen door. She sat down. Her face was calm and impassive.

3. \I help you, mother?\asked as she lighted her umpteenth cigarette of the morning and was shaken by her usual barking cough.

4. \

5. \

6. \what you can.\

7. Damn it yourself, I said to myself. Why did I bring her up here? Why, why, why? Yesterday had been rough. She had hurled accusation after accusation at me. \do you always say I'm crazy?\she had yelled. \you EVER tell me I'm a paranoid schizophrenic again. That's all you ever do -- call me crazy and I'm not.\

8. \you crazy. Please, Kathy, keep your voice down. Kathy, stop it. Stop it right now!\

9. I shook away that memory and rose laboriously. I had just come to the island and so I was eager to clean up my burgeoning garden after a winter's neglect. This is the fourth year I have had this tiny treasure of a house. It was to be my retreat from the

harassing city, the social and political commitments I take on each year, the needs of family and friends.

10. For three summers I have brought my 40-year-old daughter to the island to spend two weeks with me. Surely, I can live for two weeks with the tension and outbursts. Her life is so limited and mine is so full. A short span of days, really, for me to take care of her; to give her some joy. I have so many days, just for me, after she goes back to the city.

11. But I can't. I resent the tension. I lose patience. Sometimes I hate her. What is wrong with me? I am strong and healthy; she is vulnerable and ill. It is always my choice to have her here. But I count the days until she is gone and there are moments when I think, no, not another summer. Why do this to myself? Most of the time I know that these weeks are too important to her; I cannot take them away.

12. She doesn't sleep well. Before I came up, I discussed the sleeping problem with her psychiatrist so that he could prescribe some medication. I couldn't bring myself to tell him that I am afraid to be deep in sleep while she is awake. She is not physically violent. In all the 24 years of her illness, she has attacked me only three times. But they remain with me. Each time, her adrenaline-induced strength had overwhelmed me. And no matter how intimate one is with this illness, the primordial fear of madness lurks deep within. The medication the doctor suggested doesn't work and my bedroom here is an open room without a door to lock. So, I sleep lightly these nights. I sense the lights blazing downstairs. I listen to her cough as she smokes and mutters through the long hours. I try to imagine — out of my own healthy body — what it is like to be Kathy.

13. Physically, she always feels unwell. The antipsychotic medication has many unpleasant side effects. More than that, she has no empathy with her own body, cannot take care of it. She eats badly, drinks coffee constantly, smokes incessantly, does no exercise. She has perpetual headaches and frequent stomachaches.

14. For years she suffered from Crohn's disease, a deep inflammation of the colon, leaving her little or no control of her bowels. She has been plagued and humiliated by accidents in public. People have responded to this affliction by yelling at her, calling her filthy. She has silently accepted the appellation, taken it within her. \bitch!\she yells at herself. \

15. I lie awake, my throat tight and aching as I remember the years when her illness was more active, filled with agonizing hallucinations that most of us, during a lifetime, experience for only seconds in our worst, most searing nightmares.

16. She had been a normal, beautiful child. The changes began in high school. Kathy started a diary when she was 16 years old. She wrote: \morning I feel as though someone took a file and sandpaper and scratched off all my epidermis. I feel raw and sore and ugly and dirty and loathsome. I also have a headache and coffee makes it worse. I escape thru dreams and the pressure of returning reality gives me a headache.

17. \inside me is going thru this funny, alien state, a sense of being at the mercy of some strange force, and this pathetic scarecrow figure inside me at the mercy of other forces. My stomach is empty and gnawing and uneasy as if anything could fall in and break the superstructure I hold up with all my force.\

18. Kathy did go off to college. The trauma of her breakdown there was followed by the deadening travail of the long search for a psychiatric solution. Then, a decade of daily life in the huge psychiatric hospital, the \she has never been able to draw a deep breath full of good life.

19. The daughter I would have had — were it not for this evil illness — exists in embryo in the daughter I do have. After an outburst, she will come and tell me quietly: \mother. I don't want to fight with you.\

20. \

21. To admit the truth, sometimes I trigger her outburst. Like Tuesday, when I came upon her pouring coffee straight from the jar, half filling her cup with the powder and splattering grains over the counter. I ordered her, peremptorily: \a spoon, Kathy. Can't you do things normally once in a while!\

22. She whirled and, in a shrill tone, screamed: \to do. I am an adult and I don't need you to tell me when to go to bed and when to get up.\absurdity!\\

23. Later, in the evening, she almost whispers to me: \washed my hair, done my nails, and I've cleaned up the dinner dishes. I feel much better now.\ashamed. I know her greatest wish is to live with me all of the time, to have me take care of her, cook her good meals every day as I do these two weeks on the island.