Supernormal. Мэг Джей
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Mara thought she had the best mother in the whole world, and on these days she did.
Sometimes, though, the big yellow bus rounded the corner and no one was there waiting. On those days, Mara waved a self-conscious good-bye to her bus driver and wondered if he knew what awaited her. On days like this, Mara made herself scarce without leaving the house. Her favorite escape was to her bedroom closet, where pillows and blankets lined the long shelf above the clothing rod. Stepping lightly on a small dresser, Mara hoisted herself high up into the top of her closet. It was there that she discovered what she called her “magic trick.” She looked at a spot, like the hinge on the door or a spot on the ceiling, and closed one eye. Then she opened that eye and closed the other eye. Going back and forth, opening only one eye at a time, Mara realized that her eyes saw the hinge or the spot from slightly different angles; binocular vision worked by fixing both eyes on the same thing at the same time. Then, somehow, she trained her eyes or her brain not to do that. She realized that if she let the two images drift apart, the world became doubled and unfocused. By staring into the space between the two images, Mara found a way of looking right at something but not really seeing it at all.
The more she practiced her magic trick the easier it became, so easy that when Mara’s mother’s face changed from light to dark and she grabbed Mara’s arms and would not let her go, Mara did not have to disappear by packing her little suitcase or retreating to her closet. By splitting her vision, Mara could slip into the space between what her right eye and left eye saw anytime she wanted. It made Mara feel untouchable, even when she was standing in front of her mother and the woman shook her as hard as she could.
***
In any given year, one in five adults struggle with some mental health condition, and one in twenty live with what are called serious mental illnesses. While there is no definitive list of mental disorders that qualify as “serious”—nor is there a group of mental disorders that are necessarily mild or insignificant—most psychologists would agree that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are serious metal illnesses, and any number of psychological problems, from major depression to eating disorders to obsessive-compulsive disorder, can be considered serious mental illnesses if symptoms are severe enough to substantially interfere with everyday activities such as keeping a job, earning a living, maintaining relationships, running a household, or caring for oneself. Of course, in adulthood, one of life’s everyday activities may be parenting. Though we may not think about mental health patients as parents, women with emotional disorders are just as likely as other women to be mothers, and up to 50 percent of women who live with a serious mental illness live with their children as well. Fathers with mental illness are neglected in the research, yet from the available data, it seems that men with emotional problems may be less likely than their peers to have children, or at least to live with their children, although of course many do.
By the time Mara was in elementary school, her mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is a mood disorder that affects nearly six million adult Americans—and therefore the day-to-day lives of millions of American children like Mara. Symptoms of bipolar disorder include emotional highs characterized by lack of sleep, limitless energy, and chaotic productivity followed inevitably by bottomless lows when sufferers may sleep or cry in despair for days or weeks at a time. As dramatic as the symptoms of bipolar disorder may be, witnessing the mental illness itself is likely to be only a small part of the stress children and families face. As their symptoms ebb and flow, parents with serious mental illnesses struggle to keep their jobs and pay their bills, and this makes it difficult to provide even the most basic necessities for their children. Parents with serious mental illnesses are more likely to be single parents, and on their own, their behavior may be too inconsistent for them to provide the structure children crave. Overwhelmed by their own symptoms and moods, parents like Mara’s mother may be unable to notice or meet the emotional needs of their children. And because many mental illnesses are chronic and episodic, these stressors are likely to impact children not just once, but again and again across years.
Despite these challenges, parents with mental illness—like other parents—often find deep meaning in their roles as caregivers, and their love for their children and their desire to be good parents can be powerful incentives to do well. Children in these families tend to see their parents as good parents, viewing them more positively than do the parents themselves, as they look beyond their parents’ illnesses and connect with the mothers and fathers inside. This benefits everyone, because even when caregivers struggle with emotional problems, children suffer less when they have warm and affectionate bonds with those they love. Just as having a serious mental illness does not automatically make one a bad parent, being the son or daughter of a parent with a serious mental illness does not necessarily mean a ruined life for the child. These children are at greater risk for emotional and behavioral problems of their own, yet studies of children and adolescents with parents who suffer from serious mental illness find that about one-third to one-half do well at school, at work, and in relationships, and are free of mental health problems themselves; they look and function like their peers.
How do they do it?
Some do what many children who live with adversity do: They find a way to get away.
***
Up in the protected space of Mara’s shelf, there were stuffed animals and dot-to-dot books, but most treasured was a black, handheld transistor radio that she kept tucked among the pillows. When her mother cried the afternoon away, Mara sat up on her shelf and shoved the single cream-colored earbud into her ear. “I tried to get the sound as loud as I could,” she recalled. “I didn’t care about my hearing. I wished I was deaf so I would not hear.” Mara rolled her finger along the plastic, toothed tuning dial on the radio, watching its little red needle move stiffly across the stations. Music and then static and then music and then static again. As she did this, Mara felt like she was fine-tuning her attention, and she blocked out the sounds of her mother in one ear by focusing on the music in the other.
One way we tune out of one part of life is by tuning into another. When we become absorbed in a single engrossing activity, we forget about our troubles, big and small. Listening intently to music. Losing ourselves in a book or a movie. Playing an instrument. Daydreaming and fantasy. Watching television. Throwing ourselves into a hobby or sport. These are just some of the ways in which we distance ourselves from the stress of everyday life by attending to something else, usually as a way of relaxing or of lessening the wear and tear of the world around. In his memoir, Instrumental, classical pianist James Rhodes remembers escaping the pain of childhood sexual abuse by getting away to play music: “The school had a couple of practice rooms with old, battered upright pianos in them. They were my salvation. Every spare moment I got I was in them.” And in her memoir, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, Misty Copeland, the first African American woman to become a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, remembers dance as a way of forgetting about the realities of her childhood: “Whenever I danced, whenever I created, my mind was clear. I didn’t think about how I slept on the floor because I didn’t have a bed, when my mother’s new boyfriend might become my next stepfather, or if we would be able to dig up enough quarters to buy food.”
Any absorbing activity involves a kind of selective attention—or selective inattention—a shifting of focus that allows us to narrow our experience and to shut out awareness of small stressors or even grievous misdeeds. While such activities may sound like escapism, the mind strays from the here and now as much as 50 percent of our waking hours, suggesting that these distancing maneuvers serve some important survival functions. Indeed, researchers have found that absorbing tasks and preoccupations can be quite positive: They reduce stress, preserve feelings of safety and control, restore a neutral mood after bad things happen, and sometimes result in the feeling of “flow.”
Even when Mara was not on her shelf, she was an expert at focusing her attention on the thing of her choosing, seeming not to notice when her mother crashed, in one way or another. So the police saw one evening when they marched her mother in through the back door, after she had run her car into a telephone pole in a hypomanic speeding frenzy. Mara was eating a pizza in front of the television, listening to a game show with one ear and to the police with the other, never once looking their way. “My eyes were glued to the TV,” Mara recalls now, “and I knew