On Lunatics, Coo-Coo Birds, Emotional Terrorists and Blame Gamers

Lunatics: everyone knows one or some. Most families are saddled with one or some. It is a multi-billion dollar a year industry, to treat the ill-adjusted. Good people like Glenn Close create and are deeply involved in charities that raise funds and awareness for the mentally ill. Every other ad on television is about one depression drug or another. Catherine Zeta-Jones just came out of her bi-polar closet. A great many artists, writers, scholars and academics are known coo-coo birds. And so it goes, what use to be something only whispered or hidden, or otherwise not discussed – is now an accepted part of our society at large.

Okay. Sure. I get it. And I agree to a point. I mean, after all – it deserves attention and care. Awareness, too. Yes. But here’s the thing: has society become so accustomed to blame that everyone lines up like sheep and says “Yes! Me, me! I feel crappy! I’m a little blue! I can’t shake the stress! And I saw this commercial...” and expect to be slapped with a validating diagnosis of depression, pop a pill and make it all better? Where is the accountability? Where is the emotional responsibility? At what point did people stop looking at the choices they were or weren’t making in their lives in direct relation to their degree of contentment and happiness, or lack there of?

Now the above doesn’t go for the truly mentally insane. I realize they just may very well be unable to help it. I also strongly believe that those who cannot help it be removed from society. It’s the casually, morphingly-diagnosed depresees that I find irritating and overall lacking character and the gumption to look in the mirror and change whatever ails them.

But then there’s another breed - the somewhat silent, real-time, pendulum-swinging lunatics who sometimes function in the real world, hold jobs, have iPhones, drive cars, eat food – but live in squalor, rent-free in their deceased grandmother’s house in the ghetto with a rabbit they starved to death, decomposing in a cage next to their dining room. They can’t be bothered with disposing of the carcass because they can’t get to that side of the room without stepping in both fresh and old, ashen piles of dog shit. This is the kind that will punch a three-year-old in the stomach for yanking a bit too hard on the house-shitting dog's ears, and then misjudge him for inarticulate and unable to tell his parents. This is the same kind that will walk down the same hall every day, where a cockroach goes overlooked on the wall, now a fixture with one half of it’s body remaining intact, the other crushed from the middle down, it’s innards streaked and dried yellow on the crow’s foot texture. An occasional comrade lays belly-up down this same hall, cocooned in dust bunnies.

But this person goes to work. And works with children, preferring small children, you know four years old and under, who can be bribed, manipulated and don’t get too mouthy. This kind of lunatic is uneducated, dropped out of school because, well – she was fat. High school is undoubtedly hard on four hundred pound, acne pocked girls. But there’s a difference between uneducated and unintelligent – and this person is not the latter. She is wicked smart, even if also a habitual drug user with a rap sheet. She obsesses over other’s children in a Hand That Rocks the Cradle kind of way. She has a sick and skewed (Freudian, even) perception of what a relationship between brother and sisters in their thirties should look like. She often says things like “my love knows no bounds,” which translates to mean that she herself knows no boundaries and will refuse to respect or acknowledge those of others. This type constantly intervenes in other people’s lives and relationships, perched on a lean-to soap box about how to live and how to be, how to raise children, judging all around her, condemning anyone who sticks around long enough. Yet she lives in the squalor, is unable to be self-sufficient, is single and friendless, save for the revolving door of sub-humans that’ll stick around only to smoke free from her sack, or commune in their mutual rejected sorry-ness, or the virtual internet relationships she’s been able to create through trickery, false braggadocio plus some creative Photoshopping. Aside from her parents (who are obligated, bless them,) everyone else has gone. Left… running and screaming away.

This is the type that most alarms me. This is also the type I find most flinching – the kind that uses their diagnosis (which changes, depending on what it is they want at the moment) as justification for their irrational actions, for their verbally violent and physically threatening meltdowns inspired by anything including something so little as a scheduling snafu. This is the type that is still whispered about among family… my family.

This is the sort of all-affecting, out of control, then lucid, then threatening then self-proclaimed near-prophet who everyone, for as long as I can remember, has danced around. Been at the mercy of. Tiptoed. Endured all kinds of shocking, unacceptable behavior from because… well, she’s crazy. She can’t help it, they say. And as family, we’re all supposed to just keep on taking it, keep on being the subject of her tirades, her obsession, then alternately take her libel and slander on the chin, because… well, first, it’s family and second – she’s not accountable for her actions, they say. Third, it’s really all only because well… she just loves us. She just wants attention. And the worst reason of all is yet another topic addressed here previously in my post on suicide – it’s her constant threat (and past failed half hearted attempts) that if she is not allowed the access she craves, to my husband, to my children – if she is not told what she wants to hear, is not allowed to “be herself,” then she. Just. Might.

And all the puppets dance.

I only half believe any of that. I believe this person, and her exclusive brand of crazy, chooses which of her actions to blame on her “illness,” which as mentioned is sometimes only clinical depression, or other times it’s manic depressive, or still yet, bi-polar or, or, or – just depends on the day, her offense and who you’ve talked to. I believe that the biggest part of the ever-changing illness is the also above mentioned lack of character, scape-goating cowardice and ultimate fraud. I am unsure whether or not she ever will complete the suicide, since she is one of those who seemingly enjoys such a love affair with her pain. Wallowing in it. Perpetuating it. Creating it. This is not me wishing it on her, nor goading her to it – but rather an honest explanation of what we’ve endured. The eggshells we used to walk on, before our family unit was threatened. I know in my bones that this is the kind of crazy that winds up being Friday night’s featured Dateline story, with Keith Morrison narrating the sordid details.

So, what do you do? How much compassion is enough? How much should be endured because of the sometimes cuckolding word “family?” Here’s what my husband and I did after years of it, negotiations over it, prayer about it: we went radio silent.

We did not (do not) attend events where we knew we’d have to deal with her. We’ve shunned her, officially, for more than a year now. We’ve ignored her texts, where once again, at pivotal moments in our lives, she makes effort to turn the focus to her – when we got married, when we were pregnant with our son (“How dare you consider naming that child after your mother!” –ensue family brawl over name choice…) when we were packing down ten years of our lives on a tight timeline and moving (insert looney’s insistence that we stop everything to discuss her feelings about our move – that we were taking “her” boy away from her. Mind you, we moved twenty six minutes away.) Then the day we had a sonogram and were told our baby Bird had a hole in her heart and ps – that kind of hole was a marker for Downs syndrome (insert berating texts from looney.)

It never mattered what was happening in real-time life with us, it only mattered that we all stop while she held us captive to tell us how she felt (read: raged, sobbed, foamed at the mouth) about our life decisions, and her insistence that she be considered and weighed heavily in each and every single one.

And that’s just a sampling of this kind of crazy’s milder episodes and behavior. That doesn’t include the stalking since, the lies she’s spread about myself and my husband, the threats to kidnap our children and the many other terroristic things we’ve been forced to notify both authorities and our attorneys about.

So, silence. Distance. And to that side of the family (save for two) – we are the bad guys. We’ve hurt their feelings. Family card night just isn’t the same. She can’t help it – they say. She’s lucid now, she’s not currently in a downward spiral, it’s safe now, they say.

These same sayers have told us, after particularly violent episodes inspired by something so benign as laundry that they too, have feared for their personal safety in her presence. “But, it’s family!”

I’ve come to discover that there are certain things that only a mother’s love can endure, and I ain’t her mama. And I’m no Glenn Close, either. Though, I’ll give to her foundation for posterity.

I know this might seem insensitive, harsh even. But when an entire tribe of people have been at the mercy, and my specific pod of people the focus of all the above, it tends to wear the compassion and understanding thin, it diminishes any pity that might have existed before, before, before – and it forces alienation, fortification of security and protection and since - the subsequent sweet, divine tranquility of normalcy and quiet. Even though she lurks. She’s always lurking.

So why am I blogging about it? Not to air dirty laundry, truly – that's not my style. She has been an embarrassment for the whole of my husband’s life. We are ashamed to claim any connection or relation to her whatsoever. Am I writing to increase our watchers (of which we have many, thankfully)? Maybe. But also to gain insight. Do comment on this. Do give feedback. Do tell me that we’re not the only ones who have the genetic (or legal, as it were, for me specifically) misfortune of being linked to a raving, bat-shit crazy, ticking time bomb. Secondly, I’m writing about it because in the world of gross-connectivity and over-sharing – we have mutual friends on Facebook with her, where she addresses my children in status updates, where she slanders my husband’s good name in posts. I just want to set the record straight for my old favorite government teacher who is one of those mutuals, in case you were wondering, sir. And lastly - because just as she stalks us in real life (we have eyes everywhere, our house sees everything, Rw is “big brother” only in the most technical of terms…) she’s one of the ones I mentioned in my very first post here – the one who will come for stalking and fodder.

Here it is, Tar-baby – we see you. We know. And now, so does everyone else. 

If you so happen to see a drug commercial that might cure you of all that - for the love of God, fucking take it.

And that, well… I just couldn’t help. Sanity made me do it.

To learn more about lunatics, crazy people, blame-shifters, emotional muggers or the people who do truly suffer from mental illness instead of just poor choices, click here: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml