Kenin
There are good people.
My husband has Parkinson's. Every day of the week, regardless of the weather (excluding blizzards and hurricanes), he walks 5K. I walk with him on weekends but only when the temperature is below 55. I love our walks; the nature around us is beautiful. But for exercise? I prefer to be out of the heat and humidity.
He prefers the outdoors. He walks every day because exercise is the only thing all the Parkinson's neurologists agree slows the progression.
Slows. It is still progressing.
When we walk, we hold hands. Not only has that always been our normal, now it keeps the tremor in his right hand from affecting his walk. When he walks alone, he bounces a lacrosse ball. It helps with dexterity and distracts the tremor as well.
He is well-known in our town. People wave at him from their cars, sometimes stopping to say how inspiring he is. He has been hugged by strangers who see him in other locations and recognize him, "you're the guy with the ball!" More than one person has used him as an example to a child as someone with discipline and drive.
This morning, he was walking with his ball and it hit a rock, careening into a hole about four feet deep. The hole is covered by a board, but, obviously, there's enough space for a ball to fall through. Cars zipping by, he lay on the ground and stuck his arm through the hole. He couldn't reach it. I suspect at this point his tremor was a bit uncontrollable as well (he walks before he takes his medication because the side effect is his right leg twists inward making walking very uncomfortable). He gave up and continued walking home, sans ball.
Maybe three minutes later, the time it took to walk from one side of the high school to the other, a pick up truck pulled over and parked. A nicely dressed, clean cut man (my husband's description) got out and started walking toward my him.
Ball in hand.
Apparently, he's a cop in our town and sees my husband often; one of the many who waves back - my husband always waves when the police drive by. He saw what happened.
"How did you get it?" my husband asked.
"I moved the board and jumped in the hole."
Nice clothes and all.
My husband thanked him repeatedly and has told me I must remember his name: Kenin.
He was so moved as he told me the story. He kept sipping his water to calm himself. I was crying as soon as the pick up truck parked and the guy got out, figuring what was coming although I assumed he was gifting him a ball, not that he'd climbed in a hole to get my husband's.
For every person who makes me angry and sad because they are impatient and unkind with my husband, I must remember there are good people around, too.
Some thoughts about my mom and her mental illness:
My mom was a single mother. I was born in the 60’s, and while it appeared my mom was pretty self-sufficient, where I lived in the working-class-neighborhood of Brooklyn, it was considered a faux pas to give birth to a child out of wedlock. My mom knew this and she found a guy who was willing to be listed as the father on my birth certificate. I didn’t know this at the time, but my mom had been married two times before I was born. During her life she was married a total of nine times. Nope, that’s not a misprint. Nine times.
My mom was a consummate artist. She was also profoundly mentally ill. I am convinced of a truism of my mother’s artwork: her mental illness informed her art, and her art informed her mental illness. Knowing her as well as I did it makes sense that she used art as a distraction. It also makes sense that she was married nine times. As her internal world was so chaotic, I sense she was looking for outside stimuli to quell the madness she felt on the inside as well as receive some kind of validation that she was okay.
During the time my mom was a professional artist her work appeared in over 200 shows. She worked in various mediums (plaster, ceramics, sculpture, pottery, pen and ink, etc) but her best work was done in either oil or acrylic. Today, artists mount their work between two pieces of clear Lexan or Lucite. My mother’s work was mounted between two large pieces of glass, held together by large machine bolts/screws. Felt washers were used on either side of the bolt ,and in-between the pieces of glass. The pieces of glass came shipped to our apartment pre-drilled. My mom tried various methods to mount her work, but she was fond of threading the holes in the glass with climbing rope and using a fisherman’s knot connected to some bolts mounted on the ceiling. Not only was she a consummate artist, she prided herself on making sure her art was mounted in a way that could keep her work safe. People would come from across the globe to attend her shows and buy her work. I was proud of my mom and I never tired of people telling me that my mom was amazing.
As a kid I remember hoping that the constant adulation my mom received about her art would be sufficient to quell the near- constant distress she felt with her various mental health issues. As a kid I remember feeling powerless to help my mom. When my mother took her medication, she was at ease in the world: her world made sense, and there was a sense of order in the Universe. When my mom took her medication, I felt connected to her. When she kept to her medication schedule my friends weren’t scared of her. My mother was also trained as a mental health therapist. When she took her medication, she had amazing clinical insight. When she didn’t take her meds, the police were always there. I’m not sure exactly how many times I visited her in the hospital. The diagnosis was always the same:
– Paranoid Schizophrenia with depressed features
– Narcissistic Personality Disorder
– Borderline Personality Disorder
– Sociopathic personality Disturbance, or what is known today as Antisocial Personality Disorder
My grandmother was a social worker and my mom was a therapist. It’s not surprising that I was drawn to working in the mental health field. After reviewing my mom’s hospital records, I’m not sure that the last three mental health diagnoses were accurate, however, I am absolutely convinced she suffered from Paranoid Schizophrenia. She had command hallucinations which convinced her I was the spawn of Satan and that the only way to save the world was to end my life. During her last hospital stay the entire team met with me and my grandparents and they disclosed my mother’s plans to end my life. There were enough clues along the way but nothing extreme enough happened which prompted the state or my grandparents to remove me from my mother’s care. I came to live with my grandparents but was extremely sad as I felt like I was abandoning my mom.
Have you seen A Beautiful Mind? It’s an amazing film that does a wonderful job of illustrating mental illness, specifically paranoid schizophrenia and delusional episodes. While I have never met John Nash nor do I know anyone who knows him, I can relate to how his wife felt living with someone who was profoundly mentally ill. Unlike John Nash, my mom was never compelled to create a room full of chaos. She kept most of her delusions in well over 600 scrapbooks. My mom was obsessed with numbers, colors, shapes and abstract information. If she saw the number 5 on TV, she would collect five objects that represented that number. If the numbers on TV were a certain color, she would collect pieces of paper in that color: the word ‘White’ would become part of her delusion, and she would collect a large number of objects that were white. As ‘White’ has five letters she would fixate on the number five. Much like someone with OCD engages in the compulsion to relieve the distress, my mom was compelled to focus on her delusions to feel safe. After I was sent to live with my grandparents, I inherited all of my mom’s scrapbooks.
I tried looking through them to see if I could gain any insight as to how my mom lived her life and navigated her world. After paging through many of the scrapbooks my grandmother sat beside me, placed her hand on mine and encouraged me to stop. “Todd, even your mom doesn’t understand why she does what she does”. My grandmother was right. I was simply trying to find a way to be closer to my mom. I wanted to help her. I felt powerless.
Growing up with my mom and living with grandparents that survived a genocide certainly shaped how I view mental illness and the work with my patients.
I’m not a huge fan of labels. My experience is that when you label something not only do you need to overcome the affliction, you also need to overcome the label. I certainly understand why a label or a DSM code is applied in a mental health setting: they create a sense of commonality with other clinicians, they act a gateway for billing practices, they offer a common language when writing reports or letters, and when clients do not behave in a clinical setting the clinician can blame the patient versus take responsibility for their inability to make any progress with their client.
Unfortunately, labels also tend to marginalize clients, especially people who are poor or low-income. People with greater financial resources tend to have fewer social problems. Clients without the aid of financial support tend to be at the behest of agencies which are overloaded and they often are only willing to apply a label to make quick work of a new admit. As I’ve worked as a clinician in a variety of agencies and with clients on either side of the financial spectrum, I’m convinced this point-of-view is accurate. I’m also embarrassed to admit that early in my clinical career I was entirely too generous with the application of labels on a host of clients. I’m reminded of many assessments and letters and documents that were rife with the misapplication of whatever diagnostic assessment impressed me at the time. I’m grateful that I have grown as a clinician and have grown past the need to both marginalize and stigmatize clients seeking help.
I have suffered with depression for most of my life. Meds only seem to work for a limited period of time. The only thing that seems to help with depression is therapy and volunteer efforts.
I think of mental illness as being on a spectrum, and I’m certain that if most people peeked at the DSM 5 they could probably identify with some of the characteristics of any of the diagnostic criteria. Chronic mental illness is a bit different. I think of chronic mental illness like a radio station: most people who are not mentally ill have the ability to tune into one station; my mother lacked this ability. Attendant to the illness of Schizophrenia belies disorganized thoughts. I’m not sure my mom ever felt normal or had the ability to have coherent and cogent thoughts. Most literature suggests that symptoms of Schizophrenia manifests before the age of 19. While I never had the opportunity to meet any of her family, I have heard enough of my mother’s background to determine that my mom suffered from early-onset Schizophrenia. She likely heard voices and suffered with hallucinations and delusions while she was in Kindergarten.
As hard as it was for me to accept my mom’s mental illness, I am absolutely certain it was just as hard for her to accept that her brain did not function as a normal human being, whatever normal is. I saw a great bumper sticker that said normal is a setting on a washing machine. I think that is pretty spot-on. My mom represented two extremes of a great mind: a tormented human being in her own thought prison and a fantastically talented artist with the capacity to produce great, original work in various mediums which were lauded by art critics throughout the US and the rest of the world. The people who knew my mom suggested she was a great artist and a consummate therapist. I think they were right.
When I was a kid I used to believe that my mom ruined my childhood. I blamed her for creating so much chaos in my life. I assumed she did this intentionally. I grew up in an environment of catastrophic violence. Whenever I had a hard time, I’d point to my mom: I never developed the coping skills needed for a decent life,
I developed PTSD because of my mom and her poor choices, I attracted women who weren’t good for me as I had a poor role model. While this could be great fodder for a therapy visit, it’s also a fantastic way to stay ‘stuck’.
Here’s what I know and believe to be true: my mom did the best she could with what she had. She was incapacitated and couldn’t have functioned any other way. She was living with a disease that affected the way she behaved and thought about people and the world at large. While my mom was sufficiently impacted with mental illness, she had some sense that she couldn’t care for me and let my grandparents raise me. In her mental fugue she had enough clarity to make a decision for my own well-being.
My mom also valued education (she possessed a few graduate degrees) and insisted I followed-through with my own education. She valued self-sufficiency and would remind me that I had the fortitude and capacity to survive. While I lived with her pain and confusion, this experience has remained a catalyst for friends, sponsees, and clients: when people talk to me I’m not shaken by their disclosures. Being able to listen to the pain of another person without flinching is a very concrete experience that allows me to witness humanity. I’m also keenly aware that my mom had wanted to take her own life on several occasions. Had she done that I wouldn’t be here. Because of my mom I had an amazing relationship with my grandparents that would have never been possible had my mom been born without any kind of mental illness.
I never had the opportunity to meet my mom before she died. We were estranged for the last 45 years she was alive; my mom became lost in her white power/Nazi beliefs which sufficiently ended our relationship. I dated an African American woman who converted to Judaism for me (we had planned to get married further down the road), and according to my mother, I had “polluted the bloodline”. I was born in the Projects (Flatbush Gardens) so I’m not exactly sure what white trash ideals she wanted me to preserve.
Was I affected by my mom’s mental illness? Certainly. Do I have more work to do? Absolutely. While I can focus on what I didn’t get and be upset that there are places in my life that feel incomplete, I am left with a striking revelation: there are gifts in the darkness.
However you choose to deal with your own distress, good luck on your path.
Potholder: A Love Story
Once upon Ye Olde English heath, as the door to her cottage swung open, Hildegard smelled burning. Her husband’s boot had crossed the threshold, he would expect dinner, and he would not want it to be burned.
Hildegard rushed to the hearth. She grabbed the dangling pot of stew and instantly, agonizingly, the metal seared her palms.
“Zounds!” she cried.
“Woman!” her husband remonstrated.
“Zounds, it hurts!”
“Hold thy foul tongue!” her husband roared. “Thou wilt not blaspheme in my house!” (For zounds, dear reader, derived from God’s wounds, a reference to the crucifixion of Christ, and to employ the torture of one’s Lord and Savior as an epithet was as shocking to a pious old Englishman as the lyrics of NWA would prove to his descendants' erstwhile colonists 400 years after.)
“But it hurts!” Hildegard cried. “Thy stew burneth, and the metal hath proved too hot for my tender hands!”
“Stow thy pitiful excuses!” her husband retorted. “Find thyself a godlier path, or never again look me in the face!”
Hildegard departed. She wept even after she treated her second degree burns at the home of a crone who practiced homeopathic medicine, for Hildegard loved her husband, for some reason, or at least loved having a roof over her head to escape the goddamned English rain. To keep her husband roof husband, she needed aid, so Hildegard set out to a person who could set her on a godly path.
“Woman, why dost thou weep?” the Archbishop of Canterbury asked.
“Forgive me bishop,” Hildegard answered. “I hath displeased my husband.”
“How?”
“With an ill word.”
“What ill word did thee speakest?”
Hildegard hesitated. “I said, Zounds, your bishopness.”
“Jesus,” said the Archbishop of Canterbury, “that’s fucking awful word. Why wouldst thou say such a thing?”
“I burned my hands, your bishopness. On a pot. Heaven help me, if I don’t find a safer way to hold a pot, I might blaspheme again, and my husband will disown me. Is there any hope for such a disgraced wench as me?”
“Let us pray.”
And Hildegard and the Archbishop knelt and prayed, and, i dunno, burned frankincense or something, and lo, the Holy Ghost sent them down a dove, which carried in its beak a thickly woven fabric, and they gave thanks to the Lord.
“Almighty God,” asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, “what wouldst You, in Your Infinite Wisdom, have us call this thickly woven fabric with which to hold pots?”
The candles flared, the stones of the cathedral shook, the Archbishop wet himself, and a voice from the heavens boomed, “A potholder.”
And so Hildegard carried the potholder home, and gave knowledge of it unto other women, and prepared many delicious stews without burning her hands, which meant she never again said the unforgiveable zounds, which meant her husband loved her, five times a week whether she were in the mood or not, and she bore many children and had a roof over her head to protect her from the goddamned English rain, and they all lived happilyish ever after until the plague destroyed their bodies and minds.
The End.
The serious alphabet
Are you serious?
Baby, you should
Chill out sometimes.
Doesn’t it
Exhaust you?
Fore you being
Godly and
Hotheaded really
Isn’t appealing.
Just calm down.
Know that
Life doesn’t always
Mean that you
Need to have control.
Open your mind to the
Possibility that a
Quick joke wont
Ruin the atmosphere.
Smiling and not giving a
Toss, ignoring the
Urge to say
Vile comments
Will make our
Xanadu and
You won’t require a
Zipper for your mouth.
Empty Promises
I was told I was a neglected plant -
That I haven't been cared for properly,
I deserved to be put in the sunlight.
To bloom.
Be shown in all my beauty.
You promised so much.
I will thrive.
And grow.
Perhaps I misunderstood;
Or maybe I’m just naive.
You promised.
But you lied.
I didn’t get put out in the sun.
I was never even watered.
You put me in a dark cupboard,
with a photograph of a beautiful sunrise stuck on the door.
You promised me the world.
And here I am.
In the dark.
Slowly dying.
You promised.
The note
Upon the fridge was pinned a note
In hurried hand it had been wrote
It said exactly this, I quote
'I'm joining Johnny on his boat'
No further message there was penned
My poor heart, oh it did rend
That man was far more foe than friend
I fretted how it all might end
My girl was hardly more than lass
Although she could be bold as brass
And on occasion rather crass
She had no business with that ass
I'd heard stories 'bout that man
About his off-white panel van
My face went pale, I turned and ran
Mind scrambling to make a plan
My feet flew down towards the dock
As chimes emitted from the clock
Those schemes of his, I planned to block
That boat of his would surely rock
When I arrived, the dock was bare
Neither he nor she were there
I almost wilted with despair
He'd lured her right into their lair
See Johnny was a simple fool
Passing handsome, never cruel
He often hung around the pool
Making the young women drool
But I knew where he'd take his date
A place where bad men lay in wait
Their stone-cold eyes filled up with hate
I hoped I wouldn't be too late
There was at river's mouth a place
Perched atop the high rock face
These cloaked men had made their base
That was where my feet did race
I donned a cloak and grabbed a gun
I planned to kill them one by one
Oh they'd regret what they had done
They'd not live to see the sun
The trip took longer than I'd like
The cult's lair was quite a hike
I hid in bushes, poised, catlike
Waiting for the time to strike
What I witnessed shocked me raw
Rocked my foundations to the core
My girl was there, feet on the floor
I'd never seen her look so sure
A knife in hand, she faced the men
She sliced and then she sliced again
Til blood was thick in that bullpen
She slaughtered them from one to ten
I'd never seen her move so quick
Their bodies did she nick and prick
The scarlet ground became quite slick
The last man gave a death throe kick
She turned to where I hid close-by
As if she knew my eyes did spy
'You read the note?' her voice was shy
'T'was time for these bad men to die'
I stood up and smiled at her
'My girl, of course I do concur,
I wanted these deaths to occur
I wished we'd had time to confer'
'I tried to tell you once or twice
But what's done, it should suffice'
Her eyes were hard as winter ice
'I've ended virgin sacrifice'
Death by Convenience
Convenience is killing you.
Leading you downhill to your grave.
What Frost doesn’t say,
Is the road less taken,
Is steep in grade,
Filled with potholes,
Uphill all the way.
What you don’t realize,
Is downhill leads to disease.
Instead of being easier,
It’s hard on your knees.
Instead of building character,
Instead of building muscle,
You’re building a pile of regret,
Too big to shovel.
Fortunately,
hope is not lost,
For those who want to heal,
Willing to pay the cost.
It’s not a price paid
In money or time.
The fee for your soul,
Must be paid by your mind.
It starts by taking a long hard look,
Admitting you’re dragging your feet in the dirt.
Convenience tricked you,
With seductive deceit.
It lured with comfort,
But ended in defeat.
It promised you rest,
But delivered despair,
A journey so smooth,
That led to nowhere.
So choose not the path,
Where convenience lies,
For it's in all the struggles,
Where true value lies.
The climb may be steep,
And the journey severe,
But each step strums a song,
Your soul yearns to hear.
In each brave uphill step,
In every small strive,
You experience REAL living,
Not just living to survive.
Short Story Collection Being Released
Hi everyone!
I just wanted to share that I'll be releasing a collection of short stories on February 1st. Many of the stories in this collection have been featured here, while others haven't. If anyone is interested, you can find it on Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CRQZTJM5/ref=sr_1_1?crid=CRDHZ7RB04E0&keywords=theres+gold+in+those+hills&qid=1704751382&sprefix=theres+gold+in+those+hill%2Caps%2C185&sr=8-1
I'm pretty excited about this and I just wanted to thank The Prose community for being the major reason for this collection. Before I joined this community, my writing was directionlesss and you've help me find direction.
So, thanks everyone!
In the End
SHE: You mean they were all lies?
HE: That's not what I'm saying.
SHE: Then what are you trying to say?
HE: They were all b.u...
SHE: B.u., L. L., huh.
HE: It was just a few nights.
SHE: A few nights?
HE: Here and there.
SHE: B.U.?!
HE: Before Us!
SHE: How much is a few nights?
HE: I don't know.
SHE: What...?!
HE: I didn't keep count.
SHE: How much is a few beers?
HE: Not the same thing.
SHE: Just checking.
HE: They didn't mean anything.
SHE: But they weren't Lies...?
HE: They were just...
SHE: ...a few Lays?
HE: HONEST!
12.22.2023
FFF#11 In the End, They were All Lies!