Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

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In the summer my father would drink gin and tonics. When I was a kid, he would say, “Honey, can you go make me a drink?” I knew how to pour gin into a shot glass and into the cocktail glass with ice and then pour in the tonic, add a piece of lime. Nobody back then thought there was anything bad about that. I remember reading an article about Eudora Welty describing how she would have one small glass of whiskey in the late afternoons before dinner. It was her little treat, a way of relaxing at the end of the day, having a cocktail. In the same manner, my dad and my stepmother, Jordan, who I called Momma Jordan or Momma J, would partake of a glass of wine or a cocktail at the end of the day, and my dad would open the day’s mail and we’d talk about current events or anything else. We’d sit in the sunroom off the living room. It was all glass and it felt like you were sitting outside. You could enjoy that room all year round because you didn’t have to worry about bugs but you could enjoy the natural light. In the winter it would be delightful because there was a potbelly heater out there to warm the room.

I had different experiences with my mother and her drinking. She was not a social drinker. She drank in private, a closet drinker. I didn’t realize this until I was around age eighteen when I was visiting my mother at her apartment in New Orleans and she came to the door slurring her words. For years she had always said it was her medications. I was used to seeing her like that. She had spent a lot of time in mental health hospitals and various therapy clinics and she was on medications. But it suddenly occurred to me on this visit with her in New Orleans that on top of that she was drinking heavily. I didn’t know she was an alcoholic until then.

Her maternal instincts or maternal abilities were taken from her by her mental illness. We were close until she passed away in 2004, but after a certain point I didn’t depend on her for anything. I learned at a very early age that I wouldn’t be getting from my mother what most kids get from their mothers, the stability and warmth and reliability and support. I never felt any pressure from her, either. I mean, she didn’t have that capacity.

Looking back on it, many of my traits that might be considered good traits came from her. She read everything. She played piano and she listened to good music. She loved Judy Garland and Erroll Garner and Ray Charles. She also introduced me to Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen. As I grew older and more aware of her mental illness, I began to compare her situation to that of Sylvia Plath and in many ways to Anne Sexton. Both Plath and Sexton committed suicide. My mother didn’t commit suicide, but she did check out in other ways, at least from the point of view of her children.

My mother was obsessed with psychotherapy and read every book about it that she could get her hands on. She was in therapy all the time and in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She had electroshock treatment back when they didn’t have the drugs for depression that we have now. She was on lithium and she hated it. Lithium had horrible side effects, like nausea and diarrhea and skin problems and weight gain and fatigue. Because of that she’d stop taking the pills. Then she would act out in a very hostile manner and my father would say, “Oh, she’s not taking her medication.” That’s a lot for a kid to deal with. Early in my life everything involving my mother revolved around hospitals and therapists and drugs.

I was always hearing comments from my father like “Your mother’s not well, it’s not her fault, your mother’s not well, don’t be mad at your mother.” I understood that. It was actually a sort of generous thing for him to say about her. But I was left without very much to grasp on to. I would think, “Okay, my mother isn’t here for me.” I understood that. It wasn’t easy. I had to pick my spots and pick my times when it was okay to engage her.

My mother’s name was Lucille Fern Day and she was born on December 31, 1930. Her parents were the Reverend Ernest Wyman Day and Alva Bernice Coon Day. She went by Lucy. Her father was a Methodist minister, so conservative you’d think he might have been Baptist. He was a hellfire-and-brimstone type of evangelical preacher. The Methodist Church moved him from town to town in Louisiana every two or three years. Both of my grandfathers were Methodist ministers, but my mother’s family was much more closed-minded. She had four brothers, three older and one younger. Her younger brother, Robert, died on his motorcycle coming home from World War II. That was before I was born. I always heard from my mother that he was the sensitive one in the family. He was a poet and, along with my mother, a musician. My little brother, Robert, was named after him.

Mom studied music but didn’t pursue a career in it. My understanding is that she started playing piano at the age of four. She fell in love with it. But music became her albatross, the piano was her albatross, because she wasn’t allowed or able to pursue it as a career. It became a symbol for what she could not do. Nobody in her family encouraged her to take it seriously. I’m not going to say that her inability to pursue a career in music caused her mental illness, or influenced it, because I think most of it was biochemical. But she struggled so much with not having a career in music. It affected her confidence or lack thereof.

We had a piano in the house when I was growing up. After my parents divorced, Mama still had a piano with her wherever she lived. But the piano would come and go. It was a joy and a burden at the same time, a love-hate relationship. She would long for a piano and then get rid of it after a while. She never explained why and I didn’t ask. When those feelings overwhelmed her, she would get rid of the piano. Then a short time later she’d go out and get another one. It was back and forth; she couldn’t live with a piano or without a piano. She wasn’t like Bette Davis in one of those old movies, running around with smeared lipstick. Her mental illness was more understated and subtle and at the same time monumental.

My mother told me that when she was a kid, her family didn’t have plumbing and they used newspapers for wallpaper and insulation. They were all working-class and didn’t care about school or going to college. I don’t know how one sibling can be born into the same family as other siblings, and grow up the same way, and come out so different. She had an intellectual mind, read good books. It was a testament to her capabilities that she broke out and went to college and became a well-read person because none of her relatives were like that at all.

My mother met my father when she was studying music at LSU. My mother’s family hated my father. He was the literary poet guy. Although they were both church families, his family was liberal and open-minded. My mother wanted to be in a more progressive world and my father offered a way into it.

Later in my life my father told me certain things about my mother being sexually molested in horrifying ways by her father and one or more of her older brothers, repeatedly, when she was a youth. This was confirmed to me later by my sister, Karyn, who attended therapy sessions with my mother when she was older. She didn’t tell me this for years and years and I don’t think she made the wrong decision to withhold it. This is unthinkably horrifying and upsetting, and I’m still trying to process it.

I have memories of my mother being happy, and of us being happy together. She had a great sense of humor. We would laugh at all sorts of things. But she would drift in and out of her illness like Sylvia Plath did. My father told me that she was once diagnosed as having manic depression with paranoid schizophrenic tendencies. Back then they didn’t have the medication we have now.

Mom talked about her psychiatric care and would quote passages from her psychology books and jot notes in the margins. She read Jung and she read that popular book from the 1960s I’m OK—You’re OK. She was very aware of her mental illness. After I moved away, we would talk on the phone for hours about psychology and the latest therapies. I learned so much from her.