“Sue, you have a phone call,” my branch manager said. “Line 3.”
I locked my cash drawer and left my teller window to go to the phone. “Hello, this is Sue,” I said.
My husband’s voice came quietly over the line, “Ah, I think you better come home.”
I could tell immediately something was wrong. You develop a sense for it when you’re married to someone with emotional problems. A tone of voice that says, I’m on the edge. If you don’t pull me off of it, I’m going over.
“What’s the matter? What’s going on?”
A long pause. Then, “I think I might kill myself.”
I left work immediately. Even though we couldn’t afford for me to miss any work. We were living in a gang neighborhood, a ghetto, in downtown Tacoma. On welfare. With a one year old son. And my husband wasn’t in any state to hold a job.
It was a 40 minute drive home. Usually, everytime I drove, I was worried about getting pulled over by a cop, because the registration on the car wasn’t current, and we didn’t have insurance. This time, I was worried about what I’d find when I got home. Are any of the knives in the kitchen sharp enough to do damage? I wondered. I was pretty sure we didn’t have any razor blades around. Or even aspirin. We barely had food. And where was Nathaniel. our one year old son? Daniel’d been caring for him all day alone. Or I hoped he had.
I pulled into the detached garage in the alley and crossed the yard to the back door of the house. For once I wasn’t worrying about gang members hiding out in our garage, stashing their cocaine in our bushes, or whether the neighbors were drunk and waving guns around in their yard. I was worried about whether my husband and son were ok. What would I find when I opened that door?
My husband was lying on the couch in the living room, one hand covering his face. Nathaniel was sitting on the floor next to the couch, feeding himself from a jar of baby food. Most of the food was all over his face and his hands. He looked up at me and smiled, his hair all sticky and gooey.
It almost seemed like Nathaniel was sitting there next to his dad, watching over him.
—
There’s a line in a wonderful song by Ray LaMontagne that says,
Worry…
Oh, worry, worry, worry, worry
Sometimes I swear it feels like this worry is my only friend
The years that we spent in Hilltop were like that for me. At the time, I didn’t feel especially stressed out. It’s just life, you know, and you live it. But later, after we moved away and were recovering from Daniel’s horrific year-long medication-induced battle with depression, I realized how much pressure I was under. How worried I’d been, all the time. The strain of trying to keep my husband alive, my kids fed, the rent paid, was bad enough. But to do it in a neighborhood where shootings were common, gang members lived next door, drugs were sold on the nearest corner, and 13 year olds walked by reeking of crack–it was a lot of stress.
My husband was put on medication for ADHD, back when ADHD was a new diagnosis. Most of the meds the psychiatrist perscribed didn’t work for him. The one that did help him mellow out and concentrate was imipramine. It also, if he missed a single dose, sent him into a tailspin of violent anger that ended with him severely depressed. It took us a long, long time to figure out his emotional problems were stemming from the medication. When we did realize it, I called his shrink, who wanted to up his dosage. Last time I ever spoke to that doctor.
We decided to take him off the meds, and he tried it cold turkey. We went through two weeks of him swinging from violent temper tantrums–he ruined a lot of our furniture, tossing it around the room–to being suicidally depressed. So, he went back on the medication, and we slowly weaned him off.
It ruined a good year (at least) of our lives. The emotional damage done to him from taking that medication is something he still has to deal with. It destroyed his self esteem. When he was on the medication, he couldn’t handle even ordering lunch meat from the deli counter in the grocery store.
That was a long, long time ago, though. It’s almost like looking back on different people. Those days made me prematurely grey, but the grey hair didn’t bother me. I figured I’d earned every strand. (It’s only lately, now that it’s so visible in my bangs, that it’s been bothering me!)
I also like this line of Ray’s song:
I’ve been saved by a woman
I think my husband would, too.
—
Nathaniel then:
Nathaniel now:
Daniel now:
Listen to “Trouble” on the radio.blog, top right.
