May 23: Hoping for Something Better, New Poem, Annie's Ghosts

My two "something betters"

I'm reading a book right now called Annie's Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg.  It's a true story about a man who discovers, after his mother dies, that she had a sister he never knew about.  The sister suffered from a mental illness and was institutionalized at 21 years of age.  Luxenberg's mother basically lied for the majority of her life, telling everyone she was an only child.  The narrative that unfolds is heartbreaking, full of family secrets and disappointments and abandonment.  Having a wife with mental illness, I've had a hard time reading it.

In the past, I've blogged about the fact that I fear my son or daughter will develop mental illness.  Mental illness runs on both sides of our families, so the deck is stacked against them.  I watch my children for evidence of mental problems, even though they're very young.  My daughter is ten, and my son is two.  My daughter tends to be very mercurial in her mood swings and has been for a while.  I'm not sure if this temperament is normal or the tip of a much larger iceberg of emotional/mental difficulty.  My son has no patience with anything.  I may be overreacting.  I probably am.  They may just be normal kids, but that doesn't assuage my worries.

I can't imagine making the choice that Steve Luxenberg's grandparents made.  They left their daughter is a mental hospital for the rest of her life.  Annie, the mentally ill daughter, spent close to 40 years in institutions before she died.  It goes against every parental instinct I have.  I have a friend whose daughter suffers from schizophrenia, and my friend goes between being exhausted, frustrated, pissed, and exhausted again.  But my friend has never walked away from her daughter and pretended like she didn't exist.  As a parent, I want my children's lives to be better than my life.  I want them to be happier, more successful, more content.  I don't want them to struggle the way I have, especially with mental illness.

However, I know that I have little power over mental illness.  In fact, I have little power over whether my children will be happier than I have been.  I can give them cell phones, ballet lessons, and laptops.  I can go to dance recitals and art shows and track meets.  In life, however, there are no guarantees.  I find myself constantly looking into the distant future, trying to see if there are thunderclouds on the horizon.  It's a pointless exercise.  The most I can do is live the best I can, every day.  If problems arise, I deal with them.  If the day goes well, I give thanks.  That's the definition of sanity.  Maybe that's the only "something better" I can give my children.

My new poem deals with this topic, the hope all parents have for their children.

Saint Marty hopes for something better for you today.

Something Better

I want something better for my kids,

The way all parents want their offspring

To attend college, law or medical
School.  Do something extraordinary.
We scrub toilets, paint walls, deep-fry potatoes

For thirty or forty years, put everything

On hold until we're sure our daughters

Can study veterinary medicine, our sons

Learn to x-ray broken vertebrae, tibias,

Clavicles.  My uncle drove to the GM plant

For over thirty-five years before he received

His pension, then began to paint oil landscapes

Of places he’d dreamed about in rush hour

Traffic on I-75, places full of waves,

Evergreens the color of Chinese jade,
Places he knew he'd never see,
All so his daughter could study,
Become an engineer at Ford.

I don’t want my children to teach
College English part-time, work
Eleven-hour days in an office,

Scribble poems on napkins, lunch bags,

Margins of graded essays, dreaming

Always of a time when those words,

Cut and polished and set in lines of gold,

Will buy vacations to Stockholm or Rome,

Ballet lessons and birthday parties

In hot air balloons.  I want my kids

To know a life better than mine,

Even if it means I eat bologna

With cheese every day, pretending

My cut of lunchmeat is somehow

Superior to the one my father ate

At work for over fifty years.