Can Mental Illness Be a Gift to a Relationship?

Chapter 1

THE YOKE by Julie Howard Parker
PROLOGUE

I would not recognize the student I once was in Paris, if, on a return visit to the 1950s, I saw her rush past me, books slipping, hair flying, to catch the open-backed green bus grinding its way to the Boulevard St. Germain. We would mean nothing to each other, she, late to class in her camel’s hair coat with the hem flapping loose, I in my nineties, heading toward the apartment she had just left. But if I did not glance back to watch her swing onto that crowded platform, the whole meaning of a life might be lost, my youthful exuberance melting into postwar Europe.

Luckily, there is always a thread, maybe dangling from that coat lining needing mending. Only memory can tie it against unraveling. This saga starts at the end of that year, as I said goodbye to the sober, coal-smoked continent whose shrill sounds and pungent smells will forever linger. Suitcase hoisted above, I boarded the bus heading to the shipping port of Le Havre in Normandy.
           
 From the shifting deck of the great ocean liner, only moments earlier I had been gazing absently at the blue-black waters of the vast Atlantic. A gloom of fog blanketed the red and black funnels of the RMS Queen Mary. Smoke trailed behind us, flecking its soot above the sprawling wake. The ship, recently refitted from troop transport to peacetime travel, was bearing me homeward from a college year abroad.

           Life, mine at least, was churning along with that giant, mindless hull over the waters of my own unconscious. The French were fading behind, convinced a third world war was taking shape between Russia and America. Their fate was not my own, however, mine teetering between two worlds. A beast of a different sort was about to erupt in me. It would pursue me with such fury that the idea of myth emerges, Ulysses rowing for his life to flee Charybdis.

           I was adventuring ahead of my time in 1952, leaving my homeland before planes were the common tourist option. But I had fidgeted in French class under sterile declensions until inspiration–exchange student–altered the fate of my major. France would spirit me away to an exotic, thrilling continent. Peter and I, as deeply in love as we were that year at Middlebury College, had agreed after endless vacillating that I should go. I had toned down my excitement, picturing him longing for me, my faithful, selfless steady, on a below-zero Vermont campus. Learning to teach foreign languages might offer a career beside homemaking in our partnership ahead. He would be waiting for me in Chicago.

         Now, floating between two landmasses without a toehold in either, I entered hazardous water. Suddenly, a knifelike jolt, followed by a sense of dread, rose up from somewhere inside me. I froze, sensing danger. It was as if the tissue holding my mind together had just ‘broken,’ split open. Instinctively I pushed down, running in fright from this threat out of nowhere..

What had just happened? I was trying to picture greeting Peter, after so many months apart. I looked around. Nothing had changed in my surroundings–the glossy waves were still chopping and peaking. A new wave surged, bursting upward, widening the crack, as if some membrane in my brain had given way, releasing a force sucking me downward. I felt exposed, in peril, as if the ‘who I am’ had ruptured. And flooding in was a force I didn’t recognize, alien. I pushed down in panic. My legs grew numb.

         The assault subsided temporarily. My thoughts raced.  Was it my return to life in America? Was the ship tearing me too suddenly from this old world culture that had invaded my heart?

A new surge now erupted through the fissure like magma, overpowering the vowels and rhythms of two languages colliding in my brain. I staggered. All the rich and novel ways of seeing life from a war-torn perspective were shattering. The love I was trying to retain for Peter oozed into limbo.

           I clutched the barrier edging the deck and glanced around, fearing others could see what was happening. Objects, people and distances now played tricks on my focus. A man in a black coat a few yards away stared into the horizon, tapping his cigarette ashes. When he turned my way, I shrank, pretending to dig into my purse for glasses. I backed away from the painted iron rungs of the railing. Concealing my panic, I smiled at deck strollers, waving and nodding mechanically. At dinner time, I faked a laugh at a table mate’s endless stories, then excused myself before dessert. I was now pushing constantly against something deadly no one could see inside me, and clinging to a phantom, a student named Julie.

            That evening, my nerves chaperoned every step I took to avoid plunging down the narrow metal stairs to a tiny bunk room. The lowest deck throbbed with the roar of the ship’s engines as the acrid smell of fuel permeated the long corridor leading to my cubicle. Inside the cramped cell, I climbed into the narrow bed and lay awake under a thin blanket. All night long, dreading where sleep might take me, I listened to the muffle of the giant propellers turning in the boiler room with my heaving heart, chanting ‘horrroom…horrroom…horrroom.’

The next morning, I arose in this same terrified state, pushing, pushing against the
undertow for survival. Four chilling words emerged, marking the end of my enchanted French year: I’m losing my mind.  Where was I headed, how would I function once I landed?

             Peter! I shuddered, trying to reconstruct his face. I hadn’t seen him since his Christmas visit to Paris, where in a sidewalk café I had confessed to him guiltily that my feelings had wandered briefly to a fellow student. We had parted after that vacation with our trust in one another shaken. Was that the source of this sudden alteration? Or was my brain crashing over the dread of senior year back in America? A week earlier I had been running to catch the bus or underground metro, hurrying back to Madame Girard’s for the main meal at noon, juggling courses expertly in a language that was rivaling my own. I had soared, inflated to a giddy extreme with foreign ways of doing things.

          A scarier thought now surfaced. Might this ‘happening,’ this weird gaping void I feared tumbling into, rise from something so twisted that I would join the corridors of the incurable?  The ship’s foghorn blew its mournful warning. I pushed down with all my might against this saboteur inside, running from my own legs.

          The great Cunard liner was cruising closer and closer to the same Port of New York from
which Peter and I had said our tearful goodbyes a year earlier. A wrenching memory surfaced of my waving to him from above on the massive ship deck, he on the platform below, receding. I was returning a ghost of that extroverted, vibrant me, the only ‘me’ I had ever known, playful despite my hair too oily, forehead dotted with pimples. He didn’t care about any of these, loving only my easy laughter, my lightheartedness. Fearing his rejection of a girlfriend so altered, I began scheming about how I could hide from him, postpone our reunion in the hope the symptoms might fade. 

          There is no turning around an eighty-thousand-ton ocean liner. It was conveying me back a
stranger to everything I had left behind. My mind whirled with one crazy thought: how to gain time, avoid meeting the one I feared losing. Peter, the fulfillment of the ideal I had sought all through a wobbly childhood! I could not let him find me. His presence might save me if I escaped from him. When we had first met, the pull of our magnetism had shot us like satellites into the space where legends launch. I was his bubbling muse. He was my rock, earthbound and wise.

          On the last night aboard ship, desperate thoughts took hold of me. What if I chose to end my life right there, silently, unobserved, in just another tiny room among the 577 lowest class cubby holes on D deck. I reconsidered. Wouldn’t that act deprive me of a chance at commitment, at maturity, no matter how agonizing? The attainment of that beautiful state of adulthood had been my dream from childhood. Shouldering the yoke of responsibility, of pulling my weight beside my partner, I would learn, was the goal that drove me but terrified me.  

*     * *

            Jump forward with me for a while now, into Part I of this saga. Six years have elapsed since I stepped off that ship, managing to elude Peter for a little while. Pushing down was becoming a hidden part of me. When we finally connected, he hardly noticed my invisible turmoil. His welcoming smile crinkled the corners of his ocean blue eyes. His long firm embrace, his obvious relief to have me at his side, gave me courage to masquerade as normal. 

As I clung to Peter all through that final year of college, he brushed off my neediness as culture clash. Gradually, pushing down became a habit, holding the destructive force at bay. I discovered in class that academic dialog helped erase the menace until the bell rang. But I glued my arm to Peter’s as we studied in the library. Focusing fiercely upon class assignments, I dared not let up or the release of the force threatening inside would geyser, obliterating our future. 

We graduated with diplomas in our two specialties, French and philosophy, and married, Peter in contentment, I in split reality. Slowly, I adapted to fear and intense sorrow over the Julie I once was. I told no one what I was feeling inside, not even Peter. My simple presence sustained him. He had worried from childhood that the frail mother he loved would die; she had already outlived the prognosis of a failing heart giving out by adolescence. Serving hated years as a draftee in the army during the final phase of the Korean War, he lived with insecurity. The birth of three daughters offered me some affirmation, even if one was followed by postpartum symptoms of a new, bloody variety. I loved motherhood. My vivacity returned a little. Perhaps I was slowly healing. Then it happened.