I would say that my mom never has shown much ability to remember. Considering the sheer, mind-boggling number of drugs and treatments she's been subjected to since 1960, I have generally given her a pass on that. My own memory has bits I wish I could lose, bits I wish I hadn't lost, and quirks that annoy me mightily.
But some things seem to me to be just too big to lose. When I was five months old, mom says she left me with dad and took a little trip--one time she said for a week, another time she said it was no more than three days. For a nursing mother to take even three days off seems a bit odd to me, but not impossible to believe.
The problem comes when I compare to dad's side of the story. He came home from work to find his infant daughter home alone, obviously untended for several hours, and no sign of his wife. He called friends, neighbors, her parents (more on that later) and the police. Nobody knew where she'd gone, when she'd left, or why. Considering some of the other stunts mom has pulled, I have little trouble believing this.
Somewhere about a week after she disappeared, dad found out that she had gone home to her parents, but they wouldn't return his calls. He got help from the neighbors to take care of me, kept working, and played the waiting game. Nine months later, out of the blue, her parents brought her back, and left without a word.
I just have to wonder. How do you forget your nearly-new baby for nine months? To say nothing of a husband. Did none of her friends ask? If her parents thought dad was so bad that he wasn't worth talking to on the phone, why did they leave me with him? Or if they thought dad and I were so bad for mom, why did they bring her back?
Needless to say, I don't remember any of that. I barely have any memories at all before I was four years old. Which just happens to be when my brother was born, and mom spent over a year, total, in something like four different hospitals, split among maybe a half-dozen or more separate visits. That time makes perfect sense to me. The medical and mental health care of the mid-70's was still trying to figure out what was wrong with her, and what treatment(s) might help her, and that took time. But in 1971 she did not go to any hospital, and there's no indication that she saw any doctors.
The trap, here, is that there probably isn't any way to understand, because over the years we have figured out pretty conclusively that her brain chemistry is just not right. So we can't expect her to be normal. I'm not sure which diagnosis was being used then--I've been told that in 1960, she was deemed to be Paranoid Schizophrenic. Some time later, (perhaps in the 70's) they decided she was Manic/Depressive. These days they call it Bipolar disorder. She doesn't follow the herd there, either, since there is no evidence that she has ever had a depressive event. Ever. Apparently depression is very common, mania less so, and manic-only bipolar people are quite rare, like maybe 5% of people with bipolar disorder. Having a rare diagnosis is emphatically not a good thing. Because almost nobody knows how to help.
One of the things I'd like to do, and part of the mindset behind starting this blog, is to see if it's possible that any of those neighbors remember. In our mobile society, I doubt that many, or even any of them might remain there. 1971 was a long time ago, after all. Is it important? Probably not. Do I disbelieve my dad? Absolutely not. But since it's a he said/she said situation, I'd like one more "said" just because I want to know. Or maybe I'm just... too stubborn, and I want to prove that mom forgot. But I wonder--what did it look like to the neighbors? Did they notice? (Some of them knew at least some of the details, because some of those kindly neighbor ladies babysat little me.) There's been a lot of turnover in our old neighborhood. It's not like we stayed, after all. We left when I was about 18 months old. But as of about the middle of 2014, the house my parents built, and the neighborhood it stood in were still standing. (But the house has been painted. No more Forest Green with Orange Trim. (Nobody said dad had popular taste in colors.) It blends with its neighbors much better, now. I've driven by, and seen it.)
The grands are gone. They will answer no questions from beyond the grave, even if they would, since they were remarkably tight-lipped before. I've been given the impression that the aunts weren't aware of the events as they were happening--whether they were out of state, or weren't read into the full details, or some other unknown detail, I'm simply not certain. And as mentioned above, communication was not happening with my dad, so he wasn't even able to find out at the time who knew what was going on.
This is one of those things I wish I could have skipped.
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