What's in a name?

Perhaps this is a good day to come clean: I named my blog as I did because I've skipped over a number of things. Skipped several college courses, for instance. (Tested out, actually, but regardless of how it happened, I didn't have to go to those classes.)

Some of my skips were deliberate, like those courses. Others just happened. Like skipping over some parts of adolescence. No, I didn't magically age a decade overnight, and no, I wasn't magically mature, either. But when I look at some tween being a happy, silly, apparently carefree tween, I'm dead serious when I say "I was never that young."

The first time I got to admit my mother to a mental hospital, essentially all by myself, I was eleven years old. Up until that point, I would have said I'd been having a fairly ordinary life. Even having parents get divorced was part of the ordinary-ness of it all. (While it's true that my parents were the first divorced parents I knew about when I was ten, I'm pretty sure that has more to do with my circle of friends, rather than nationwide divorce rates.)

Watching the meltdown of a full-blown manic episode evolve over the course of roughly a week was... transformative.

As mom devolved, I found myself changed, whether I willed it or not. I tried to figure out what was happening with her. I tried to keep up with her (anyone who's ever stayed up for 36 to 48 hours without sleep probably knows how well that didn't work--my mother on a manic episode could stay up for a whole week with the merest blinks for naps) and when I couldn't, I worried. It's very difficult to pin down, since her apparent IQ skyrockets along with her ability to be convincing, but if you're paying attention, the logic is missing, and the attention span steadily gets shorter and shorter. The essential person who I thought of as "mom" was gradually engulfed in this... other.

I can't recall all the details of that first one I got to be up close and personal for--there have been too many. It might have been the time she wrote letters to Lech Walesa supposedly telling him all the things he needed to know to successfully lead Poland out of its troubles. (I don't know if she sent them, and if so, if she had a good address for them. But she wrote them, and told people around her that she was going to help him save Poland. Being a savior is frequently one of the signposts we need to watch for.) What I do know is this: She was going to college, and surrounded by students who are traditionally rather vocal about their take on current world events. And her meltdown coincided with finals week, fall term, 1981.

In the final analysis, I wasn't able to DO the admitting myself, but I was the driving force behind my friend's mom taking mom in. And while I won't say I was instantly a grown-up, I consider that the end of my childhood. Adolescence, and the chance to be carefree? Yeah, I skipped that.