II. Depression in the Northwest

II. Depression in the Northwest

 After the fiasco of the Big U, we lived in Idaho for five years.  My sons finished high school: the elder, the actor, the playwright, with phenomenally high S.A.T. scores, got a scholarship to an expensive private school in Seattle;  the younger, who I'm sure has aspergers even worse than I do, or some other weird complex of mental disadvantages, got his GED when he was 16, took five tries to get his driver's license, and turned into a brilliant alternative rock composer-performer.   Tina finished and published her first book, which won major regional awards, garnered critical acclaim, and made it possible for  her to go on to win a series of distinguished fellowships and residencies. 

It was with awe that I watched her struggle to create a beautiful book, a memoir of the first ten years of her life in the Northwest; it was with even greater awe that I watched her get her book published by a major university press, and make acceptance speeches at awards ceremonies to two major literary organizations;  it was with awe that I watched her work through some labyrinthine legal difficulties associated with the publication, emerging triumphant; it was with awe that I watched her apply for major national fellowships and residencies, getting more than half of them.  

You might think I was envious that she achieved so much success, while I was still shit on a shingle in Podunk, Idaho, but you would be wrong; I had always known that she would succeed in the world, that she had the savvy it took to navigate her way through the complex social gauntlet  at the end of which  acceptance and artistic recognition and were to be found; and jealousy was the furthest thing from my heart—to  me, man and wife were one flesh, and her success was my success, her happiness was my  happiness.  [She never felt like that, by the way—in our relationship there was always a clear distinction between HER stuff and MY stuff.]

The problem was that her success gave her no happiness, no feeling of accomplishment, not even any sense of self-validation.  Her head state was keeping her from recognizing any positive things in her life. She had been suffering from clinical depression for many years, and had gone through a variety of psychological treatments, including just about every anti-depressant drug on the market.  Her mental illness really kicked in, in earnest, right after she had our second child, and by the time the boys were teenagers, she had a very, very serious problem.   

For one thing, although she had always been a slow worker (I always attributed the high quality of her work to this trait), as the years passed, it became more and more difficult for her to write a simple paragraph; the paragraph was always a gem when she finished it, but many is the time she spent an entire night on a single paragraph.  I've mentioned that she won many fellowships on the strength not only of her track record, her awards, but on her brilliant, succinct application-grant-writing; who knows how many more grants she might have won if she had simply not missed so many deadlines. Many, many weekends ended in a flurry of all night effort (for both of us) getting some mass of application forms filled out and to the post office before it closed at 5:00--sometimes we made it, sometimes we didn't. She was a real genius at research, both in the library and then on the Internet, and for her second book which was about an ancestor of hers in Alaska, she had amassed a huge quantity of background material, in addition to decoding many subtle secrets embedded in the letters of this ancestor. Still, after working on this project for some three years, she had less than 20 pages to show for her effort.  

That might have been OK, except that her self-esteem was getting lower and lower.  In spite of the fact that her first book had one won so much critical acclaim, and had made it possible for who her to further distinguish herself in other ways, the money she made from it was practically nothing, about $1400 after she paid off a lawyer; and her sense of failure was even worse than mine.  At least I could make money; by the time we had reestablished ourselves back in Idaho because I had a full class of students (40+), a community orchestra, a community chorus, and a Saturday Music School but that was known to be the best musical and educational experience to be had anywhere in the local region.  Tina couldn't even hold a job;  that is to say she could hold a job, but she hated it so much it was driving her crazy, that is to say even more crazy than she was already becoming.  It was my  intense pleasure and honor to absorb all the burdens of debt of money-making for the family, while she worked on her new book which she was sure would be a big hit and make a nice tidy sum.  

But she did not look on my efforts with a kind eye.  She not only felt like shit that she wasn't making any money, she held against me that I was; she was resentful of the time I spent with my students, and punished me in subtle ways for having to make a living to pay for her doctors. (There was a long string of doctors.) My work was very time-consuming, not only in the lessons, but in the hours of preparation I spent creating customized practice materials, arranging music, and rehearsing musical ensembles. It was a rewarding, fairly stable life; but not having an institutional affiliation, all my work was done at home, right up a short hallway from her room.  She began to feel like a stranger in her own house, and had no sense of privacy or retreat, never being able to escape the constant stimulation of music lessons being given 20 ft. from her ear.  At the time of which I speak, she had just quit her very promising job with the University of Idaho; she couldn’t take the strain, so I took responsibility for all our expenses, and she retired to her room. Her room became a den of madness, where she engaged in hour upon hour of mindless digital busywork, including coloring complicated books of Eskimo and Japanese designs, making little or dummy origami boxes, or piecing together little collages made from tiny scraps of paper scissored out of recycled magazines. She hallucinated spiders on her pillow.

She harbored horrible resentments against me for a bunch of things that were not my fault: our  poverty, the noise, the mess, and the stolen time; but she also began to resent a complex of symptomatic behaviors which were definitely and very much MY FAULT—behaviors which were emanations of my aspergers mentality.  Symptoms which has been presaged years before, became intolerably emphasized. For instance: for years I had suffered from cluster headaches, which, fortunately tended to attack me only at night, but which were devastating in their  effects; during this period they would actually reduce me to a screaming, quivering hulk, sometimes for hours, leaving me exhausted and sleepless.  I also began to be lose tolerance for all kinds of social situations: in restaurants I could not relax unless I was sitting at a certain table, at a certain distance from the clatter of the kitchen, always necessarily out of earshot of crying babies.  I began to  indulge in nightmare behavior in the car: I could not handle traffic of any kind, I was a wreck in the mildest level of rush-hour congestion, and it got so bad that when we visited my son in Seattle, I actually had to have a bag pulled over my head, to blind me, in order to keep me from freaking out over the dangers of freeway travel; still, I could not handle anyone else driving because my anxiety reached such a pitch I couldn't keep from constant backseat driving, flinching, whining, and complaining; in these last years a family car vacation was quite impossible, because the effects of travel were intolerable to me, and I was pretty intolerable to anybody around.  We virtually stopped going to restaurants, concerts, movies, and every other imaginable social activity.  Tina became more and more a slave of my antisocial behavior, and more a prisoner of that little room at the back of  the hall.  

In her heart she still loved me, and knew that I was largely  not responsible for these behaviors, but the constant unalleviated pressure began to use up for last reserves of understanding, and her dissatisfaction with life became more and more intense.  Her biggest problem with me was my pain.  She knew how deeply hurt I was by my inability to make a decent living, to be accepted, and by feeling that all of my dreams of success and recognition had come to nothing, and she sympathized; she admired my abilities, my talent, my miracle working teaching, the fact that I was, as she said, " the real thing."  But she started to run out of patience, she started to be overwhelmed by my pain, which she could feel, and which she could not assuage. I don't even think she knew she was taking it personally, all she knew was that I represented a stifling, unrelenting bad sense of hopelessness, and despair, and she could not help identifying with it.  

The irony is, that in the last two years in Washington, I had begun to recover somewhat.  The headaches miraculously disappeared.  I was dealing with my difficulties on the road.  But most importantly I was coming to terms with God over my failure to find an inroad into the academic world.  I was a very big local hero in our small town, and my orchestra was beginning to attract the attention  even of the snobbish college faculty on the Hill.  I had a good friend in the director of the jazz program, a nationally known composer in his own right, who treated me as an equal, performed my music, and was honored to have me perform his.   The fact is, that in spite of the IRS sucking off the cream of my income, I was actually making a fair amount of money, and we would have begun to climb out of debt (Tina's mental illness had taken at grave told on our credit cards which were getting more and more taxed by a constant deluge of doctor and drug bills), if it had not been for another development which took place about that time.  

As I mentioned, Tina was being selected for a lot of residencies: several in Alaska, one in Arkansas, and she even spent a month at the famous McDowell colony in New Hampshire.  These residencies were great honors, and raised your profile even higher in the literary community, but hardly any of them came with the cash component.  You had to pay your air fare to and from the site, and in the case of the smaller ones, you even had to pay for your own food; the MacDowell Colony, of course, is famous for the little elf dressed in black who deposits bags of food on your doorstep and tip-toes away during the day; but many of them were not like that: so that in spite of the fact that she was being given  free rent at a quiet place where she could devote herself to writing, these residencies' were actually a further drain on our finances; and since I was only making  enough money to pay our immediate bills to get by, these residencies were plunging us even deeper into credit card debt.  

Meanwhile Tina's mental condition was getting worse.  She spent month after month at these private places, but she was still unable to write anything.  Our last year in Washington she spent about six months away from home, and managed to produce one 1500 word article, and hardly anything else.  She justified her writer's block, as best she could, by insisting that the time was spent doing research, setting the story in her mind, preparing; but we both knew it was simply the fact that she could not let herself go.  She was so filled with self-loathing, insecurity, anxiety, and mental confusion, that she could not allow the words to flow out of her fingers into the word processor. Every night she faced that empty page, and with every dawn revealing that still empty page, she felt worse and worse about herself and about the possibility of ever writing again.

The most she accomplished was out of a funky little arrangement with the historical Society of a little bump on the  Alaska map,  up in the Yukon,  near the Canadian border: a little town called Eagle.  During her residency in Skagway, where she gave a creative writing class to high school students, she met a resident of Eagle who offered her free rent in exchange for a little organizational work at the town library.  Tina didn't see much professional point to it—but it meant more time spent in her beloved Alaska, and it was more time away from the hell that was home Washington and me.  It was in Eagle that she wrote the first finished chapter of her book, a charming piece on the townsfolk watching the ice on the river break up, a harbinger of spring.  But in a Eagle she did a lot more than write a five page piece.