Jennie Shortridge: When A Mind Breaks (2024)

An Essay by Jennie Shortridge, author of Love Water Memory

A few weeks before my 57-year-old mother died in early 2000, she admitted to me something that I'd long suspected. When I was two years old, my mom was 27 with four children age seven and under. She’d moved away from her family on the East Coast to North Dakota. The snow outside was two feet high. She’d already had a “nervous breakdown” at 19, and the weight of everything now was too much. With my two older sisters at school and the baby and me at home, a feeling overtook her, an idea, a thought; I don’t know. I can never know what it felt like to her. But she suddenly realized she was in danger of harming my sister and me, of following her mind’s broken impulse to kill us.

I also don’t know what she did that day before she locked herself in her bedroom and called my father to tell him something was wrong, but this admission explained a lot. I’d known a deep sense of terror from my earliest memories, from before I could speak. It felt like a silent kind of screaming in my head where no one could help me. I was afraid of everything as a little girl: flash bulbs, loud noises, intruders with knives in the night. But I never equated any of it with my mom, because if you have to be afraid of your own mother, how on earth will you survive?

My mission as a child was to figure out my mother's brain: what made her happy and loving on some days, and what made her withdraw or become mean? What made her vacuum at two in the morning, then sleep until well after we arrived home from school the next day? What made her want to terrify us with suicide attempts or acts of violence against us? What made her disappear for weeks at a time, then arrive home from the hospital empty-eyed, a stranger? I poured every ounce of energy I had during the bad times into keeping my mother alive, somehow: by being invisible. By being a good girl, if that would help. By entertaining her, if that was necessary that day. I was like the kid at the circus keeping the tight roper walker on the wire with my sheer force of will.

When my mom felt truly awful, she seemed to need the comfort of sharing her burden with us. She spared us very little of her pain, and told us we would be just like her some day. As I grew older, I felt defiant about this, saying, “No f’ing way will I ever be like her,” but of course, there was part of me, deep inside, that believed I would. That believed my mother’s disease was just lying in wait to attack me at some particular life stage: would it be puberty? Motherhood? Menopause? She warned us about so many of life’s transitions and the horror they would bring.

My first full-blown panic attack hit me at age 14 on my first date, out for dinner at a very adult restaurant. Earlier in the day, Mike had cut his finger quite badly in the kitchen and his parents hadn’t taken him to the hospital, just wrapped it up mummy style in gauze. The blood kept soaking through every layer. As I tried to determine which piece of flatware to use, and how to elegantly cut a steak, I broke out into a cold sweat. I thought I could overhear disco music coming from the lounge, then realized it was the too-fast thumping of my heart. My vision blurred. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was spooling out into my mother’s universe, going “crazy,” wherever that was, and I didn’t know if I’d ever return. In retrospect, I know that I felt responsible for keeping him alive, as silly as that now sounds. I had to keep that tight rope walker in the air and maintain my composure in this formal environment. And having no idea how to do either, I panicked.

I would battle panic attacks and free-floating anxiety for the next ten years, always secretly certain that this time I would finally lose my mind, once and for all. But no one knew any of this. I kept it to myself. I fought hard to look normal at all times. I never let on that anything was wrong, a skill I’d learned from growing up. We never told anyone about our mom, and I never told anyone what I was going through either.

By my early twenties, I’d mastered looking normal and had been supporting myself for several years. I had a mortgage and a live-in boyfriend. When he was diagnosed with cancer, I went into overdrive, taking care of him. I could no longer sleep. Ever. I cried. A lot. The panic was always clutching at my throat, making it difficult to get enough oxygen. If only I wasn’t this way. If only I hadn’t had a crazy mom. If only I really was normal.

My boss took note of my condition when I asked for a sick day to catch up on sleep. He was not kind about it, telling me I was weak for not being able to handle my boyfriend’s cancer better. A coworker overheard and gave me the name of a mental health counselor. I cried through my first several months of therapy. And over time, I got better. And when I say time, I mean seven years, every week. Rain or shine.

It took a long time to understand that my mom was very ill, not “trying” to be crazy or mean or frightening, and that my brain had hardwired in panic mode (a condition we now understand as post-traumatic stress disorder), a response that makes perfect sense. Because my mother had also become a prescription drug addict, I refused medication until my early forties. I have now taken a daily anti-anxiety pill for over ten years. I thought I was being strong by not taking medication, but I was only prolonging the pain. Sure, I was able to survive without it, but with it I’ve lived a much more satisfying, emotionally rich life.

I’ve had a lot of time to figure things out now that I’m nearing the age my mother lived to be. That she shut herself down in the midst of psychosis and homicidal ideations toward her children is one of the most courageous and actual death-defying acts of motherhood imaginable. Many mothers with mental illness have not been able to fight those demons, and we read about them in the paper and think, How on earth could she kill her own children? But mental illness doesn’t reason with its victims, or listen to their pleas for normalcy, just as cancer doesn’t. The head, the brain, is as much a part of the body as a pancreas is, or a heart, and when afflicted by horrible illness, it fails.

I wish there had been better mental health care in the 1960s and 1970s, and I wish there was now. I wish there was not still a stigma around mental illness, and that people talked about it more openly so that we could all learn from each other. But mostly, when it comes to my mom, I wish there was a way to let her know how brave and strong she was that long ago snowy day when her mind broke and she walked away from us and closed the door.

Jennie Shortridge has published five acclaimed novels, including her latest,

Jennie Shortridge has published five acclaimed novels, including her latest,

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