Name in the Middle

I was born a third, left the hospital a middle, and have felt like an outsider for much of my life since.

Seventeen days after the Baby Boom era officially ended, I was christened John Glenn Cook III. Named after my father and grandfather, I was driven home from the hospital to the strains of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s inauguration ceremony on an AM radio.

Little did I know then, at three days old, that LBJ’s long, drawn out drawl (along with a couple of his social policies) would be one of the things that would help my parents veer permanently toward the Republican camp. For the longest time, I could not reconcile how my father could have John F. Kennedy’s speeches on album and yet claim to be a Republican.

Of course, I also didn’t realize that being a Democrat in Texas did not mean you were liberal in any way, shape, or form. But I digress…

My parents, married just nine months and 21 days when I was born, were fresh out of college and starting their careers. For my dad’s parents, my birth represented a number of positives — first grandchild, a namesake, and, most important, another reason my father would not go to Vietnam.

My grandfather (John Sr.) was an assistant postmaster in Longview, Texas, and was terrified that his son (John Jr.) would be forced to fight in a conflict that many people did not understand. When my dad’s number came up in an upcoming draft notice, he quickly drafted a plan for my parents to get married, noting a deferral that was granted to males who had recently wed.

So my parents got hitched on a Friday, moved my dad’s stuff 250 miles south over the weekend, and my mom went to work teaching school the following Monday. A few short months later, I came along, not knowing at the time that I already had been part of the first great compromise of my parents’ nascent marriage.

It goes something like this: I could be named after my father and grandfather, under the condition that my name really wasn’t John, but Glenn. Except for dooming me to a life of filling out forms with a name that I didn’t go by, and facing a lifetime of questions about being named after the astronaut, the moniker on my birth certificate has had little impact on my life.

Or so I thought.

Life with ‘The Situation’

“Well, we’re back in our situation again,” my aunt said.

It was Christmas Day — her 72nd birthday — and she had spent it eating alone at an IHOP in Central Texas. Her husband of 42 years was in a psychiatric hospital, and sadly, this was not the first time.

I can count on my hands the number of times I have spoken to my aunt — my father’s older sister — since my grandmother died in the late 1980s. It was around that time that my uncle and I nearly came to blows over the handling of my grandmother’s illness, and at that point I pointedly walked away from two people who had a long-term influence on my childhood.

A bit of background is necessary: My father became ill when I was 8, and for major portions of my childhood, I spent summers and school breaks in Longview, the East Texas town where my parents were raised. My aunt and uncle lived 10 to 15 miles from my dad’s parents, and I spent much of my time going back and forth between the two houses.

Reflecting on that time, memories flash by like 15-second commercials from childhood, with yellowed and sepia tones. I remember sitting in a boat belonging to my aunt and uncle, hands on the steering wheel and making sputtering sounds with my lips as I imagined being in a high speed chase. I remember fending off the dirt dobbers, the flying bugs that nested in the homes they built in the ceiling corners of their carport. I can see my grandfather working in the huge garden he set up in their backyard, his skin leathered and tan in the years before he became tethered to oxygen. I remember the Dallas Cowboys games and my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration at their house, my grandfather dying then.

And I remember the confrontation.

••••••

As I write this, my uncle is in a different hospital. His physical “situation” — my aunt’s word to describe his state at any given time — is not good. He has blood clots in his leg and in his lungs that are life threatening. And then there is the mental illness, about which my aunt is reasonably matter of fact.

“He gets on these kicks,” she said on Christmas Day. “He gets revved up and he starts having fears and hallucinations. He gets paranoid. He can’t slow down. He can’t sleep. He’s all agitated and revved up, and then he starts being belligerent. I had to take him over there because I couldn’t have handled him when he is like this.

“So,” she said with the voice of someone who has been through this countless times, “we’ll get his meds straightened out and then everything will be OK for a while, or at least until he has another one of his episodes.”

My uncle was formally diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2000, but he had shown signs of erratic behavior for at least two decades prior. Anxiety could make him extremely demanding and overbearing. At one point, he took a two to three week leave of absence from his job “due to nerves.” He retired in the mid 1980s, even though he was only in his 40s. No one knew, or spoke of, the exact reason why.

“We were so dumb. I didn’t even have a clue what they were talking about,” my aunt said. “As he got older, it got worse, and when he turned 60 it completely got a hold on him.”

••••••

I abhor violence. I don’t like TV shows or movies that glorify or wallow in it. However, I do understand primal instinct. The two fights I got into at school growing up were with people who said cruel (and not well thought out) things about my parents.

And no one, absolutely no one, could say anything about my grandmother or cast a vote to prolong her suffering. End-of-life decisions are extremely personal, and when my uncle — during an extremely stressful point in time just days before her death — tried to take control and made a number of statements about what my grandmother “had to do” and what we “had to do” for her, I started to snap.

And just as quickly, I walked away. Self preservation demanded that I not stay involved with someone who put me in a primal state.

I kept in touch with my aunt and uncle through my parents, who served as intermediaries. We exchanged Christmas cards. Occasionally, and usually at my parents’ behest, I would call to check on them.

This year, after my mom told me about my uncle’s latest meltdown and that my aunt had to eat alone on her birthday because he refused to see her, I decided to reach out and call her at home. After all, it was Christmas, and I had a confession to make.

••••••

The conversation lasted 90 minutes. I asked questions and took notes, writing down parallels between some of my uncle’s episodes and those of my daughter, who also is bipolar. Their situations are different, in part because of age and gender, and in part due to the fact that no mental illness/disorder results in the same experiences.

“It’s the strangest mess,” my aunt said. “Everyone has so many different forms of this.”

She went on to describe how and what happened when my uncle’s “situation” became worse, how she has been on a decade long series of cycles that start with emerging paranoia and isolation, followed by anger and depression, then hospitalization and renewal.

“I don’t know what causes this, but I know that when he becomes anxious about everything, he can’t do anything about it,” she said. “For a while, he just knows that he can do something better than everyone else, and he will drive that point into the ground if he has to, just to get his way.”

What I appreciated most was my aunt’s candor — a trait I had not realized she shares with my grandmother. And what emerged in the conversation was her great strength in the face of mental illness. Why didn’t she leave him?

“He’s a very kind man when he’s not all caught up in this, and it’s not something he can help,” she said, referring to his “crazy episodes” as blackouts. “When you get to know him, you know he’s not like the person he is when he’s in one of those states. I’ve just learned that the meds only hold him for so long, which means when they don’t work that he’s going to have to go to the hospital and stay for a while.”

I told her about my conscious withdrawal from them, explained my reasons for staying away, and said how guilty I felt. “I do understand,” she said. “This is not an easy thing to deal with — for anybody.”

Our relationship felt renewed by the end of our talk. She expressed her concern for Kate and — here’s that word again — our “situation.”

“Fortunately, things are different now,” she said. “It used to be that people who went to a psychiatrist had a bad reputation, but now we know that they’re getting treatment for something they can’t help. It’s not something we expect to have in a child, or in a spouse, but they can’t help it. They just can’t.

“You can help them, though, and others, too, by being open about all this,” she said, not knowing how much she had helped me — on her birthday.

Tell a Story in 100 Words or Less, Part 3

Sixteen years ago, the day after turning 30, I took the first huge risk of my life. I stood next to the front porch on a chilly afternoon and poured out my heart, knowing that in one sense I was destroying the person I had become and reclaiming the person I wanted to be at the same time. For the first time, life’s gray was erased – black pushed to one side, white to the other. In its place was a feeling I knew I’d never replicate, even though the grays of life would return. About this, however, nothing is gray.

The Perils of Creativity

Creativity is elusive, tantalizing, edifying, agonizing, or — with apologies to my English teachers for ending a sentence with a preposition — some combination thereof. Throughout my life, I’ve gone through phases in which I’m extremely productive, and others in which I feel like a barking seal.

The past two to three weeks have felt more like the latter than the former.

January typically is a low-key time. The days are cold and short, the streets are deserted, and my muse usually is in hibernation mode until after my birthday in the middle of the month. Considering the four birthdays and two major holidays that occur in the 30- to 35-day period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I guess that comes as no surprise.

But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

I have four primary hobbies — writing, photography, reading, and listening to music. The first two qualify as active, while the third and fourth vascillate between active and passive. When they work together in groups or in tandem, I am at my best, but recently they haven’t been working at all, even in isolation.

After reading six books in six weeks, I’ve had trouble finishing a long-form magazine article. As for taking pictures, I’ve spent most of my time going through the more than 5,000 I took in 2010 — most of them in an 11-month period. (Last January wasn’t too hot either…)

After writing a variety of blog entries in November and December — so much to process in so little time — this is the first of 2011. I have started and stopped several other essays during this period — another source of frustration — that ended up as part of the Fragments series.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve compensated by engaging in two other enjoyable, though extremely passive pastimes — watching football and going to movies. Fortunately, between the NFL playoffs and the Oscar contenders moving into wide release, January is the month for both.

Slowly, I can feel the muse is getting restless again. On a single train ride from New York to Virginia, I managed to complete two long-overdue entries that I hope you will enjoy in the coming days.

My brain is filling up with things to process, and rather than feeling saturated or spent, I’m starting to feel like I can deliver on them again. My desire to get outside and be creative is back.

In other words, look out, folks…