Mamaphonic

Becoming a mother is what kick-started me writing again, after a long dry spell that began in college, when I was twenty. Unlike other mothers I’ve met, though, it wasn’t exactly motherhood itself that did it. Instead, it was a very unexpected by-product of motherhood, one that I hadn’t been expecting and certainly didn’t welcome.

I didn’t start writing after my first child was born. I didn’t start writing after my second child was born. I started writing after my third child was born, pushed by a manic swing I wasn’t even aware of. I didn’t know I had bipolar disorder, and I didn’t know that being pregnant could trigger an episode. The exhaustion and depression and trigger-happy temper didn’t tell me that I was in trouble.

I have rarely been so productive. Every night I would be up late, alternating between cruising my favorite parenting site and writing short, snappy pieces for the long-defunct site Themestream. In the morning I hauled myself out of bed with a crane, exhausted, and ready to scream at my children. I would tell myself that I needed, desperately needed, more sleep, but every night, there I was, on the computer, typing furiously.

Meanwhile, I kept a small, restricted on-line journal that only a few friends could read, where I told the truth about what I was feeling.

I’ve had chances to go back and read all of those things, the Themestream pieces and the journal, and it’s positively surreal. I wrote well; those Themestream pieces were good. None of them revealed the chaos behind them. In fact, I sounded like a clear, competent, smart mama, homeschooling, cooking, and playing marvelous math games with my children. In the beginning, before I really started hitting bottom, that was at least partially true.

The journal shows the other, jumpier, more frightening side of the truth. I described the terrifying and not all all exhilarating jumble of mixed mania as being strapped to the front of a bus that was going eighty miles per hour down the highway, with no brakes and no way to get off. The daily balancing act between the lethargy of mixed depression and mania and the frantic jitters caused by a badly prescribed medication was “like surfing on a gravel tidal wave, terrified that at any minute I’ll lose control and be swept under and crushed.” At the time, I still didn’t recognize the fact that I was experiencing mania, but on looking back, it could not be more obvious.

I was miserable, I could do hardly anything, and I wrote. I wrote like a crazy woman.

It felt at the time as though it lasted forever, but it was really only about three years before my doctors and I hit on the right combination of medication to keep the worst of the mania at bay. Gradually, I was able to go to bed and sleep. I stopped screaming at the children, to my relief and theirs. Themestream was gone, and I stopped spending so much time on the net.

I kept writing, but the stream of easy inspiration was gone. Worse yet, I had started a novel, and lost it when my laptop was drowned by a leaky pipe. I had begun it in a frantic, manic moment, and it was gone. It’s anybody’s guess whether I could have sustained it, but I no longer had the chance, and that particular variety of inspiration seems to be gone forever.

I’ve been stable for several years now. I recommend it. As far as I’m concerned, mixed mania was as close to hell as I’ve ever been, and a lot closer than I care to be ever again. I owe it to my family and, more importantly, to myself to avoid returning to that mess, at all costs. I don’t want to be a crazy woman.

At the same time, I feel a wistful regret for that manic inspiration. I may have done it for dysfunctional reasons, but the truth is, I wrote more, and more effectively, than I have before or since. Was it hell? It absolutely was, every second. But when I was creating, hell was an mighty attractive place.

• I Finished!