Crazy

The other day, walking out my front door, I found myself glancing down to make sure my shirt was buttoned. Then I laughed. I’d caught myself doing one of Mom’s Sanity Checks. She always told me, “If you forget to button your blouse, that’s a sure sign you’re looney.”

My mother passed away more than twenty years ago, but her self-checks about how to assess idiocy have stuck with me. Now I wonder why she felt so concerned about our basic lucidity. As a child, I don’t remember hearing anything on this topic from the other neighborhood moms.

Lipstick going too far away from the lip line signaled mental instability. Bra straps and slips showing more than a few inches for prolonged time periods – an absolute taboo in the 1950s and early 1960s – meant a person could go crazy at any moment. Mom convinced everyone that the neighbor’s foster son was a typical sociopath and described this abnormality in detail to me for decades. At the time, I assumed she knew the correct facts. In reality, I don’t remember the handsome teen-aged boy doing anything askance.

Mom attributed female psychological problems to pioneer history. My grandparents had been homesteaders in the 1800s, building a log cabin in the tall timber of the Pacific Northwest rain forest. According to Mom, women stuck in these tiny, dark hovels, with their husbands out working and hunting all day, gave rise to “cabin fever,” or what she called, in the 1950s and 1960s, a “nervous breakdown.” Blouses buttoned wrong or slips showing could escalate into full-blown homicidal or suicidal catastrophes. That’s why she emphasized checking our buttons, bras and slips – to stop a cognitive blip before it got out of hand.

At age twelve, I remember my backwoods’ grandmother, eighty-nine years old, deciding to take a nap after Thanksgiving dinner. She quietly passed away with a turkey-filled stomach. Grandma, a music teacher, always impressed me as accomplished and intelligent, supremely sane. I never heard stories about her going berserk in a log cabin. 

I don’t know where Mom’s concern about madness came from. However, she loved to create high drama and references to irrationality and absurdity always got people’s attention.

Mom projected a self-image of an exemplary woman, college-educated and smart. She loved brinksmanship, pushing herself to the edge as a self-styled liberated individual who’d mastered the latest knowledge in her field and also partied with enthusiasm. As a Special Education teacher, she quietly used hypnotism to help her students relax and learn more efficiently. In the days before mainstreaming, her classroom was separate from the main body of the school and she designed her own curriculum. 

After school, she immediately repaired to the local watering place and enjoyed the first of her evening vodkas, insisting that her habits constituted the superior way to live. As she aged, the 5pm vodkas began to start as early as 3pm. I found it impossible to communicate with her at these times, for she behaved like a typical drunk: narcissistic, cruel and non-sensical. I considered her insane when inebriated. But she never checked her blouse buttons at those times, for she didn’t appear to doubt her brain function when soaked with vodka. She seemed to feel entitled and criticized me for not drinking and “having fun” with her. 

It took me years to unravel the fact that she daily proclaimed herself to be brainy while spending a good part of each day senseless. In my twenties, with the help of Al Anon, a group dedicated to helping the friends and families of alcoholics, I figured out the illogic of Mom’s troubling and weird behavior. I felt grateful to finally understand these dynamics.

When I reflect on it now, I find supreme irony in her unrecognized mental obliteration each afternoon and evening. I suppose part of the definition of mental illness is non-awareness of disfunction. For this reason, the older I get, I find it useful to practice becoming more self-aware. Such self-knowledge expands Mom’s original Sanity Checks, allowing me opportunities to reflect on whether a brain glitch might be a permanent condition.

I’ve noticed a few friends my age, in our early seventies, becoming forgetful. Some already have full-blown Alzheimer’s. As far as I can tell, I’m not any nuttier than I’ve ever been. I’m hopeful that practicing self-awareness and using Mom’s Sanity Checks might prolong mental acuity.

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