Estrangement, Politics and Anti-Black Racism: part III
With a dose of Women and Mental Illness
* *
Pop and I made jokes about Mom’s mood swings, her bouts of irrational thinking and behavior, and her frequent sleeping. More so before his affair with the secretary. But definitely after, when depression stole a significant chunk of her vitality.
Like most preteen girls, I needed to vent about my mom.
He was more than happy to listen to someone complain about his wife.
Those were the times he paid attention, to me. Sort of.
I didn’t tell him how much I missed her. I didn’t tell him how I worried.
He made it sound like she could get up out of the bed, if she tried harder.
He never mocked the periods of hyper-productivity. They kept her occupied.
I didn’t like them. She sewed in the basement for hours; for years. The first half of the 1980s were spent making two silk bridal gowns and twelve bridesmaid dresses, back to back, for two of my sisters. I was apprehensive but excited to be a ten-year-old “junior bridesmaid,” instead of a flower girl in Carla’s wedding. I had been a flower girl once before, for Uncle Pasta and his first wife, Karen. But still, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be a bridesmaid.
I never realized that Mom saved herself hours of time and hundreds of dollars using the same bridesmaid dress pattern for me that she made for the other bridesmaids instead of choosing one unique pattern just for a flower girl. That is genius and life-saving. For her. For me; the excitement was tinged with disappointment. Still, It wasn’t the first time I was nudged into a more adult role for the sake of ease in the lives of those around me, and it would not be the last.
Eight years later, she was diagnosed with Manic Depressive Disorder, a mood disorder associated with mood swings, irrational thinking, periods of expanded alertness, creativity and high productivity, cycling with sad mood and excessive sleep. This diagnosis would evolve with successive editions of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual to become Bipolar Disorder, and in the early aughts would be further subdivided into Bipolar 1 and Bipolar 2.
Did my father finally see the light, and realize that instead of laughing at his wife with his daughter, he should get her some help? No.
Did a progressive doctor at PAMF, the clinicians associated with her hallowed alma mater, Stanford, realize something was off? No.
Like virtually every challenge she had ever had, Mom figured it out herself. She read a book by a woman who figured it out herself. When I was almost off to college, she read Call Me Anna: the Autobiography of Patty Duke.
Reading Patty Duke’s descriptions of bipolar disorder, both pre-, during-and post-diagnosis (and post-medication), a series of light bulbs went off in my mother’s head.
Mom recognized that the symptoms of mania and depression described in the book closely resembled her own.
She recognized that she could use the language of diagnosis and symptoms to talk to medical and psychiatric doctors, in order to describe the pathology she had always experienced in a way that forced clinicians to listen to her and give treatment.
She realized, that like Ms. Duke, she would benefit from medication, which she eventually did, starting, like Ms. Duke did, on lithium, once she was able to access medical care.
And if that doesn’t prove the power of a fucking book, I don’t know what does.
What if all those years that she suffered could have been fewer? Why didn’t anyone notice and try to help her?
Besides me. And I was just a kid.
“You were the only one who could cheer her up,” my father used to say, “I used to call you ‘our little Florence Nightingale.’”
I remembered. That is when attention was paid, to me.
Years later, after her death, I found a letter she had written to her doctor.
“Dear Dr. G,” it began, “I thought if I could put some of this down on paper it might help prevent me from bursting out crying when I’m trying to tell you what’s wrong with me.”
She then logically and thoughtfully, in perfect handwriting, with pen, detailed her symptoms, their duration, her current stressors-the weddings and the dresses she made, my brother coming out, her parents having their 50th wedding anniversary and her mother, Grandma Mildred, not cooperating with the planning on account of Grandma Mildred having been carrying on an 18-year affair “with a pro golfer!”, my father’s affair with the secretary (which she carefully labeled a '“flirtation”), and that she, Mom, had just gone back to work full time.
Good God. Who okayed that plan?
“Your mother was just so devastated after my friendship with Galissa,” Pop once said, in an affected ‘wimmin! they are such mysterious creatures!’ tone, “I thought if she went back to work full time it would be good for her.”
In the note to Dr. G, she mentioned trying to have a good diet, get enough exercise, and rest. By the 1980s, gaslighting women into blaming their problems on their inability to control these three areas of their lives was in full swing.
By way of conclusion, her narrative wiggles this switchblade between the folds of my heart:
“Please don’t tell me to relax and it will go away eventually—I’m too scared and shaky for that. I know that you know me well enough to know I—”
and then it ends. I don’t have the other pages.
She was afraid to cry and she expected to be belittled. I can’t tell if that’s because she has been abused this way her entire life by the men around her, or because men were just walking around living their best lives, letting their most sexist thoughts and fantasies hang out. How many times had she used a similar preemptive incantation in order to be taken seriously?
* *
And what does this have to do with estrangement, politics, and anti-Black racism?
We’ll get there.
* *
My becoming a therapist irked relatives, which surprised me.
It doesn’t now.
I started my psychotherapy private practice in a room that I sublet from my father.
The room was an oasis I created in the squat, dumpy building that he owned and practiced criminal law in. In order to arrive there, my psychotherapy clients had to journey past his tenant’s giant neon Bail Bonds sign, through a tinkling door into a waiting room with smelly chairs, 70s coffee tables, and likely a few criminal clients.
From there, the client navigated a tunnel-like corridor between threes sharp-cornered, looming desks squished into the narrow secretarial room, through another door, and then turning (to the right! if you look to the left and you will see my father’s very interesting room) down a long hallway jammed with artwork of questionable quality, origin and themes of erotic and religious nature, past Uncle Pasta’s teeny room-within-a-room (the sort of room where one hands out pills to patients, if the room were in an infirmary), past soft-spoken Lawyer Pete’s lion-themed room, past Filbert the DUI attorney (the son of an ex secretary, possibly even that ex-secretary) and then finally (finally!) my client would arrive at my door. About five minutes before they arrived, I would race to the front room to wait for them so I could escort them the whole way, distracting them from their surroundings with my chatter.
There was a quick, clean, introvert’s choice entry along the side which was a straight shot past the bathrooms to my door, but like all illicit things, it wasn’t perfect. It required lingering in a creepy alley just long enough to feel discomfort, no matter how fast I got my key in the door.
Everyone working there loved my room and the vibe I created. So much so that they started using it as a lounge when I wasn’t there, because it was the only room with good lighting and comfortable furniture.
The trouble started quickly enough. Which brings us back to anti-Black racism, and the ultimate trigger for it in the year 2008: Barack Obama.
Uncle Pasta, perhaps on a lunch break with a pastrami sandwich, dropped right-wing propaganda in my therapy room, right on the filing cabinet by the door that I used as a drop zone for keys and phone.
Until that point I had done a good job of compartmentalizing my anxiety to the times in the office when I wasn’t with clients. But this unexpected broadside slapped me with shame, humiliation, and embarrassment, which quickly turned into a wave of panic.
I saw the photo after I flicked the light on, coming in with my first client of the evening. This is the only source I could find with the a portion of that photo, in that specific pose with that specific outfit.
The photo was embedded in a document, a printed-out, forwarded, all-caps, emoticon-heavy, early-aughts-style email (the kind that had scintillating copy such as “OBAMA SAYS HE ISNT BORNE IN THIS COUNTRY, BUT LOOK AT THIS DRESS HE WEARS.. NOT A MOSLEME? I DONT THINK SO HMMMMMMM? (smile emoticon. laugh emoticon. monocle emoticon.)
Uncle Copy Pasta had intentionally left it the inside of my office in a place visible to clients. I had been working in professional environments previously, and was completely shocked at the unprofessional behavior of what I saw as him deliberately trying to throw me off when I was working with clients. I was already nervous because I was starting off in a private practice and recently licensed, and for a supposed elder to deliberately sabotage me like that was cruel and petty. I hadn’t quite put it together yet that Uncle Pasta not only objected to me, but also thought that therapy was bullshit.
Part of the framework of therapy is to create a safe space for the client, and I felt violated that he had done something with the intent of fucking with me. I’m sure the client, a middle-aged guy who probably made more money than Uncle Pasta and I put together, saw the offending document as well as the emergent beads of sweat on my forehead.
The breakfast table debates with my father had an indelible impact—I couldn’t be in a political debate with nearly anyone, let alone a pushy, entitled man-child, without my stomach filling with adrenaline or my mouth getting dry. Getting my attention back onto the client felt like the mental equivalent of pushing a heavy desk all by myself.
But I did. I was a good therapist. I was well-trained. I shoved the thoughts about Uncle Pasta and the Obama Dashiki (now there’s a band name) into a box and thrust it onto a high shelf in my mind. That worked to keep the attention on the client, making for a good session, even though my nervous system stayed over-alert, and my stomach sour
* *
Too overwhelmed and distrustful of confronting my uncle without getting a panic attack after that incident, I hid.
I started scheduling my client contact hours during the time that I knew he wouldn’t be around. I avoided talking about politics around him and my dad. I fawned.
I smiled. I laughed. I said things like, “Let’s not get into that right now.” I arrived right before sessions and scurried into my room to avoid him. Just thinking about the situation and visualizing myself avoiding him or seeing him, kicked my nerves up even more, and I started experiencing symptoms associated with full-blown anxiety disorder.
Since this uncle was at every family gathering, along with the other elders who began to feel equally intimidating to be around, the anxiety would start showing up right before I would have plans to see family, giving rise to events with symptoms just short of a panic attack.
I started avoiding family gatherings, which made the relatives more cutting and cold, which caused more anxiety that led to more avoidance.
Uncle Pasta left me a letter in the same spot, on the filing cabinet in my sanctuary. “It is customary,” he began, “for the younger person in the family to approach the elder in this type of situation, but I will forego convention in the spirit of familial love.” Or something like that. I panic shredded it later.
That was the way they spoke, he and my father. I couldn’t really read it, because that panic feeling would rise up in my throat and choke me, making me feel like, if I let it, it would choke away everything I had worked so hard for: my degrees, my licenses, my scars from life, and my mental health, not to mention my very real, very successful burgeoning private practice.
I was thrown back into being that kid at the breakfast table, and I didn’t like it.
The difference between the respect and appreciation I got from my clients (not to mention their willingness to pay my fees) and the way that my family treated me got more and more obvious. It was the same thing with colleagues, who not only gave me the time of the day, they respected my opinion and treated me like a valuable part of a team. It gave me vertigo and was especially noticeable now that I had moved back to San Jose and that these diverse interactions with people were all taking place in the same area.
I complained about Uncle Pasta to my father, who was essentially my landlord. Pasta had stopped leaving propaganda in my office, but still tried to bait me into political arguments, got into political shouting matches in the hall outside my door when I was in session, and in general got into my space when I was working, embarrassing me in front of clients. I asked Pop to intervene with my uncle.
Instead, I got a lecture. About how reprehensible it was to support Obama.
He could hardly blame my uncle, because, come on. Obama.
He was spitting mad, the way I imagine him looking when he said:
Someone I know could have seen you.
Did you know she was going to this?
And that day, he sputtered:
Look, you’ve gotta understand who this guy is.
And then he gave me a book, called “Obama Nation” by Jerome Corsi. I made him promise to watch Bowling for Columbine if I read the book.
I got through about three pages. He never saw the film. You might be tempted to say that had I just extended more empathy, more understanding, more tolerance, and more curiosity to my father and uncle, that maybe we could have found common ground, and if more people like me were willing to do that in 2008, our country wouldn’t be so divided.
It sounds nice. But the only flaw is, I had been doing that my entire life, fawning, nodding, cautiously bringing up a point, laughing nervously, changing the subject, and this only encouraged my father and by extension his siblings, to be bolder, turning every discussion into an attack where I was to represent all liberals so they had a face to insult in their rage. And during the same time, they were being coached by Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove, and finally, the Orange Foolious, to think of all people who voted Democrat as worshipful, politically correct goons. And to see anyone who wasn’t white and male who was in a position of power as someone who cheated to get there.
From 2008 until 2022, Republicans blamed Obama for just about everything. But Pop and Uncle Pasta had sourced the primo shit early courtesy of FawnOld Dump, and were blaming Barack Hussein (oh god, they always said Barack HUSSEIN in 2007) before he even won his primary. “I’d even prefer Hillary to THAT GUY,” Pop would say.
A week later, I was working with a client when the sound of men shouting bled through the cheap wall. I opened the door onto the hallway and found my father and Uncle Pasta yelling excitedly at my father’s protegé, a Democrat.
His point was made. Time to go.
I started plotting, planning, and extending an S.O.S. to my expanding group of contacts in the Bay Area that had nothing to do with family or high school friends. Within two days I found a new office. and had to go from paying $75 a month to my father (he offered to let me use it for free but I knew that he would hold it over my head and attach even more strings than the ones that held me). to paying $300 a month, an amount I had to scrape together and hustle for.
I was naive, and thought that my father would help talk to Pasta. I had been away too long and forgotten the family rules, how it functioned, and where I ranked. I had had a “sweetheart deal” on office rent, which meant I had no financial leverage. So I had two choices: stay, and suck it up, or go, and pay market rate. I couldn’t afford panic attacks while I was trying to get a practice off the ground. I couldn’t afford to be honest with my father and his brother by telling them I experienced anxiety, because they thought that sort of thing was a weakness. Plus I finally had to be honest with myself and admit that a criminal law office run by the “fuck your feelings” crowd is a terrible place to operate a mental health practice.
But during the six months that I was there, I managed to build a steady client base, which gave me enough money to rent an office in a therapy building.
With the messy financial ties cut, I thought things would get better with my father and his family. I focused on my life, built my practice, met my partner, got married, and had a baby, all within three years.
But the panic attacks didn’t stop. After I had my daughter, they worsened. My father arrived at my home unannounced, at all hours, refusing to make plans when I asked. I was simply not allowed to set boundaries with him. If I asked him to call first, he would call from the driveway. If I asked him not to disturb my napping daughter, he would pick her up and unwrap her swaddling.
Anxiety was robbing me of quality time with my husband and baby and making it harder to parent. I cut contact with my father. I intended for it to be until I felt more balanced, but that ended up taking two and a half years.
You could say it wasn’t about politics. I tried so hard to make it about boundaries, decency, behavior. But at almost every juncture where there was a deep rift in our emotional connection, politics lurked like a vulture. Never about actual policy, though, just more of him talking shit about liberals. When I distanced myself, that was the first thing he brought up. Well, I know our politics are different, but you don’t have to stop talking to me! He refused to acknowledge that it was about bullying.
And if it wasn’t about race, why was race always there? Angela Davis, the Freedom Train, Obama. Never saying the quiet part out loud. Mom was supposed to know why Angela Davis was off-limits. She was supposed to know without him saying it, why she shouldn’t let me go to a MLK rally. I was supposed to see Obama in a dashiki and think, this guy is different than me and from a group of people that disqualifies him from leading the country. He didn’t say it’s because he is Black, but he showed Obama being too Black, and that should have been enough for me to get it. But since I did not, he gave me a racist book full of factual inconsistencies and research errors to try to convince me that Obama will be horrible for the country, because according to them, Blackness correlates with all sorts of awful things, like Socialism and de-regulation, and higher taxes for rich people.
Oh no. Darn.
Why did we frame this as a conversation about politics when it’s a conversation about racism?
The more time that passes, the more the memories come back, arranging themselves into something damning.
Me telling the little girl that my father didn’t like Black people.
Him calling Black people extremely disrespectful and problematic names-never the “N” word, but always dancing to the symbolic edge— from the time I was small.
His attempt at impersonating AAVE.
The way he imitated the vocals on “Let My Love Open the Door” by Pete Townshend, because I could tell he thought that Pete Townshend was Black by the way he was imitating the vocals, which he did every time it played on the radio, which was often, because the song was a huge hit, and forever fucking up my association with that song.
His cringy, fake-sounding story from his trucking days about being taught by a Black truck driver how to pick a good watermelon.
His cringy, fake-sounding story about the Korean war where he supposedly killed a North Korean who died in his arms saying “war is hell, brother.”
The way, after I told him I was dating a Black guy when I was about 23, he casually drove me through East Palo Alto, on purpose, as if to make a point.
The way he spoke about the bodies of the Ethiopian women who worked at his bank; like they were prized gazelles.
The path to estrangement, occurring several years after the office drama, was strange, but now that I’m here, I definitely have a lot less to lose by continuing to speak my mind about politics and race. I also have more energy to hear my own thoughts on politics and policy, and to spend working for Black liberation instead of managing panic attacks.
My mom is gone now. But Angela is still here. I fall down the Angela Rabbit Hole, or, the Research Funnel as Sylvia, my writing coach, pointed out; citing yet another writer’s work. Sylvia tells me that Toni Morrison worked as an editor long before she became famous, and she was the one who encouraged Angela Davis to write books.
I read Abolition. Feminism. Now. By Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie. I reflexively hear the taunts and insults my family would throw out freely if they saw me with this book. I have kept attempting to learn, change and divest myself of white supremacist thinking while in my family, but I made more progress after I had been dismissed from family. I’m aware of the danger that activist circles could just be another place I’m looking for love and to get childhood needs met. But I’m coming to the work as an adult. And I do feel love here, in the social justice space, as well as the art sphere.
I take a class called Interrupting White Womanhood, where a Black woman patiently coaches about twenty of us “woke white chicks” about womanism, and how to be less shitty. I learn through my dialectic with the leader and the teachings that I’m trying to control everything, which is an outgrowth of a white supremacy mindset, and that I have a lot of unconscious bias and shitty Karenhood to overcome. (My words.) I start to read Angela Davis’ autobiography, the preface to the 2021 edition: she’s still here. She credits her community and the care they have given.
Myself and the Interrupting White Womanhood Women start to dig into our relationship style with other white women and the unspoken rules: be nice, fawn, protect others’ feelings, which leads to a lack of authenticity and closeness. This often comes with us centering our own feelings over those of marginalized women and flaking out on feminism when it suits us.
I think about my mom, my sisters. Get in the car. Be nice. Don’t be mean. Why so angry?
The moments in time seem to collide and ideology ripples across a narrower space created by the wormhole over San Jose. Angela’s comrades have gathered to free her and my curious, young mother is somehow with it enough to be here. Here is my father; pulling my mother away from the rally, pulling us both away, because I am either the potentiality in her ovaries or an actual embryo in her uterus by this point. But also, there I am, a dream in a uterus that is continuing the work that the uterus owner couldn’t do. I am also an adult, here now, returning, to do the work my mother couldn’t do, partly because of her choice to go with my father, but partly because, maybe she didn’t feel like she could make the hard choice to stay, because she was mentally ill and unmedicated, and was routinely dismissed by the men around her.
I think that had she received treatment and not been so isolated from other women during the time my mom got pregnant with me, that she would have continued with more active anti-racist work. My brother told me that early on she invited Black neighbors over and sternly told everyone they were to treat these folks like honored guests, or anyone else that would come over. She took every opportunity to receive mentorship and advice from the honorable LaDoris Cordell, the first Black woman judge in Northern California, who helped my mom become a pro-tem judge. After she divorced my father, Black friends came into my mom’s life. I sincerely believe that had my mom been more well and had not slid further into mental illness and alcoholism, she would have engaged more critically in intersectional feminist actions, and given back more.
And just like my mom brought me on her journey as an embryo in her uterus, I too bring her on mine, as an ancestor that rests in my bones and skin. As a tiny jar of ashes I bring sometimes in my purse. As an idea of freedom and justice and intersections that was passed on to me and kept alive. As a way to give back more.
* *
After receiving appropriate mental health treatment, I no longer suffer panic attacks during political arguments.