I never wanted my daughter to feel the divorce. I told myself over and over and over again that I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes that I’d witnessed so many other couples make. The bitterness. The bile that’d spill out of their mouths when they spoke of the person they once had pledged their undying love to. I never expected these people to have happy divorces; I just didn’t think they needed to wash their children in the same unhappiness they bathed themselves with every single day.

I was going to be better; I was going to be an example, to myself, to my daughter.

But doing so, making it easy on my daughter and, by association, O., has only made moving on harder for me. He comes to my house and stays some weekends because he doesn’t have a place of his own. No, it’s no trouble, I’d say. I want my daughter to know her dad, I’d think, persuading myself that the boundaries we redrew with the thick, black lines of divorce papers wouldn’t be blurred, wouldn’t disintegrate as we trudged back and forth and back and forth and back and forth over them with no regard for distinction.

But I was wrong, and I’ve been so foolish. I remember telling C., my counselor, how I sometimes couldn’t fathom the divorce being final. There has always been a part of me that honestly believed we’d find our way back to one another.

**************

I can hear him talking in the other room. I’m in my bedroom with my eyes closed, taking a rest, willing away the tightness in my chest. I walk around the corner and ask him who he’s talking to, half expecting him to be singing to himself. He stares at me for a minute, a pause, a second, letting the question hang in the air.

Sarah, he says. And I turn around and go back to my room, silent. His footsteps follow, the hardwood floor moaning until he stops beside my bed. Can I get you anything? Do you want some tea? So benign, maybe contrived; he’s gauging how I’m feeling about his talking to Sarah, even if he’d never admit so when pressed. No, I’m fine, I say to my pillow.

**************

He doesn’t have to tell me that he’s interested in her romantically; I know. When I tell him that I can’t believe he’s talking to her while staying at my house, he questions me, as though my anger is somehow misguided. Not everyone thinks the way you do, Michelle, and that doesn’t make everyone else wrong, he responds to my calling he and Sarah thick for not having the faintest idea of how inappropriate their behavior is. I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one who would find this action so amazingly inconsiderate, but then I think of at least a dozen women who would be sympathetic to my annoyance and shrug off his attempt at turning it toward me.

What I am guilty of, what I will fully take responsibility for, is my own belief that somehow my life would put itself back together again, the misery rewound until the fracture lines in the once whole picture evaporated, invisible.

I’ve been so foolish

I’ve been so naive

I’ve been so focused on the impossibility

that I completely forgot to put one foot in front of the other, to wrap my hands around my leg and forcibly remove my foot from the muck, shaking off the thick ooze of pain.

I forgot to soothe myself

I forgot to find my own succor

I forgot that I count, too

1. A Halloween parade at Sabine’s school. Over dinner with my parents this weekend she suddenly remembered this event, looking up from her plate to tell us all: “I am really excited about my parade.”

2. Chicago Public Radio

3. Hearing people’s stories, in person and on the Internet. I love listening to people tell me interesting things about themselves, even when, in the case of the Internet, they might not be speaking directly to me.

4. The sight of Sabine on her new bike

5. Dreaming

Go on, share with me and others.

1. The sound of my daughter scampering across the floor to her grandparent’s bedroom, throwing open the door with a big giggle, my mom answering her with a “Hey, little girl,” my dad saying, “What’s up, Bean bag?” I can hear the smiles in their voices.

2. Caramel apples from Betty Janes, a little store in my hometown that makes candy from scratch

3. Toast made from fresh sourdough bread

4. Sleeping soundly; I didn’t wake up once last night

5. An e-mail from an old friend that made me smile

I’m grateful for a lot of stuff, now you go share what you’re grateful for.

1. Free wellness screenings at work

2. Some time off and away

3. Planning an abbreviated Thanksgiving menu; no big frills, but a nice meal all the same

4. The thought of Sabine and my mom making cookies together

5. One step at a time; one day at a time

Do you need to catch up? Go here and see what else I’m grateful for, then start your own list.

I guess perhaps because I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with bipolar, even while growing up, O.’s diagnosis didn’t scare me. Like I’ve said and said and said, I was pretty much in denial for the first, what has it been?, year. But scared? No. O., as a person, didn’t change. I understood I still understood him, no matter the added information.

But mental illness wasn’t anything I ever joked about, or casually referenced, outside of using words that don’t instantly bring to mind a particular diagnosis, like looking at my dog chasing her tail and barking and saying, “Stop acting crazy!”

Recently though, I’ve had reason to stop and take notice of how some people misuse—innocently, perhaps—words that reference mental illness. Sitting in a meeting with colleagues who are explaining what they are responsible for to members of another department, the person to my right speaks of how some of our clients can be, shall we say, indecisive about how they feel. And, in the privacy of the room, he laughs, “And you sometimes want to ask them, ‘Hey, are you bipolar?’”

My internal dialogue immediately chattered, Is that what you think of this disease? That it’s all about mood swings? Only to realize that there are probably a good many people who misunderstand the nature of bipolar, considering the disease nothing more than a battle between depression and mania—two states that are even further confused.

A different colleague told the story of a client who was hard to work with by saying, “Apparently she’s magic. She never sleeps and gets all of these ideas and just doesn’t make sense.” Perhaps she was trying to be clever, bring some levity to what appears to be a fairly serious situation, but I still felt myself cringe at the misrepresentation, the blatant disregard, no matter how unintentional, for those who suffer from mental illness. Witnessing true mania is nowhere close to magic, no matter what the sick individual says or how they act. I’ve watched O. recollect manic moments with shame and embarrassment, not once with wonder or pride.

But the conflict occurs because what’s to be done? Do I stop these meetings and interject my own personal experience with mental illness? I hardly think that would do more than getting myself labeled sensitive. Then there would be the continual, if unconscious, guard: What can I say to Michelle? or, even worse, Wow, I had no idea.

That is the heart of the matter, right there. Truthfully, no, they don’t have any idea beyond how the media and acquaintances and random encounters have contextualized bipolar for them. Did they see an interview with someone suffering from the disease and figure that is how bipolar always manifests itself? Did they hear a story about a crazy aunt who, like someone with a fatal or terminal disease, was finally summed up in hushed tones, “Oh, yes, she was bipolar.”

I don’t know anyone’s exposure or comfort level with mental illness, and it’s not information you find out easily. No one has ever come up to me, for instance, and asked, “So, how do you feel about mental illness?” The subject, like so many others, isn’t filed under “general conversation” or “easy openers.” For me, the truth about mental illness is that it is an uncomfortable topic that comprises a whole range of sometimes opposing emotion. Complex and simple. Tender and maddening. Understandable and elusive.

But, for me, too, mental illness is a necessary conversation. I have to understand, at the very least, how O. sometimes experiences bipolar, because to do anything less would be unthinkable. I know he struggles; I can feel it in the waves of his emotion that ebb out to me by virtue of the child we share. And, without a doubt, he, and his diagnosis, can’t be defined as mood swings and magic.

Dear Sabine,

I love spending my weekends with you.

Love,

Mama

1. My daughter’s passion, even when it sometimes comes out in angry bursts of temper

2. The hope of sun and warmer temperatures next week

3. Doing puzzles with Sabine, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth as she methodically tries pieces until she finds those that slide together

4. Dog snores, somehow much less annoying and more endearing than adult snores

5. The fluttering eyelids of a sleeping child; she sleeps with as much abandon and vividness as she exerts in waking hours

Missed some of mine? Go here and find them, then add your own.

In his book Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales quotes sociologist Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents:

“We construct an expected world because we can’t handle the complexity of the present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we make our construction.”

I’ve been constructing expected worlds for most of my life, and holding myself to them. My feeling of expectation may be different from what Perrow is speaking of above, perhaps, but something about this quote struck me like a slap across the face. I have specific emotional responses that are based on a world I’ve sewed myself into so I’m continually adjusting, scrambling, moving the lens so as not to disturb the continuity.

1. Figuring things out, slowly, slowly, slowly

2. Pictures that take me back

3. Reading this book and being absolutely dumbfounded by how intricate and complex we human beings are; untangling the web of emotion, memory, instinct, absolutely fascinating

4. Surprising Sabine with a new pair of shoes only to have her tell me she didn’t want to wear them to school because her teachers would tell her they liked them.

5. Knowing my limitations

Sharing feels good.

1. Talking to my mom nearly every day

2. Allowing life to teach me its lessons instead of resisting

3. Listening to Ryan Adams; something so soulful and honest about his music

4. Sabine pointing to a question mark and asking me what it is; me explaining how a question mark functions and what it implies; her stopping me mid-sentence, saying, “Mom, mom, I have a question,” then making a statement

5. Growing up in a very funny family, so thankful I have a good sense of humor

Number 34 is right here; don’t forget to share a little something of yourself.