Hanging on

I didn’t paint on Thursday. I got out to the levee and realized that I had left the locking carabiner in my garage. I had another carabiner, but it didn’t lock and there is no way I was stepping an inch on that incline without all the safety equipment. And in a way, I knew I really should be at home because my son was falling apart.

In the early years of Shayne’s illness, I thought if we just found the right medicine, he could be functional. At some point my thinking shifted to, if he would just take the medicine, he could be better. I have spent a lot of time trying to get to get Shayne to take his meds consistently. While I haven’t given up or lost hope, for the sake of my own mental health, at some point I quit fighting, cajoling, reminding, or debating over the meds. In other words, I stopped being a mom about the medicine and let him make the choice. His choice is to barely take it at all.

I have a high tolerance for crazy. I couldn’t have survived all these years as a teacher if I didn’t. Shayne’s behavior doesn’t bother me that much. He mostly keeps to himself, writes crazy stuff in his journal, watches Batman, eats Taco Bell and sleeps a lot. But his crazy is like watching a slo mo video of a glass of grape juice falling. Suddenly somehow it’s not a video and the juice is splashing you in the face. I feel like a weather magician sometimes. I can see the patterns in his crazy, but riffles and shifts in the wind can change the direction. Sometimes I can even stop the storm, by getting him back on his meds, but this time Shayne crossed the line from crazy to out of control. And I didn’t get in front of it in time and I couldn’t pull it back.

Every single time Shayne has a psychotic break, I think, it can’t get worse than this. But then it is. This time his words and actions are things I wouldn’t dream of putting on paper, but it culminated with him making a 911 call and reporting that he was being raped at our address. Then he got in his car and drove away. I dealt with the police. We made our report. Then I fell asleep. I know that’s a weird reaction, but sometimes the only way to cope with the madness is for my brain to take a little break. When I woke up, it was dark and I had no word from Shayne, the police, the hospital. Somehow not knowing is the worse than anything else.

I got up Friday morning and drove out to the levee before it was light. Watching the sun come up on the prairie is miraculous. It’s not orange, or pink, or red, but all those colors at once. I mixed up my color for fisherman and climbed down the wall. I just painted my fisherman and his long reedy pole. It looks so tiny, but in perspective, he is just in the background. Then I went out to a paint recycle center and met a guy even more covered with paint than I was. He showed me around and we couldn’t find any gold or neon green, I guess people aren’t using those colors in abundance, so I was forced to buy a gallon of new paint from a paint store. I did get a discount though and the salesgirl was super nice. Then I went home. Shayne hadn’t been there.

I sat on the porch until late in the evening wondering where he was sleeping. Wondering if he’d eaten anything. His birthday is today. I half expected he’d be in his bed when I got up this morning. I’ve been holding out hope that he will come home for cake and we can work on getting him some help. But he isn’t, so I guess I’ll go out to the levee and start painting the biggest trout on record. Right now, I am so grateful for my mural. It’s really the only thing getting me through.