Monday, July 2, 2007

The Devil Talking



I’ve been so sad and blue
Ever since you bid the Prozac fairy adieu

Every time my mother speaks to me here lately, I hear the voice of Satan. She needs a visit from the Prozac fairy, but she’s rolled up the welcome mat for antidepressants and thrown it in the Dumpster. Now that she’s given her prescription up, she’s making me need pharmaceutical help.

It’s put me in quite a dilemma. I used to be a very anti-Western medication person. Now that I’ve spent some time as a teacher, however, I love Ritalin and Adderall. Many’s the day I lived in fear that this or that child would not take his/her medication that morning. I respect parents who want to try something different for their children, but it sure does make life chaotic in the classroom when somebody’s frontal lobe is not on. And now that my mother has gone from being a delightful good old girl to a person who shows up unannounced and ruins my weekend, I think she should be required by law to go back on Prozac.

Because the demon is communicable. “Baby, she sends you into orbit,” Wyatt told me last night after patiently hearing me rant about my mother’s latest visit. Men can’t understand the way certain statements or insinuations from their mothers can stick to women like Napalm.

When my mom was on Prozac, she always called before she came by. She was fun. I liked taking her places and introducing her to my friends. But now, it’s almost as if she’s grown radar to detect the times when Wyatt and I least need visitors, and she executes a pop-in. Her social skills are suffering. At a cookout here it came up in conversation that one of the people in attendance was from Columbia. My mother asked the woman if any of her relatives had been shot in the drug war. When I told her that I’d found a buyer for my condo, which I considered good news because I had moved in with my husband and no longer needed it and its mortgage payment every month, she started to sniffle and called the news sad.

I thought my mom had exorcised all her demons during the time that she was medicated because she went to great lengths to do so. I’m all about non-pharmaceutical, alternative therapy methods (like EdxTM, Energy Medicine, EMDR, and Emotional Freedom Techniques). I believe they’ve helped me a lot, and assumed they had helped her too. But the way my mom has reverted fills me with dismay – maybe it was all snake oil after all. Sunday she really went to my ass right after I’d given her a Reflexology treatment and did a Blue Medicine Buddha visualization for her.

I feel partly to blame for my mother’s deteriorating mental health. Earlier this year I quit my full-time teaching job and began temping. Apparently she believes I am not worried enough about my situation, and she wants to worry about it for me and encourage me to worry more. What she’s worked up about most recently is, she wants me to take another teaching job. One that’s about a 45 minute drive away for me, and would put me in close proximity to her home. I would also be working with her best friend, if I took said job. In other words, I might as well just crawl back into the womb. Is anybody else about to have an anxiety attack thinking about those conditions?

I am scared about the future, but getting more scared almost never makes scared people make better decisions. Hysteria is not a good place to be making decisions from. But hysteria always wants to be surrounded by more hysteria.

I’m really disappointed about the fact that my mother’s ability to be cool was so dependent upon a drug created and marketed by a pharmaceutical company. I’m also disappointed that I haven’t found alternative treatments for my own asthma – when I was working full time I didn’t have time to visit an acupuncturist or cook all the time to support a diet free of all my food intolerances, and now I can’t afford to.

Maybe I should just go back to work in the school system, eat carb and sugar-laden cafeteria food every day, forget about herbal remedies and Permaculture, decide that Yoga and Belly Dancing are foolish wastes of my time, get on some Prozac myself and watch TV until bedtime every night.

But I’ll be damned if I do. I guess I have to respect my mother’s choices too.
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The crepe myrtle blossoms at Ham's Lakeside are looking good, aren't they?

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