1980s to present, California and New York

By Jane Dover

Lily has told me that I can tell her story. Finally. My daughter has said it is OK to write it down. To share the truth of her battle with depression. Because it might help someone.

Where to begin? There was the afternoon when she was 11 years old, and she collapsed on the kitchen floor, sobbing.

“Mommy, I don’t know what’s wrong. Take me to the hospital. Please. Take me to the hospital.”

And gently, as if she might break if I touched her or held her too close, I helped her out to the car. Gave her a cool washcloth to use on her tear-streaked face. Got on the highway and drove carefully, ready to burst into sobs myself, so aware of her fragility, so aware of my responsibility. Desperate to keep her safe.

As she calmed down, I explained what would happen when we got to the emergency room. They may want to keep you there, I said. But they will help you.

I could hear her breathing become easier. I watched her face as we approached the hospital. I would do whatever she wanted. Whatever made her feel safe.

“Take me home, Mommy,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I’ll stay with you. I won’t leave you.”

“No. I feel better. I just want to go home.”

And so we did. She seemed soothed by the fact that she did have some control. That if she asked, I would take her to the hospital. That was comfort enough.

We spent the rest of the afternoon together on the couch with a quilt, and I watched her as she watched a favorite video.

This was not the first sign. It wasn’t the first time she lost control and went into a place so dark and far away that I feared that she would never find her way back out to the light.

I recall an afternoon driving on the freeway, headed home from school. She was about 10. She looked over at me, her eyes big, an expression of utter distress on her face. Tears began to fall.

“I don’t even know why, Mommy, but it’s all I can do not to open the car door and throw myself out.”

I had to steady my hands on the wheel as I took the next exit. Pulled off to the side of the road. Tried to breathe.

I attempted to bundle her in my arms, but it did nothing to comfort her.

Then she looked at me again, tears streaming. “I would never do it, Mommy,” she said. “I promise.”

The first call I made was to our family doctor. An overall checkup was done. Lily was healthy. Nothing physically wrong. Therapists were recommended, and we made an appointment with one, a lovely woman who had a thriving practice working with kids.

Lily refused to get out of the car when we arrived at her office. But deals were struck, and she went in.

When I returned an hour later, Lily was smiling. “That was great,” she said. “I want to come back.”

A few weeks later, she told me she no longer wanted to go. She said the therapist kept blaming me for Lily’s depression. Not me, exactly, but the fact that I had just finished treatment for cancer.

My daughter was certain that my cancer was not causing her depression. She resented being told it was about me. She knew these feelings were more organic than that. They were a part of her.

I began to make phone calls, trying to find someone else who might help. A doctor was recommended. A psychiatrist. A kind, gentle man who had a daughter about Lily’s age.

Lily was resistant. Again, deals were made. An appointment was set up. He welcomed us both into his office.

“Tell me about when Lily was a baby. When she was very young.”

She was never an easy sleeper, I explained. Never napped. Didn’t drop off blissfully in her car seat. When left with a babysitter, she was more likely to be awake than the babysitter when Lily’s father and I would return home.

And she was so intense. No ease about her when it came to trying new things. No running ahead without thinking. She worried about anything and everything.

The doctor was gentle with his questioning, and a pattern he recognized emerged.

He showed us both some pictures of brains that had been scanned. Beautiful colors, reds and blues and pinks. He showed us the difference between the two images. Explained the chemical difference between them.

The one on the right, he told us, showed signs of a chemical imbalance. This, he said, is what depression looks like. And from the symptoms Lily was able to describe, this is what he believed was wrong.

There medications and therapy for depression, he told her.

And we began the journey.

I can remember a few weeks later hearing laughter coming from Lily’s room. Girls were in there with her. Giggling overflowed. It spilled out the door and down the narrow hallway, right into our room, and Michael and I cried.

That sound had been absent for so long that we had forgotten what it was. That bright, clear, tinkling sound, finer than any crystal.

Lily had been on medication for only a short time, and she was lighter. So at ease. Not hyped up or silly, just balanced. She could recognize happiness. Feel it. Share it. And I thought we were over it. That the worst was past.

But as Lily entered her teens, she rebelled against therapy. Refused to go sit and talk. Began to stop taking her medication. She would enter that dark cave and refuse to come out.

She was smart enough and was in control enough to make it through a day at school. Knew to be polite to her teachers. Always did her work well and on time.

And then, emotionally maxed out and exhausted, she returned home to her room. Her cave.

We want to protect our children. We want our friends and family to think well of them. To love them as we do. So we hide what we are dealing with. Because we also blame ourselves. And we fear that they won’t understand the illness.

And because I miss her and want to be with her, I find myself joining her in her darkness.

We spend a Christmas Eve sitting out in the car in front of our friend’s house. Lily is crying. She cannot go in, she says. She doesn’t know what to say to anyone.

Then one day, I write her a letter. I tell her I can’t be with her there in that dark place. That she will have to reside there on her own. That I need to be in the sun. That I’ll be waiting there for her when she wants to join me.

She tells me it’s a good letter. But nothing happens. And then one day, she decides to begin taking her medication again.

For a while, all is well.

But teenagers resent parental control. The pills represent all she hates. No matter how often we compare what she has to her friend who is diabetic, or to her friend with asthma, it makes no difference to her.

So off she goes again.

Last fall, Lily went away to college. She packed up her pills along with everything else she might need. But then she chose not to take them.

She developed coping skills she should be proud of. Maintained good grades. Auditioned for a part in the school play and got it. Performed at a level of perfection I am in awe of.

Lily has been drawn to the stage and acting since she was just 5 or 6. She is able to become someone else for a while. It touches something in her. Makes her happier than anything else. But then the curtain comes down. The show is over.

She returned home for the summer, and with her came the darkness. Her pills sat on the kitchen counter, untouched.

Again, we proposed that she take them. And one day, she began to.

Once again, Lily is back. The Lily I know to always be in there. Deep beneath the surface, struggling to rise to the top.

I read books. Magazine articles. But so far, not one has told me how to convince your grown child to continue on with the pill taking. To make threats of any kind when they are so depressed is frightening. You and she are held hostage to images too horrible to contemplate.

You want her alive. You want her happy. You will settle for alive if you can’t have the happy. You are thrilled that she hasn’t chosen to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs like some of her friends have. You know kids who have not survived to go off to college. To begin their adult lives.

So you just thank God that she has decided once again to try.

I asked Lily the other day if she is noticing a difference in her mood. In the past, she has always denied it. But this time, she said yes. She does feel different. I believe this is progress.

I’m sitting here now at my desk. Lily just came in the room. She looks soft. As if the hard edge of her life has been smoothed just a bit. A weight lifted.

She is wearing her new (to her) zebra print coat found at a vintage shop in LA, a black wool hat, and black high heels.

“I’m playing dress-up,” she states, smiling.

She is getting ready to move to New York, where she will study acting at a wonderful school.

“Why,” I ask her, “did you start taking the pills again?”

“Because I don’t want to feel like I might kill myself when I live alone in New York,” she replies.

She turns and looks at her reflection in the mirror. Her newly red hair brushes against her cheek.

“Do you think you will stay on them?” I ask her, hardly daring to exhale.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Probably not.”

“Why?” I whisper.

“Because sometimes I need to feel what’s real. Who I really am,” she says.

Then retreats to her room. But she leaves her door open, and the music she is playing right now, this moment, is lovely to my ears.

Jane Dover is a freelance writer living in Central California. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, January 28th, 2008 | Email This Post

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