Blowing Hot and Cold

There was a little girl and she had a little curl
right in the middle of her forehead
and when she was good, she was very, very good
and when she was bad, she was horrid.

This rhyme came up on Cate's blog a few days ago. Wow. The feelings and memories that brought up. I had to get up from the computer for a little bit to get my equilibrium back.

To me, that rhyme has always symbolized my father. He's bipolar, but we didn't know that until after I was grown up and had left home. No, to me that rhyme meant Daddy because he was so unpredictable. You never knew what to expect from him, except that it was probably going to be bad.

Men who are bipolar tend to manifest the illness differently from women who are bipolar. Woman, as I understand it, tend to show more of the classic signs of the illness, the mood swings, the manic behavior. Men, on the other hand, tend to be angry. Dad has definitely always been that.

My father is an amazingly intelligent man, a genius. He took the Mensa test on a whim one time and was invited to join. He turned down the invitation, but he's always been proud that he could have joined if he wanted to.

My father taught me to love the fine arts. He took me to concerts and ballets, kept our home full of classical music, did oil paintings and bought paintings from other artists to hang around our home. He taught me to love the outdoors. We'd go hiking and camping as a family all the time. We lived in Oregon when I was young and would hike up by Multnomah Falls every few weeks. He climbed Mt. Rainier and skied down it again. He and my mother honeymooned at Spirit Lake on Mt. St. Helens. He knew how to throw a knife and catch a fish. Everywhere we lived he'd plant trees all over the property. He was wonderful and I adored him. He was my hero.

That was the good daddy, the daddy that I wanted to hang around all the time. Usually, though, who we had to deal with was the bad daddy, the scary daddy. This daddy threw things and hit you when you weren't looking. He couldn't keep a job, so we didn't have insurance, and couldn't go to the doctor when we got sick. I learned from that daddy to be wary every time someone walks through the front door, trying to gauge their mood and danger level. I learned to keep my back to the wall, to be hypervigilant. I learned to be afraid. I left home 20 years ago, but I still get a tight ball of fear in my stomach when my father calls.

My greatest fear is turning into my father. Bipolar disorder is hereditary. Since two of my siblings are bipolar I watch myself compulsively for signs of mental illness. The older I get, the better I feel, the more I can relax. I'm overly concerned about it, I know. I'm not really safe from developing bipolar disorder for another 10 years, but it's unlikely at this point, anyway. My father and siblings were all bipolar from their childhood.

I learned recently that growing up with a mentally ill parent is considered to fall into its own category of problems. I ran across a group in Australia, the National Network of Adult and Adolescent Children who have a Mentally Ill Parent/s. Vic. Inc. Australia, but have never found anything similar in America. That's too bad. Having a mentally ill parent makes your entire childhood an alien planet. That's what I used to feel like in fact, an alien, watching humans to try to understand how I was supposed to act. It's hard to learn how to be normal from a mentally ill parent. It would have been nice to know that I wasn't alone in feeling that way.