Escape to Malibu: Part 14

Five weeks I endured there. Five weeks I watched for spring & walked & talked & took the pills they told me to take. I obeyed all the rules. I visited with my children & parents & a neighbor who had had her first baby the same week I had Adelaide. Relatives sent flowers & we ate lobster salad in the dining room on Fridays. Art Carney & Judy Garland had flipped out here. It was a high class looney bin.

Of course, it was all an elaborate white rat's obstacle course, a Skinner's exercise, a challenge of operant conditioning. If you "behaved" for a certain number of days you no longer had to be locked up. You could move into the main lodge which was more like a frat or sorority house as it had a massive stone fireplace in the living room along with a piano & pool table, & housed the kitchen & dining room.

When you were close to leaving you earned the right to carry your own key to your own room in another building which was like having your own apartment.

Finally, once the limit of your insurance coverage was reached, you were "cured" & let loose. Thank you Blue Cross/Blue Shield Master Medical Plan of Massachusetts. I enjoyed your lobster salad days.

There was group therapy & private therapy & trips bowling & to the movies. One sadisic attendant, as I became more rested & together suggested I see "The Fog" which terrified me, about a little girl who looked just like me as a child who got lost in the fog one evening & ran into all kinds of evil forces & demons & dragons. It was the same bespectacled sadist that greeted me initially & man-handled me into the "isolation room".

My former tenants had come to visit me when first in the Annex. Cara later confided, during my separation, that she & Robert had tried without avail to talk Bernie out of it all. That she had spent sleepless nights worrying over my plight, haunted by my personage in the Annex. When the divorce came down, they were my friends. Their invisible unspoken empathy sustained me. I felt their unconditional love.

Mother Nature too, was with me. As spring gently sprang & the grass grew greener & baby bunnies appeared on the lawn at dawn my hope was buoyed. I wrote poetry as I was able to guide my hand beyond the influence of the drugs & played with my babies when they let me.

Adelaide had a terrible diaper rash from the formula they had switched her to, & I suffered for days until the milk receded & reabsorbed in its ducts, but we SURVIVED We all lived, & endured.

Joshua went least affected by it all. He is a gregarious, magnanimous child & adapts easily to a variety of caretakers. His first year I am convinced is largely responsible for this.

Adelaide on the other hand was most short-changed. She missed the six months of boob-feeding her brother got. She suffered even as her mother did the torment of separation. Yet through trial we are made perfect.

Baptisms of fire, of the Holy Spirit.

She was saved by my blessed, long-suffering mother-in-law, Joan. Joan, the wife of a Congregational minister who flatly stated he never loved her but needed a wife, was she interested? Joan who martyred herself in service to her largely ungrateful family for the prime of her years because she believed & believes the only purpose in life is to learn how to love & lives this example. Joan, who unstintingly gave her maternal self over to the care & nurture of her granddaughter. Lord the lessons You taught us that spring. We endured. We survived. And later, we even thrived.