Madness invades you slowly…quietly. It circles you and finds that chink in your mental armor where it can enter and take up valuable space. Of course, sometimes, things like trauma or witnessing something that is more than you can take, will open the door wide for madness to just move in and sometimes never leave. But usually, it lurks in dark corners and waits…it watches… until it sees you are lost, sees you begging God for mercy. Then it introduces itself, saying it will show you a way out. And if you believe it, it will smile and say “alright then” and present you his arm. When you think you’re going to be just fine, it will take you, spin you out of control and send you crashing into the walls. And you will think it really did help you find a way out.
Madness was clumsy in the way it courted my mother. It was in a hurry to possess her before we noticed, so it cut corners. At first, it was so subtle and charming; we thought Mom was just being a character. Playful and laughing, it was like having another kid in our house. When she could actually relax her need to control, she could be fun. We thought she was finally letting go and enjoying herself. The madness could have worked with that and kept us quiet for a long time. But it got greedy.
It began to show her how small, simple situations could be manipulated into monstrous perceptions. Dad had bought some innocuous thing and Madness said to her “he is wasteful. It’s like he’s flushing money down the toilet.” Her mind saw this and she thought it must be true. So she took some money and flushed it down the toilet, to prove a point. It caused a flood and that’s how Dad found out. The question was how many times had she done this before she was caught.
Her playfulness turned into something dark. She constantly walked circles around the kitchen table. The madness showed her pictures of things, which she’d try to move… or of people she talked to. It wasn’t fun anymore; it was scary. She stopped feeding us and it fell to me to care of my brothers and sister. I was only 13. My sister, who is the youngest, was 3. When Dad came home from work, I had a list of things she’d done. He was so uncomfortable, he said very little. I took it as a sign that he didn’t want to know about it. He did; it’s just that he had no idea, either, what was wrong. No one had ever gone mad before so we had no blueprint to follow.
At some point Dad woke up and decided to call the doctor. He was told to take her to the hospital. He sent us to my auntie’s house and got her ready. The Madness then told her he was trying to control her, cage her forever. She went berserk. It took Dad and three other men to get her there. She kicked and screamed, clawed and scratched. They told us kids she’d had a nervous breakdown. She would come back when she was well again. She was in the hospital resting. I was the only one who knew she was in the psych ward. The Madness had completely seduced her in ways that we could never know, and held on to her so tight, she was given shock treatments and ice baths to try and break its clammy grip.
Next -> Second Time Around
Tags: blueprints, flushing money down the toilet, ice bath, seduction, shock treatment