Page 74 of My Unfinished Heart

But more than that, I know I’ll never be able to put him back together.

I wasn’t raised that way.

THIRTEEN

Terrycloth Mom

This is a children's story.

Once upon a time on a perfect fall day when I was in third grade, I fell asleep in school. Not for the first time. Like usual, I was taken to the nurse’s office where they gave me an extra dose of my awake medicine. As I dutifully swallowed, I heard a girl throwing up in the bathroom.

Most people don’t know what it’s like to be truly sleep deprived. The word tired doesn’t begin to encompass the way thoughts seem to jiggle like Jell-O in your head, or the way light scratches at your eyeballs, or the way sounds penetrate and bounce around your skull and make you think some really weird, jiggly thoughts.

But genius is born of a certain madness they say, and on rare occasions, a solid thought would form and take over. My mad brain would latch onto random things and not let go. That day, the need for sleep overwhelmed me like a compulsion. I would sleep no matter the consequences. If sleep was good and right, then the pill was bad and wrong.

The puking girl gave me my best idea ever.

When she came out, I went into the bathroom. I thought of the bitter pill I swallowed. I thought hard about it. I pictured it there, lodged in my throat, making me gag until the imagined taste of it overwhelmed me. I threw it up.

I showed the evidence of my stomach contents to the nurse. She gave me a cool rag, but instead of forcing another pill on me, she showed mercy and laid me down. She tucked me in and let me sleep. It was the best sleep. It was the nap that saved my life.

When I woke up, my mother was pinching my nose shut. Adrenaline shot through me—cold like fear. Laughing playfully and giving my nose a gentler squeeze, she said to the nurse, “It’s a game we play.” She moved like she was about to caress my face, and I knocked her hand away. I sat up, distancing myself. She only ever touched me in front of other people, and it made me angry because her touch was a lie like everything else about her was a lie.

I sat up and looked at the sympathetic nurse’s face—the woman who’d let me sleep. I spoke in front of my mother for the first time in three years. “She keeps me awake. The medicine is poison.”

The nurse startled at the sound of my small, raspy voice.

My mother turned to me, all shock and amazement. “He’s confused, sleepy boy. Off to the doctor again, I’m afraid. I’m exhausted, too, you know?” She said that last part mainly to the nurse, though she was facing me when she spoke.

In the car, she fumed. How dare you. Humiliating. Sick. Twisted. Pathetic excuse for a little boy. We’ll straighten you out once and for all. “You’re talking now? Great. Tell me why you’re hell bent on ruining my life.”

Those words were a mistake, because they gave me an even more solid idea. “Okay, Mommy. I’ll tell you everything when we get to the doctor.”

“We’ll see about that.”

And I thought to myself, I know something you don’t know.

Everything I know about my early childhood I learned in child psychiatrists’ offices as my mother wept and begged and made herself the ultimate martyr for the cause of mothering a special needs child.

I learned I was a preemie, and had been a poor feeder as an infant. I’d had to be tube fed. I learned I never slept, not even as a baby, and had been subjected to countless brain scans at numerous facilities over many years. I learned my mother was hospitalized for suicidal thoughts more than once.

The story was familiar. This was not the first child psychiatrist’s office I’d ever been in, or the twentieth. I’d heard all my mother’s stories before. Many, many people had. She loved to share her suffering. She spoke about my sleepless nights and my narcoleptic days. My abnormal circadian rhythms. My brain disorder. She left something out, though.

The new psychiatrist handed my mother a box of tissues, and she took them with wide, grateful eyes.

“Sounds like you’ve had a rough go of it,” the doctor said so sympathetically, and I remember being jealous. Why does she get the sympathy when I have to take the pills?

It occurred to me that day, in a way it hadn’t ever before—again, I credit the nap—that the doctor wasn’t asking me anything. I thought we were here because of me. I thought I was the one who needed help. The wheels in my mind were suddenly unstoppable. Slowly, I raised my hand like they told us to in school if we had something we needed to say.

The doctor turned to me with a welcoming expression on her face. “Yes, Archer?”

“I’m tired.”

“That’s why we’re here, darling,” my mom said. “We’re all tired.”

“Then why won’t you let me sleep?”

She sighed, exasperated, and attempted to share a knowing look with the doctor.