(Sunday morning, East Coast Time)

As I traded phone calls back and forth with my brother (here), my aunt (there), and my mother (there), I reflected on the fact that this is just too damned hard right now. And, that maybe I precipitated her mania? by not just keeping my damned mouth shut during her visit. By the time I talked to her this past Thursday, she was excitedly complaining to me about the internal inconsistencies in The Golden Compass series, which I’d lent her to read on the plane flight home. Something about how Lyra already knew how to do her hair in the first book, so why was she learning all over again in the second? Hoo-whee.

When I talked to her on Friday night, she was excited to tell me about how she’d finally been able to get out some thoughts about a theology based on the Holy Spirit, and not on God the Father or Christ the Son. From a lecture she gave 30 years ago, back when she was teaching at divinity school. “And I was considered quite one of the more brilliant up-and-coming feminist theologians.” Nah, obsession with the past and inflated ego are not signs of mania.

“Why is it, that whenever I finally have a breakthrough in the creative process, you people think I am crazy?” Well, let’s see, the giggling every minute or so might have tipped me off. And . . . “whenever?” This is only her second manic episode. She was very irritable with me during the three phone calls we had, and was refusing to go to the hospital over the weekend. She was sure she wasn’t manic. “This is different.” Telling her that sure, creativity and happiness are nice, but these were precursors to delusion and confusion, like last time, and that you have to stop it before it starts, or it’s longer and worse, wasn’t getting me anywhere. So the third time I spoke with her, after she told me “I did NOT agree to go tomorrow, I will NOT go anywhere until MONDAY, when the doctor’s office is open again,” I just started sobbing, and begging her to please go to the hospital on Saturday, because I am three thousand miles away, and as angry as I am at her, I want her to be OK, and I just can’t handle her breaking down right now, in the middle of my own issues.

Well, when I put it that way, and appealed to her self-image as a caring mother, it was a different story. She went, the doctor and she and my aunt met, the doctor told her he thought that she was on the verge again, she grumpily accepted the ‘scrip, and then she and my aunt went out for Thai, according to my aunt, who called from the restaurant while Mom was in the bathroom. I’ve got to call her in a few hours to try and convince her to fill the prescription, and take it before she goes to see the shrink tomorrow, so that he can “prove to you that I am fine.”

(Later Sunday afternoon)
Well, that didn’t go well. She told me the doctor gave her the medications “just in case,” got increasingly more agitated, and then hung up on me after telling me that she didn’t understand why we all hate her. She then called my aunt, told her that she hated her for telling me “lies” about what had happened with the doctor, and hung up on her.

I then spoke with the covering psychiatrist, who seems a saint. I told him what’d happened and he agreed with my take, and told me he and the shrink at the hospital yesterday had rx’d Abilify, but we’re at that point where she’s not yet hospitalizable, so there’s not a lot I can do from Boston.

I don’t want to go to California. My brother’s going to try to call her in an hour and see how she’s doing.

(Early Sunday evening)
She’s been calling my aunt, yelling at her, and hanging up. My brother then called her, talked her down, and got her to agree she’s going to see the shrink tomorrow. (I’d told him the covering’d told me they were open tomorrow and she could come in whenever.)

She then called me to tell me she was sorry she’d yelled at me, but that she was still mad at my aunt, and that we were all still wrong. I said, “Good, I hope I am. Give Dr. X my cell number so he can call me and tell me so while you’re there.” “That’s a good idea!” she says.

I don’t want to go to California. I don’t want to look for documents to establish our relationship, so that I can start guardianship or commitment or representative payee proceedings. I want her absence to make my heart grow fonder.