Borderline Families

I was cleaning out the kids’ bathroom cabinet yesterday and I ran across a roll-on tube of perfume. It stopped me dead in my tracts.

At the beginning of August, 2007, my daughter and I arrived in Houston, Texas, in order for her to be admitted to the Menninger Clinic. We had been told by the staff at the residential community from where she had just been booted that that she would need a more appropriate wardrobe for her stay in Houston. A robe and more concealing clothing.

We shopped at a downtown mall. We were nervous and unsure of ourselves, holding up pieces, nodding and cringing. Every sales clerks who asked if we wanted help, brought home the fact that this was an uncomfortable situation – the necessity of scrutinizing each item through the lens of psychiatric institutional care.

My stomach was in knots while my daughter deliberated. She unpacked and repacked repeatedly on Saturday and Sunday. By Monday morning, she was wasted by anxiety. I had barely slept.

The Menninger Clinic is beautiful, pristine, in fact. A tall wrought iron fence and overhanging trees obscured the parking area from a busy commercial road. We pulled into a shady spot facing the entrance and rolled down the windows. The chirping of songbirds and the drone of insects filled the car. The lawns and flower beds next to the walkways were edged by a meticulously kept border. The pavement and beds of red flowers, deep green foliage and black earth were wet, hosed down and scrubbed for the new day. The morning air, already thick with humidity mingled with the car’s air-conditioning. The sun was powerful at 10 AM, beating hard through the canopy of trees overhead.

I was scared. I felt untethered to the world outside of my daughter and me. I had pulled the fraying threads that held us to one another tightly against my chest and clung fast all weekend. But, I knew that my daughter would stay here without me and I would go back to Minnesota alone.

A psychiatric facility can look very deceiving from the outside. Menninger was misleading from all perspectives. This neat, controlled environment was a sham. But, at that time in our lives, we were desperate to believe the “experts” in the psychiatric industry. This orderly, groomed setting would become a frightening mask in no time. Until then, I was at their mercy.

Sitting in the car, I was concerned with how the separation would happen. Not just for her, but for me as well. Would I be able to unhook myself and leave my daughter behind? There had been too many heart-racing moments, too many near-catastrophes leading up to this moment. My instinct to protect her was in overdrive. Would our parting be abrupt and formal? Would that be easier for my daughter? Like in pre-school when the teacher advised me to just leave, no matter that she was crying her eyes out, clinging to my legs and pleading to return home with me.

I wanted to protect her and I had to keep it together. I just wanted to be ready. My daughter’s separation anxiety lasted one day when she was three. But, she had had such a difficult time this weekend, asking questions while trying to get ready that I had no answers for.

“What will I do there all day?” I didn’t know.

“Who will be there?” Probably people just like you.

“Will there be a Nurse Ratched?” (Hint of a smile.) No, she is a movie character.

But, of course, I wondered, too, about all her questions and more. How would they help her? How long would it take? Then what?

Either I had to turn the car back on to cool us off or we had to go inside.

“Ready?”

“No.”

“We’ll leave your bags in the car and come back for them later. Let’s go in.”

We climbed out and were hit by an even denser wall of damp air. It seemed that no oxygen accompanied the moisture entering my lungs. Stay strong, I told myself as I felt like I was suffocating. All foot traffic entering the clinic was channeled through the main doors at the center of the administration building. The whole single-story complex of unattached buildings was hidden from the parking lot and surrounding roads by thick shrubs and overhanging trees. Concealed within that hedge was another fence and security gates that contained the 14 acres of the hospital’s campus.

There was a twenty degree difference in temperature as we pushed through the first set of double doors. A woman in an office with a sliding glass window noticed us before I found the doorbell and she buzzed us in. I wondered if I would ever get used to leaving my daughter locked in. Another drop of twenty degrees sent the air temperature to somewhere in the 50’s. I shivered and stood in front of the window. The woman was wearing a sweater but rubbed her arms.

“It is cold in here today. The warmer it is outside, the colder it is in here. What is your name?”

The intake process took nearly all day. There was an uncomfortable anticipation heading in and out of buildings as my skin went from goose flesh to sweating in an instant.  I was on high-alert all day anticipating being physically uncomfortable. Mentally, I was screaming at the top of my lungs, “NO, This is NOT happening.”

Towards the end of the day, two attendants lugged my daughter’s bags into her room and began to go through each piece of clothing. They dug their hands into every pocket. They squeezed all the seams of every item through their fingers, prodding and picking at the thickest parts trying to find and dislodge contraband. The labels on her hair and body potions were scrutinized. Anything with alcohol was set aside.

It was at that point that I slid a roll-on jasmine-scented perfume bottle behind a stack of books on her desk.

I don’t know why I did it. I suppose it was in solidarity with my daughter who I knew would do nothing but dab a little of the prohibited stuff on and feel like a renegade. I was reacting to the dehumanizing treatment. I would, a couple of hospitals down the line, adhere to the rules better ; I was eventually beaten down.

The room was bigger than other hospital rooms she had been in. But, it had the same institutional feel; a sheet of tin over the sink in the bathroom stood in for a mirror and blocky wooden furniture lined the walls. Her desk had a locked drawer but it didn’t work and maintenance was called.

I was asked to leave. Although the well-tended watchful atmosphere encouraged me to believe that my daughter was in good hands, the truth was that it was all just a well-oiled machine and nothing, not my daughter’s recalcitrant behavior, not my asking too many questions, not even me at the end of her stay pleading that they address her escalating anxiety, nothing was going to get in its way. They stripped her of benzodiazepines and left her in pain and ignored her withdrawal and then asked her to leave – insisting that we were NOT to bring her home but that we had to choose another facility for further treatment.

The Menninger Clinic “accepted” a patient, pushed them through their series of classes, and sent them on their way.  In our estimation, she left worse than when she entered. This was echoed time and again from other parents of young adults attending at the same time as our daughter.

When everyone left my daughter’s room, she flopped across the narrow bed. I laid sideways across her and hugged her hard. I whispered fiercely into her ear that I loved her.

I walked out through the main room where the changing of the guard was taking place. The day staff was heading home and the evening staff was getting the lowdown on what was going on in the unit. Kids were sitting in front of the TV, more kids were outside smoking in the gazebo and a few were standing in the middle of the room, looking like they were waiting for something. Everyone was watching me. A big African American man with an affectionate smile unlocked the door for me.

He looked me in the eye and said, “She’ll be just fine. Go and take a break. You deserve it.” He must have read the unmitigated grief that had taken over. I felt like falling into his arms and crying. I smiled back up to him and said that I hoped so, feeling all the while that I wasn’t sure that I was doing the right thing. I threaded my way back along the covered paths to the administration building. Another freezing trek through the main building and I was back where we started in the morning, sitting in my hot car, trying to breathe.

The perfume was a memory of her life – before this journey we took looking for relief began. It meant something to me then.

Now, years later, it has been abandoned in her childhood bathroom. I started laughing when I found it, relieved that it hadn’t been confiscated by the staff at the Menninger Clinic.

Kris Uncategorized benzodiazepine withdrawal, Menninger Clinic, psychiatric hospitals