THE TREE SHALL BE KNOWN BY ITS FRUIT (On the 10th Anniversary of My Mother's Passing)
I would say that my mother began to lose her mind shortly after the millennium, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. Her mental processes had never conformed to standard measures of normality; during my childhood she functioned with very little sleep, a condition that allowed her to raise four daughters while working full-time and compensating for a husband who managed his time in order that he spend almost none of it employed. Having been born "hypomanic," the diagnosis made by a psychiatrist once the court ordered her to live with me, also meant that my mother existed as a solipsism, free of constraints or expectations placed upon her by the outside world, and so confident in her decisions that she lived permanently in a worry-free zone. "Tomorrow is another day," she would say when “today” had wrecked on a reef and there were no survivors. (Scarlett O'Hara is the fictional embodiment of hypomania, obviously.) Her sternest criticism of me was that I wa
