19th Nervous Breakdown

I always liked that odd Stones song, but not for any normal reason.

When you were a child you were treated kind

But you were never brought up right

You were always spoiled with a thousand toys but still you cried all night

Your mother who neglected you owes a million dollars tax

And your father's still perfecting ways of making sealing wax

You better stop, look around

Here it comes

Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown

Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown

Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown

I was always treated kindly, but I’m not sure what it means to be brought up right. Kindness should be enough, but maybe too much kindness sort of flattens you out, leaves you less able to get through life. We were too poor for me to have a thousand toys, but I can see now that I had more than were good for me. Instead, I should have been made to wash the dishes more often or to put away all the toys I didn’t need.

Mom never neglected me, but she lost part of her focus when Grandma died. She tried, but never quite came around again. However, she didn’t owe a million dollars and never could have counted that high. As for my father, his train left the station way ahead of time and he never had anything to do with sealing wax. That was for closing off the jars of homemade jam and he never made any of that. His work was with much weightier and dirtier things. He was never absent, until he got too sick to stick around.

Maybe those are reasons for all the nervous breakdowns. What do I know?

I do know 19 was a false number. My house wore it proudly, but it wasn’t the real address where we lived. Rumor had it the reason it was on the porch pillar - yes, it was a real pillar - to the left of the steps was that it was the nineteenth house built in my town. A myth to believe in, but not likely true. Maybe that caused one of the breakdowns. I liked the number, though, because it had survived the renumbering of the houses on the street. That seemed important to me as a little girl, and it still does.

Then there was the 19 which was my age when my father left. I resented that because 19 belonged to the house, to the family, and he took it with him. For years I refused to accept that, refused to turn 20, so every year when another birthday came around, I announced to people that I was 19. After a while people stopped believing me, although I never stopped insisting, even long after my hair had turned completely white.

To make up for the loss of the house 19 and the father, I decided to get married. It was obvious what day that was going to happen, although the month and year weren’t quite clear. It turned out to be in November, which is the cruelest month, far crueler than April, despite T.S Eliot’s effort to make it otherwise. Anyway, I’m not going to tell you anything about the marriage, which never ended, because it’s nobody’s business. It happened and it was a good decision. Along the way there were a few nervous breakdowns, but nothing more serious than that.

But if you think I’m through with either the breakdowns or the number 19, you’re mistaken. You can easily figure out how many cats I’ve had in my life. How many countries I’ve visited. How many languages I’ve studied. (Not learned fluently, just studied.) How many stories I’ve read. What my favorite temperature is, in Celsius. How many times I’ve swum in Lake Erie and how many largemouth bass I’ve caught and kept.

You can’t be expected to know how many times I’ve burned the burgers in a carefully watched pan or how many times I’ve jaywalked, but you can probably guess. Then there’s the number of times I’ve raised my hand in class and given the wrong answer. Or the number of excuses I’ve used to explain why I didn’t finish the homework assignment on time. You certainly can’t guess how many years it took me to finish my undergraduate degree in speech therapy or how many trips I made to clean out that dumb house with the wrong number after my mother finished neglecting me completely.

Now we are down the final items that are on the list of causes of so many breakdowns. Not to be overlooked is the aforementioned Stones song with which I became obsessed to the point where I’d sing it or dance to it for 19 hours straight until I’d collapse on the couch, hating my obsession and myself for having it. Another cause that can’t be overlooked is my passion for writing haikus with 2 extra syllables, knowing as I did it that I was breaking the rules. For this sin of creating illegitimate poetic forms, I tried to pray for forgiveness but never felt I achieved it. I kept trying, but the last time, number 20, I broke down an wept ferociously, knowing I had failed.

I was never going to be able to get off that dime that was never worth 10 cents and always amounted to 19. The numbers were always going to be off, but perhaps that was because I was born on the wrong day. You don’t need to know what day that was, but I will tell you it was 19 o’clock, which is basically another way of saying 7 in the evening, just in time for visiting hours. (No, I’m not kidding. 7 o’clock. Which is 19 o’clock and by now you must know where I’m heading with all this…)

I’m in a room. There are white sheets and pillowcases. The bed should be comfortable but it’s not. I’m not comfortable and am desperate to get out of here. My chances don’t look very good, though. They’ve just told me how long I have to stay and I knew all the time how long that would be. It might be days or months, maybe years, but it’ll be 19 of them. Pray for me, maybe.