The Law of Loving Others by Kate Axelrod Read Free Book Online Page A

guess,” I said.
    â€œOkay, well, do you have any questions?”
    â€œCan you turn off the radio? Or change the station or something? What
is
that?” There was a hostility in my voice that I hadn’t shown to my father in years, since middle school, maybe.
    â€œSorry, sweetie.” He pushed in the dial. “So, what do you want to know exactly?”
    â€œI don’t know! I don’t even understand how we’re having this conversation. I mean, everything was totally normal until three days ago, and now you’re acting like I’ve been living on another planet this whole time. I just really don’t understand what’s going on.”
    â€œLook, Mom’s had some mental health issues. She’d been fine for so long. You know she’s been in therapy.”
    â€œEveryone is in therapy! That’s not a thing.” I felt like a child, here with him in the car, as if my year and a half away at school had meant nothing, the independence and sophistication that I imagined I’d been nurturing were meaningless, gone. But I couldn’t help it, didn’t want to help it.
    â€œI know, just listen to me.” My father pressed the tips of his fingers against the steering wheel, leaving momentary indentations in the leather. “She’s been in therapy and on medication for many years. And every so often this happens, every so often there’s a little break. She just needs to get stabilized again and maybe change her medication a bit and find a good . . . a good combination.”
    â€œHow is it possible that I’ve
never
known about any of this? That just seems crazy.” Was this part of the reason why my parents had been so invested in me going to boarding school? Had my mother been steadily losing her mind for the past couple of years and they’d wanted me out? To protect me from witnessing exactly what was happening right now?
    â€œLook, there hasn’t been anything that you’ve needed to know. She hasn’t been hospitalized since you were really little. Everything has been fine for many, many years. She’s been stable for over a decade!” My father’s voice cracked. There it was—the tiniest bit of grief. Sorrow. I had been pressing him but I’d pressed too hard.
    â€œAnd what was it before that? Before she was stable, what was wrong with her?”
    â€œSchizophrenia.”
    It had begun to snow. I felt grateful for the easy distraction—and so I just stared ahead, focused my eyes on the flakes as they landed on the windshield and dripped down the glass.
    â€œShe was first diagnosed when the two of us were seniors at Tufts,” my father said. “We’d already been together for two years . . . She was struggling a lot, but she was somehow able to keep things together, and then she went to the hospital right after graduation. She was there for a long time. A month or so. It was a hard time, but slowly things got better, you know? The drugs weren’t as good then, but they worked with some heavy side effects. This was when we were living in Boston. She got a job with a small newspaper in Brookline and after a couple of years things seemed totally back to normal. We knew it was there, this thing lurking behind both of us, but we were happy. She was healthy. And we got married in the fall, and then we waited another few years to make sure that things were fine, and really they were. And we consulted with lots of doctors to make sure that it would be okay to have you. All of them said the same thing: that if she was closely monitored and went off her medication for a little bit, but stayed in therapy, in a supportive environment, low stress, things would be okay. And they were!”
    â€œAnd then?”
    â€œThis is a lot to take in and a lot to talk about,” my father said. “Maybe we should just go home and keep talking in the morning?” He scratched gently at