Crazy Beats Scary. It Also Beats Indifference.
My Mother, Moses Storm's Mother, and Why, When No One Cares About You, Acting Crazy Feels Like the Way to Go
I was still very small when I noticed my mother had a hard time believing accidents happen. I mean, look, that kid whose playground ball hit her — he was standing next to the kid whose mother she’d had an argument with last spring (you think that was a coincidence?). But I was in high school before it got out of hand.
When I was 15 or so, it was suddenly clear that she’d gone from being a peculiar and ill-mannered eccentric to something else. That was the year she became the sort of person who looks up from under a furrowed brow at a traffic helicopter and says “that’s him again.”
My mother’s paranoia was suddenly intense and pervasive, and it had weird form, that didn’t seem to fit with the rest of her character. She would know — in an assured, side-glancing-with-pity-at-me-for-failing-to-connect-the-obvious-clues way — that some prominent politician or bureaucrat was madly in love with her. Unfortunately, he was incapable of coming forward. Instead, this police chief or that state senator was tracking her every move.
In those ancient days before mobile phones and caller ID, you sometimes answered your phone only to hear click as the caller hung up. For us civilians, that was a rude wrong-number. For my mother, it was him, just checking on things. My guidance counselor in high school once asked me how things were going for our family, which I foolishly mentioned to my mother. Idiot! That man lived in the same town as him. I was being used. Don’t deny it! Don’t be stupid!
This form of delusion has the official name “erotomania.” I was surprised when I learned that, because my mother and eros didn’t seem like friends, or even acquaintances. I’d never seen her go on a date, much less have any kind of romantic relationship with anyone. The fling that produced me had been a matter of a few months (my father’s version) or weeks (hers). My father had never lived with us, and there certainly hadn’t been any gentlemen (or women) calling in all the years I’d known her.
My mother’s passions were abstract. She cared most sincerely and intensely for large masses of people, not individuals. In fact, a peculiarly grandiose form of care was one of the few things my parents had in common.
Consider your own landscape of concerns. It probably includes groups of people that matter to you. Some you belong to (speaking as a parent, I think remote learning was a disaster) and some you don’t (I think migrants trying to enter Europe are being treated shamefully). Elsewhere on this map (probably closer) are individuals who matter to you — a partner, children, relatives, friends.
OK, now imagine the map with no individuals. Just big categories of people like Women, Muslims, China or the Unemployed. My father would switch to that map when he wanted to play “How Dare You Bring Up Your Thing When We’re Talking About My Thing?” “My thing” might be the threat of war here, a famine there, 32 people sentenced to hard labor for defying this dictator over here. What is you being upset about your math test, compared to that?
My mother, though, wouldn’t turn that map on and off, because that was the only one she used.
With their Great Concern for the Issues of Our Time, my parents also both had a fascination with powerful people — the ones who decide who suffers and who gets away with murder. My mother loved nothing better than a book or magazine article about how things really worked at the White House or 10 Downing Street or the Kremlin.
Where he lived, 6,000 miles away, my father, as a journalist, came to meet some of these people and move in their circles. My mother, though, saw them only through TV and reading. She’d fallen out of the life she should have had.
Once, as a young college graduate, she had worked in Washington and said hello to President Truman as he walked to work in the White House.1 But in my lifetime — because of my lifetime — she’d had to focus on making a living, and get by in obscurity. First, she was a mid-level professor (politics, of course). Then academic posts dried up and during my teen-age years she scraped by in increasingly marginal jobs, with stretches of unemployment.
The grinding force of isolated, friendless, often close to penniless single motherhood pressed down hard on her interest in politicians and power and her concern for the Great Issues of the Day. With that force she turned them into her Great Spy Story. The one where a powerful politician takes a few moments away from the Great Issues of the Day to read my mother’s mail. And send a chopper and a couple of operatives to see what she’s up to at Safeway.
I see all that now. As a surly adolescent, though, I could not get with the program. In fact, I experienced the program as an existential threat. To agree with my mother’s account of reality would separate me from, oh, everything I saw as good in the world. Friends. Teachers. Anything nice and innocent; anything that simply was what it seemed.
So I got good at treating her like someone I happened to have met on a train, and I got the hell out at age 17, and that was that. With my own early adulthood to launch and worry about, I had little trouble ignoring my fears about how all this would play out as the future unrolled.
Then, ten years later after I’d left, my mother solved the problem all by herself: She died.
In the couple of years that she contended with her cancer, I did all the caring things I was supposed to do: I found doctors, lined up benefits, visited often, sat by the bed, and so on. I was neither glad nor sad about it. It was to do, and I did it. That’s how I experience my own acts of caring: As motion, not emotion. I have internal debates about accepting a nuisance dinner invitation or agreeing to help a co-worker move. For real care, though, I just watch myself go. My conscious mind can think what it likes.
This is how I came to be spending time again with my mother. She was as full of ill-will and suspicion as ever. But now she kept her blinds closed and her movements secret only in a general better-safe-than-sorry way. She no longer thought any particular man was marshaling helicopters, phone taps, surveillance vans and what-all to track her.
As old habit dictated, we never discussed these matters. I don’t know if she looked at her past and thought, what was I thinking? or if instead she thought, funny how John spent all that time spying on me, I wonder why he stopped. She did not appear to have any regrets. She never asked me to forgive her. So I never did.
What I had wanted, anyway, wasn’t an apology. Instead I wanted her to admit that the Great Spy Story was a sham.
It did not seem too much to ask: Because of her delusions, she had quit jobs. Moved to new cities. Alienated people who might have helped her. Alienated, too, anyone who might have become a real partner. Her beliefs had made life pretty shitty, for her far more than for me. Yet she she would not let go, ever. Her belief in the Great Spy Story was more important than work, respectability, comfort or me.
In my self-pity, I never considered the cost of giving up the Great Spy Story.
How could I have missed it? My mother in the last 15 years of her life was a friendless, poor, sporadically employed woman with bad teeth, tax problems and a rattletrap VW bug. Out of all the billions of people on Earth very few — OK, two — cared whether she lived or died. One was a sister she didn’t get on with. The other was me, and until she was sick I was doing a pretty good job of acting like I wouldn’t give a fig myself.
But things were different — so different! — in the Great Spy Story. There, she was the center. How can you doubt that you matter, when scores of agents roam the streets, talking into their sleeves when they see you? Who is more important than the lady for whom helicopters fly and surveillance cameras are installed? All those informants paid, civilians interviewed, mail steamed open and replaced — that doesn’t get done for inconsequential nobodies.
Paranoia is a sweet, sweet romance. It’s the absolute certainty that other people care about you, oh, so much.
Sure, it is painful. “Why won’t he just come forward?” my mother asked me once, near tears. (I dunno, I said. I gotta go.) It’s infuriating to know that dog-walker across the street is actually there to follow you, and exasperating to find someone’s broken in, read your mail, and then left it just as they found it. But under all the rage and fear there beats a steady pulse of consolation. People care about you. You’re at the center of their thoughts.
The comedian Moses Storm makes a similar observation in his new stand-up special, which I watched the other night. (Btw, it’s really well-observed and really funny.) In the details, his mother is nothing like mine was, but the rough outline is similar: Poor. Alone. Often doing the crazy thing where middle-class people would expect her to do the drab one. Why?
“Crazy beats scary,” Storm says. “If your day-to-day problems are the insane decisions that you yourself have created, then you feel like you have some sort of agency of your life.”
Yes, indeed. Crazy beats scary. For my mother, it also beat indifference.
I think security in those days wasn’t the imperial business it is now. Or maybe she made it up. She did work for the National Security Agency in D.C., though.
A really interesting essay about paranoia, the reason for it, and its effects. I found it very enlightening.