SPRING
In springtime, when the first daffodil pushes its yellow head from brown soil, an airiness rises from my core and blossoms throughout my chest. As daylight hours expand, I rush outside and embrace an annual explosion of life. Hummingbirds hover close enough for me to see florescent green, and the whorl of their wings blows the mist from my mind. My spirits sway with the seasons, and as spring lifts the claustrophobic gloom of winter, bliss swells within me.
My husband, Doug, has bipolar disorder, and his moods swing with more intensity, yet less predictable regularity. Longing to explore his mind’s creases and crevasses, I ask what it’s like when his brain biochemistry surges.
Doug shakes his head. “You can never understand.” Then he retreats to his secret mental garden, where native and invasive species intermingle and compete for light.
We share so much together, yet this he walls off. So I search within myself, and something stirs. My own annual cycles seem to provide a keyhole into his world—a conduit through which I can stoop and peer and glimpse a tiny opening of light. Perceiving pieces of myself, expanded in him, I long to lean in and whisper, “Yes, I see the vastness of you now.”
Through the spyglass of my seasons, I attempt to envision Doug’s inner world: his hypomania mimicking my spring, an awakening of sorts, colors brightening and fragrances intensifying, energizing his body like the daffodil that sprouts inside of me; his mania resembling my summer, with long days and lingering light; but also tantalizing and perilous heights, from which he will inevitably fall; his depression mirroring my winter, the sky closing in, colors fading away.
Mostly Doug’s hypomanic activities are harmless: planting a garden of twenty-seven tomato plants spaced three inches apart, bicycling like he’s training for the Olympics, illustrating his adventures with colorful pens on reams of oversized paper—hiking up the tallest mountain and skiing down the other side. Invincible. Boundless.
Even though my mind and body can’t participate in Doug’s neurochemical rush, I would gladly grab his hands and dance in celebration of his springtime—if only I could forget the cruel punishments his mushrooming moods invariably impose. I would harvest his bountiful love apples, ring a cowbell at the finish line of his races, create a portfolio for his prolific drawings. I would do it all if only we could wait to intervene until just before everything begins to tumble, identify the trigger that turns harmless to harmful and euphoria to paranoia, pinpoint that precise moment when summer takes a steep turn off a blind cliff and a blizzard appears in July.
So instead of celebrating his spring, I cower, fearful that Doug will ascend to a dangerous summer.
SUMMER
Long summer days form the pinnacle of my seasonal experience, and each year I am amazed anew at the explosion of wildflowers in alpine meadows, the kaleidoscope of shades and hues seemingly infinite in their variations. The bloom that began in spring extends to my head, filling tight cranial spaces with air and light, buoying my mood and energizing my psyche. My inner hummingbird soars, tests her wings. Blood pumps through my veins with increased vigor, and I feel healthier than I have in months, as if a taste of former youth has temporarily returned to me.
Doug’s days also lengthen as mania erupts, and I try to envision my own summer rapture when I see his energy spike. But Doug’s mental flights can ascend to precarious elevations and his hours of wakefulness do not necessarily correspond with the sunlight. Neurotransmitters supply his elation and the less sleep he gets, the less he seems to need. The innocuous projects of hypomania tip from production to deconstruction and the lines of reality blur. Enhanced sensations no longer create delight, but morph into a doomed world filled with conspirators from whom Doug must escape. And whereas in hypomania he might drive five hundred miles to see a thousand-year-old giant sequoia, when psychosis takes over, Doug drives simply to escape imagined evils. When even his car seems out to get him, he takes off on foot, disappearing into the mountains without food, water, a map, a plan, and sometimes even jettisoning his clothes as unnecessary burdens. The police have intervened during some of these crises, placing a disheveled Doug into custody. But his jail stays are typically short-lived, officers quickly realizing that Doug needs to be confined behind different walls, his caregivers armed with pills and syringes, rather than clubs and guns.
I visit him there, behind those walls. After relinquishing my cell phone and car keys, I’m buzzed through locked doors into the men’s ward of the psychiatric hospital. The air reeks of Lysol and body odor, so I keep my breathing shallow. I’m allowed to bring comfort—a blanket from home, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—items typically reserved for outdoor picnics. But the setting is all wrong. Windowless walls reveal neither mirrors nor art—no openings, reflections, or sharp edges to offer temptation to involuntary inhabitants.
Doug embraces me only briefly at first. But when I sit, he reaches for me again—if I’ve crossed my arms or legs—to unwrap the barrier of body language I’ve unwittingly placed between us. Several times, before we were married, he took my hand, rubbed my naked ring finger, and asked, “Will you be my wife?” Other times, when the stimulation of my presence proved overwhelming, he lowered his head, a restless sea, swirling. “You can leave now.”
I wait until the last of the locked doors clicks shut behind me before I allow tears to come. Outside, the night air that usually fills me, flattens me instead, pressing me into a blacktop of darkness.
It’s this darkness and the phantom image of Doug that channels my inner hawk. So when I see the buds of hypomania bursting, I swoop down, rob Doug of his summer’s peak. I try to keep my tone soft, loving. “Honey,” I pause, gather strength, force my voice not to catch as I say words I know he dreads. “I think you’re getting manic.”
No matter how many times we have this conversation, Doug always looks genuinely baffled. “What? No. I’m fine.”
My muscles tense, my chest hardens. “I need you to trust me and call your doctor.”
Now it’s Doug’s body language giving him away—jaw clenching, fists closing, face turning from me. Suddenly I’m the enemy, storming Doug’s fortress, tearing down the walls he’s constructed to protect his mania. Rather than venturing to the trailhead, where we celebrate my spring, we visit his psychiatrist. She prescribes medication to reverse his biochemical bloom, suppress the height of what he views as his most productive season. When we return home, Doug squints at me as if I’m holding a knife to his creativity, pressing a weapon against his boundless energy, killing the zing of connections in his brain. I try not to return his glare and attempt to hide my own resentment, disguise how much I detest this role shift—Doug playing the carefree boy running naked through flowered fields, while I emulate the worried parent calling him home.
I want to shed these facades, return to our normal partnership.
AUTUMN
When the aspens tinge toward gold, my breath catches, then sticks, at that tender spot at the base of my throat. Leaves fade, fall, and crunch, shattering solid ground. As the hours of darkness exceed the hours of light, the sky traps me, until my entire body is nearly incapacitated by a stifling atmosphere. I dream again of wings, wish to become a snowbird, that elusive species that can afford the luxury of annual migration. I push pennies into a piggybank, saving for the day of my metamorphosis.
Doug fights it, too, the transition. He thinks he can control his manic highs, ride with them indefinitely, soar on the hubris of eagles into another atmosphere. But his cycles, like the seasons, turn and transition; the devastation from impending storms the only element we can hope to control. So whenever I see a squall percolating in Doug’s eyes, I reach for his poles to prevent his mind from tipping into an altered orbit and spinning into a world of strange sounds and frightening images.
I strive to hasten his fall.
WINTER
As the first snow buries flowers and feathers, a shroud muffles my spirits and I linger underneath weighted covers, hiding from a cold world. Yet if I force myself to layer clothes over my body, I can surprise myself by enjoying a brisk walk. Life takes more effort in winter, yet somewhere inside, joy still lives.
As depression wraps Doug in its heavy coat, he doesn’t disappear into the despair that others with his disorder sometimes experience; instead, he plops down to a less exciting but relatively shallow trough. His days decrease as his hours of sleep increase, resetting the chemistry in his brain. Seeing the descent relieves me, lessens my parental anxiety.
I hope for a mild winter and then, a benign spring.
As the cloak of Doug’s winter lifts, he reaches cautiously towards me, allows me back into his world, forgives me. I wish he could thank me instead, view me as hero rather than foe as he sinks back into this side of sanity. But the ideas planted in his head by my perceived betrayal are slow to transform—I’m the one who grounded him, clipped his wings, limited his ability to fly.
The shift back to equilibrium is painfully gradual.
I wait in loneliness.
SPRING’S INEVITABLE RETURN
In between Doug’s cycles, his disorder lies dormant, sometimes for long stretches, months of relative calm. Other times his sine wave of rhythms is barely noticeable, better managed now by medication and lifestyle changes. At these times, when Doug is healthy and the seasons hold the strings attached to my moods, it is Doug who cares for me, coaxes me back into the world. At least until spring returns and I’m granted a cure for what feels like partial blindness—a blurry mist lifts, light lingers, and crimson dots the hillsides.
I appreciate the importance of spring. I don’t want to erase Doug’s seasons. I just wish he could trust my avian instincts and take my wing when I signal it’s time to descend—to prevent his wax feathers melting from their proximity to the sun. And perhaps we can follow the hummingbirds when the days begin to shorten, to avoid my claustrophobic winter.
Yet regardless of the weather outside, there will always be a seed germinating inside Doug’s brain, something living that may tentatively raise its daffodil head— hoping no one will notice.
Lisa C. Peterson lives in the Colorado Rockies with her husband, Doug, and a dog who looks like a cross between a cat, a dog, and a fox. She holds an MFA from Sierra Nevada University as well as a BA and an MA from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Sport Literate, and the Sierra Nevada Review blog. Currently, Lisa is seeking representation for her debut memoir, Rogue Waves: Love in the Context of Bipolar Disorder.