For a long time, we fought against Jani’s schizophrenia without knowing what it was. By the time we knew what it was, by the time we got a diagnosis, it felt like it was almost too late. No matter what medication we threw at it, it kept advancing on her, taking her mind. The spring and summer of 2009 was our desperate attempt to check its advance.

It was probably June of 2009 where we started to turn the corner. Getting the two apartments allowed us to protect Bodhi, thereby removing the schizophrenia’s primary target. By giving Bodhi and Jani their own apartments, it ensured that Bodhi would not grow up afraid of Jani. And he hasn’t. We have kept him safe.

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In the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, during the final scene, Japanese Naval Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the primary planner of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, says, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” The “sleeping giant” is, of course, the United States which Japan has just attacked. The line has become part of American popular culture, probably an attempt to make us as Americans feel that our victory over Imperial Japan was always assured, even though the line did not appear until 1970, 25 years after the end of the war. Still, in 1970, the attack at Pearl Harbor was only 29 years in the past, meaning that most American adults alive then would have still remembered what they felt when news reached the mainland that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Even 29 years after the fact, Pearl Harbor remained our darkest memory. Every American over thirty could still remember the feelings of powerlessness in the face of the Japanese attack. Even a fictional recreation of an attack in a war that we knew we had won still made audiences feel so low that they needed to feel that vengeance was pre-destined.

A similar sentiment was said by President George W. Bush when he visited the site of the World Trade Center attacks on September 14^th, 2001. Using a bull-horn, Bush thanked the firefighters and rescuers, some of whom shouted that they couldn’t hear him, the President replied, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

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It is hard to type right now. It is difficult to make my fingers work on the keyboard. I keep hitting the wrong keys. I want to hit a particular key, my mind wants to hit a particular key, perhaps the “a” key far to the left. But I find that my left hand hovers, as if the message from my brain to my left hand fingers is not getting through. Instead, the right hand will take over, hitting keys to the right side of the keyboard that I don’t really want to hit, as if it is confused by the failure of its twin to respond and is trying to make up the difference.

The left hand keeps wanting to just shake above the keyboard. I am shaking all over, but the right hand seems to be better able to function in this state.

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[video: 100x100]

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It’s here again.

What I call my “black depression.”

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As I write this, it is 10:50pm August 7^th, 2010. Eight years, two hours, and six minutes ago, Jani came into the world. Tomorrow is her eighth birthday.

We have made it eight years overall, five since Jani became anti-social and preferred the company of what we then thought were her imaginary friends, three years since Jani became violent and her first hospitalization, two years since her diagnosis and the eight hospitalizations of 2009, and one year since we divided the kids into two apartments with Susan and I alternating nights.

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If I could control the universe, Jani would be fine.

Why would I want to control the universe? Come on. Everybody wishes they could control the universe. We all want to control the universe because if we controlled the universe and its variables we could prevent ourselves and those we love from getting hurt.

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How does divorce happen? It’s not a straightforward question. I am not actually asking for your answer. However, it is not a rhetorical question, either. I don’t have a ready answer for you, despite the fact that I have been to brink of it myself.  The end of a marriage is I think one of those amorphous places. You don’t realize you are going there when you are, when you are there you don’t quite know how you got there, and when (or if) you manage to come back you are not sure you ever really left. Once the possibility of divorce rears its head, reality becomes harder to pin down. It is like looking at your arm under the pool and seeing that your arm above the water and the image of your arm below don’t quite match up.

There was a time when you could only get divorced for reasons of infidelity (on the part of the wife), failure to consummate the marriage, or physical abuse. Divorce existed in the United States prior to the Seventies, but it was the “Me Generation” that embraced the idea that divorce was a way to find yourself. Hence, the creation of  “irreconcilable differences,” the most commonly cited reason for the end of marriage since the late 1960s.  Even the very term itself doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. How can two individuals have “irreconcilable differences?” The United States and current government of Iran have irreconcilable differences. The United States had irreconcilable differences with North Vietnam. If war “is diplomacy by other means,” then irreconcilable differences is what triggers that war. But people are not nations. Nations go to war, ultimately, because they can. In any war between nations, one side or the other will eventually win. War is expensive. Eventually, you run out of money, resources, and human lives. Eventually, the loss becomes too great and the nation must sue for peace.

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I always feel like I lose myself a little bit when Jani goes into the hospital. It is like life stops, which is the opposite of how I would feel about this situation if I wasn’t living it. I would think that the “break” must be welcome, but it isn’t. I feel incomplete at best, lost at worst. I suppose that is one of the reasons why I don’t send Jani to residential care. When Jani is gone, it doesn’t feel like life can begin again. Rather, it feels like it has stopped.

What this means is that I have adapted to life with Jani to the point that it is my normal functioning. Only when Jani is growing do I feel like I am growing. Every time she goes back to UCLA, the staff always tell us to “get some rest” and say things like, “Now you and Susan can actually sleep together” in all the ways that sentence can be understood.

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Tonight, Jani is back inpatient at UCLA.

How many blogs have I written now that start that way? I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

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