I’m sitting in the closet of my bedroom, head resting against the door.
But I’m not resting. It’s midnight and the cocktail of fluids within my stomach have been churning so long my body may as well be a Magic Bullet blender. It’s an absurd comic sight—the entirety of my thirteen-year-old body trembling in my tear-stained, cat hair-covered, pastel purple pajamas. But it’s also another scene altogether: one borne of premature exhaustion, of an exhaustion that has become so familiar as to be ancient.
It’s a solitary act, but not really. I’m unaccompanied and unaccounted for, but I also wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the juvenile rage and dripping desperation in my mother’s voice—a voice that trails into the depths of my room all the way from the kitchen. She’s not speaking to me, but her voice rings so sonorously.
How could your own mother’s voice not?
I grew up often feeling embarrassed of her—a reality which I felt painfully embarrassed about. I didn’t quite understand why I did. I uneasily latched onto the idea that maybe I just was embarrassed by my mother in the way that other kids were embarrassed of their own mothers.
By eleven, I knew this not to be true.
Early on, I found myself exposed to perhaps the barest of human vulnerabilities: love and the lack of it, and its centrality to everything.
Every interaction with my mother was marked by this very longing. It’s a yearning I know as my own now.
I remember the many times she’d come up behind me in bed, holding her arms around my waist as tight as a child does around her own mother. I didn’t realize then how afraid she was to let go—how for years, many had let go of her before she wanted them to.
I didn’t realize then how afraid she was to let go–how for years, many had let go of her before she wanted them to.
Even then, somehow, I knew to shoulder her weight.
I loved her every moment of these mornings.
One night, at around the age of twelve, I clacked away at the Google search engine on my laptop. Extreme fits of rage, I wrote. Vacillating between excessive tiredness and overwhelming joy; fixed thoughts; emotional, verbal, and at times physical abuse—the latter of which my father found himself on the receiving end of. I had typed a laundry list of symptoms that led me to a conclusion my mother would never arrive at herself.
That she likely had a distinctive concoction of what psychologists call borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and years of timeworn, unresolved childhood trauma.
And it was all of us—most of all herself—who would continue to bear the brunt of it all.
I watched John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence for the first time when I was eighteen years old.
By the year 2020, years of therapy had helped me accept a blistering status quo: the likelihood that my mom’s health may never improve. This had been evident after a series of attempted interventions. If we were lucky enough to get her to accept treatment, medication would last for months, then she’d find a way off of it. Rinse and repeat.
It’s a reality she’d share with so many others—going her whole life refusing a formal diagnosis, always unwilling to accept herself.
It was Gena Rowlands’ harrowing and human, spasmodic, and sincere performance as Mabel Longhetti that enabled me to see her—to get as close to embodying and understanding her—as an adult for the first time.
“All of a sudden, I miss everyone,” Rowlands says in the film.
My mother described her childhood as a series of joyous vignettes, but tinged in each is a haunting loneliness. She recalls sunny afternoons spent with her aunts, but conspicuously with no other kids; laughing with her brothers on the beach while one of them permanently damages her iris; family dinners as my nana complains about the seasoning of my nani’s chawal, throws plates against the wall in frustration, and leaves midway through.
She claims she had a happy childhood. But I get the impression that just like Mabel, she found herself always missing everyone from a young age. Because within the interstices of each moment, anyone could hurt her; anyone could leave.
Too often, depictions of mental illness—and “recovery” from it—are etched in a linear fashion. The truth of A Woman Under the Influence, as such, lies in its commitment to the cyclical and nonlinear nature of existence.
Too often, depictions of mental illness–and “recovery” from it– are etched in a linear fashion.
In the final scene of the film, Mabel, amid her arrival back from a mental institution, immediately falls into a manic breakdown—literally falling and cutting herself. Her kids once again struggle to discern the situation they find themselves witnessing, but express their love for her anyway. Her husband, Nick, slaps her and caresses her, almost as unsettled and unsure as she is.
It’s a moving scene because it perturbs, because it refuses any simple return to domestic normalcy.
It’s also a scene I recognize all too well. I had never seen, felt anything like it then. Or since.
Years later, I received text messages from my mother on WhatsApp. It’s a series of texts that at times arrives in increments, and at times is delivered all at once. It’s always the same, an every few weeks occurrence.
She misses me, she says. She wasn’t going to get out of bed or take a shower or go to the grocery store until she saw that I texted her back the evening before. There’s a beeping noise she hears in the garage—a tracker on her car placed by my dad, she muses. Then she informs me about how she found the secret to weight loss, how she’s going to start a new business off of it, how she’s found investors. She asks why I don’t call her to ask her for career advice.
Every message is traced by the anxiety and ache I know to be hers. It’s a mode of manipulation, a plea to be loved in equal measure.
Perhaps the two are often one and the same.
I text her back. I love you always, I write. I worry about you—your health, your healing, your happiness.
I love you always, I write. I worry about you–your health, your healing, your happiness.
I wonder if she’ll ever have the capacity to think the same for me.
I mute the conversation and check the app days later.
She replies. Of course she does.
Call me, her message says. I need to talk to you about your career plans.
I can’t hear her, but her voice rings so sonorously.
By H.A, Spring 2023 Staff
Berkeley Fiction Review 
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