how much i love my parents: correcting the record

and looking back on how all could have been prevented

there were brutal nights last march and april when i was up late sobbing in my bed because i was so convinced my parents hated me. i even sent them an email explaining how i was feeling. but unfortunately when they drove out to see me in grand rapids, specifically in order to discuss my feelings, i didn’t discuss my feelings.

what held me back? i don’t know. maybe i was so attached to this idea they hated me that i wouldn’t speak to them about it. maybe i was so caught up in the early stages of my delusions that my mind didn’t want to be challenged. maybe i was just afraid. and yet sometimes i can’t help but think that if i’d spoken more directly with my parents about my feelings, i never would have gone down this road of isolation. we would have reconciled last april and i’d never have posted so many hateful messages on my blog. it kills me to think of how i made them feel. i’m at their house as i write this, here for two nights, and i’m so grateful that they’re still willing to see me. i feel so blessed that they are still willing to have me in their house. i feel so lucky that my parents still love me and accept me even after all of this.

there’s a lot of discourse around substack about sharing stories from childhood. some of us believe ourselves to be entitled to share all the details of the trauma we experienced when we were young without regard to how our sharing makes our parents feel. in some cases this is valid; there are some parents out there who truly are monsters. but what i effectively did with my parents: instead of speaking with them about my issues, psychosis struck and i essentially paraded them naked through the streets, grabbing the worst memories and consolidating them into a story of my whole childhood that portrayed my parents as terrible people.

i do have some traumatic memories from childhood, but these are only a small part of what really happened. even if my dad made mistakes, he has loved me very much, to the point of spoiling me over the years: when i became a raiders fan, he took me to a raiders game in california; when i was obsessed with nascar, he took me to the daytona 500; when i graduated high school, he took me to england. when the school board was looking to cancel the russian program, he took me to the board meeting to stand against the decision.

even as an adult he has been eager to share experiences with me: he and my mom have visited me in spain, germany, and india; he took me on a father-son trip to estonia; any time he was in new york for work, he tried to meet with me for dinner and drinks. these memories are the ultimate reality of who my dad has been for me: the man who rocked me for hours into the night when i was a baby, who broke down crying when i had a seizure as a toddler, who bought me a new hot dog after a seagull grabbed my food right out of my hands on mackinac island.

and yet what did i say on my blog during my psychosis? i claimed to have “no positive memories” from childhood. the idea is absurd. i have many happy memories from childhood: road trips from michigan to oregon where i was born and which we visited frequently; my dad carefully teaching me how to drive and bombarding me constantly with safety advice; a visit to colorado where my dad’s cousin was getting married. in many ways it was my dad who helped instill into me my love for travel.

nor can i get over the way i talked about my mom. my mom and i disagree about many things, but throughout my life she has been there for me and our own experiences have given us a unique relationship. each of us is a victim of christian fundamentalism: she was just as much a victim as i was, and i know that without the fortune of a less religious social environment i would have also grown up still believing in the church’s most extreme teachings.

but like me, my mom ultimately escaped that part of her heritage, and we have often talked together about our experiences regarding religious fundamentalism. yet on this blog i portrayed her very harshly in terms of christianity — despite the fact that she, like me, was strong enough to break free of all that bullshit in the end.

when i think about my mom now, with a clear head void of my illness, i think about all our conversations: discussions about christianity; all her questions about my major of international relations and her willingness to listen to me rant about what i was learning when i was in college; our talks about history when she was visiting me in spain, germany, and india.

i remember what she told me in munich just before i was leaving germany to backpack through the balkans. i had plans to travel alone through places like croatia, bosnia, and serbia, and that’s what i did: i went on even to romania and hungary and italy during my two months between semesters in freiburg, germany. “andrew,” she told me in munich, “you are a maximizer: you maximize your opportunities.” i remember looking at her face and seeing how proud she was of me.

the weekend in munich fell just before i was off by train to slovenia where i would begin my balkans adventures. and i remember how i met my parents there. they were coming with an intercity express train from the airport in frankfurt, and i walked down the train platform where i expected to find them. that’s when i saw my mom, walking to me from the distance on the platform and smiling at me. i hadn’t seen her in six months and we hugged so tightly, the same kind of hug my mom has given me now that i’ve come out of my psychosis, and i knew then how much she loved me.

i wish i’d spoken with my parents when they came to visit me in grand rapids during that time when i was staying up crying about how much they supposedly hated me. that was last may. but i was still smoking lots of weed; my paranoia was too intense. i was still taking sertraline and i was still building up into a manic and delusional state. i can hate the choices i made, but i can’t go back and change them to better ones. all i can do is say “what the fuck” when i think about how i didn’t talk with them.

i wish i’d spoken directly with my parents about these feelings instead of allowing them to build up inside. but that was another feature of my psychosis as it built up through last summer: i was beginning to self-isolate. i was withdrawing and keeping my feelings and thoughts deep inside, only for them all to explode out onto this blog in august and september alongside a multitude of inconceivable delusions.

i hate to think about those months when different decisions could have prevented all that came afterward. i paraded my parents through the streets as if i were a roman general with my captives, “exposing” them to the world for their crimes against me, and yet the reality is how much they have loved and cared for me over the years.

already last may i had an opportunity to prevent all of this, it seems. i went to psychiatric urgent care and told the man there how much i hated myself, how convinced i was that other people hated me, and how many nights i’d stayed up crying about it all. and then they gave me an increased dosage of sertraline. i wish i’d followed up not just with a therapist but with a psychiatrist. maybe, i tell myself, a psychiatrist could have identified my bipolar symptoms and taken me off the sertraline; and i wish i’d made an appointment with one immediately after urgent care.

instead, i went down a path that leaves me stunned by my cruelty. i said i wanted to “destroy the jelinek family.” i said that i had destroyed the whole jelinek family and that we would never all be together again. but now i see things clearly: all the visits my parents paid me when i was living in new york, all the happy nights playing board games in their house as an adult, and all the joy that unfolded when i was together with my parents and sisters and all of our kids.

i don’t have any desire to “destroy” the jelinek family. all i want now is to have my whole family back, including my sisters. i know it will take time, and all i can do is proceed according to my baby steps: seeing my psychiatrist, taking my new meds, watching for warning signs of any return to mania, listening to my friends if they tell me they are again concerned, and doing my best to reverse everything that’s happened.

i’ll never be able to reverse all of this. that’s why i’ve said that i don’t know which relationships can be revived and which are now dead. but it seems now there are some relationships i do know can be revived: the ones with my parents. they have accepted me back into their home. i sit and listen when my mom tells me how all this made her feel. i hear how my dad emphasizes that i was ill and severely unwell. somehow they have tried to understand; somehow they listen when i tell them this wasn’t me.

i only wish i could go back to the decision points where everything could have played out so much differently. the time in may when i went to urgent care and when my parents came out to visit and talk with me about my feelings. the moment i started this blog and acted entitled to parade my parents’ worst moments through the streets. each visit to forest view when i kept my worst delusions wrapped up in secret and so never received a proper diagnosis until my third inpatient admission.

even if i can correct the record, i can’t take away my own pain from all i’ve done. each day, the morning is still the hardest part: each morning i newly face the reality of the consequences of my actions. and yet i’ve reconciled with my parents. i’ve spent the night in their home again. i love this house, and i’m so happy to be back here. “the fact that you’ve reconciled with your parents,” a friend recently told me, “is a huge deal.”

and i know he was right.