Mad Cow

Bex O’Brian

Word Count 829

During the worst of my adolescence, I would often appear at my mother’s bedroom door where she and my little sister were sleeping. “Mum,” I would say, “I’m disintegrating, disappearing, I don’t exist.” In truth, I didn’t have the words to describe what was going on. Sometimes, I did feel like I was disintegrating, at other moments it was like being in a maze of panic, as if the features of my face were unfamiliar. Usually, she told me to go back to bed. But one night she sighed, got out of bed, and marched me into the living room. I think she was getting fed up with my brain. I certainly was. It was doing all sorts of weird things, which is probably par for the course when it comes to adolescent girls. And, I should add, menopausal ones. 

In the living room, she sat me down on the couch—a tactical move. The thing was huge and swallowed me whole. 

“What, she asked, “do you think this whole business of living is about? Besides waking up, dressing yourself, remembering to zip your zipper and button your buttons, besides writing one’s column (I don’t think my mother had any idea what my day entailed, so she resorted to a blow-by-blow of her days). Besides remembering to put gas in the car (this was a tough one for her) and finding time to read a book and having that much-needed drink in the evening, while you listen to your children prattle on about their boring friends, while at the same time wondering why, when your husband left you, he never thought to take his children with him, besides cooking dinner, watching a little telly and then falling into bed, only to repeat that same thing over again the next day, your only other job in being human is to survive, and I would say in this modern life, most of survival is keeping one’s brain in check. Bex, for Christ’s sake, don’t you think I look about and wonder who the hell I am? Don’t you think there aren’t mornings where I’ve stood at the top of the stairs and thought, fuck it, throw yourself down them, end it, end the noise, the fear, the doubt?

Everybody does. This isn’t madness. It’s being human. And it’s hard.”

Good speech. Made no difference. I knew my brain was out of whack. 

After I showed up at her bedroom door a few more times, Mother decided to take action. Shrinks were first on her list. It didn’t go well. One asked if I was afraid of the monster under the bed as a kid? 

“No.”

“Well, dear, then imagine you were. These fears you have now are the same, a monster that isn’t there.”

I don’t know how many shrinks I tore through, never having seen any of them more than once. 

Mother, always up for the latest fad, heard from a friend who had a friend with a daughter who was exhibiting the same signs as I was and had gone to see a nutritionist. “We are what we eat.”

God knows where she found this man.  His office was in his house, a large place with a stone facade, heavy wood paneling throughout, dour in the extreme. While waiting, mother and I held hands. We wouldn’t have been surprised if a Warlock sprang from the backroom, waving a noxious potion under our noses.

We weren’t that far off. From the shadows came an ancient man, marooned in his worn cardigan.

He wasn’t interested that I had been showing up at my mother’s bedroom door, my mind helter-skelter, he wanted to know how I was born.

“Blue,” My mother answered. 

He frowned. “And then what?”

“My husband didn’t believe in breastfeeding but Bex didn’t take to the hospital formula. They kept her in for a couple of weeks…” 

The man held up his hand stopping my mother in her tracks. “Stop! I’ve heard enough. You, my dear lady, have been poisoning your daughter since birth.”

“No, I have not!” Mother, who prided herself in following Adele Davis and never allowing us soda, was deeply offended. 

“Cows, Madam. Cows and their enzymes. The human body can’t cope with it, especially adolescent girls. Can create all sorts of trouble, not the least among them, symptoms akin to schizophrenia.”

“Bex is not schizophrenic!”

“She will be if she keeps eating burgers.”

With that, he gave me a prescription bottle filled with white powder. The magic white powder. I only discovered what it was when my mother died and I read her diaries. Magnesium. For years I carried that damn thing around. 

And, for years I ate nothing from a cow. Did it make a difference? No. My brain has been causing havoc in my life for fifty-odd years, sometimes to the point of breaking me, but mostly, it’s an evil sprite reminding me every day that, as my mother said, survival is hard.

Bex lives mostly in France with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present, she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother. Read an excerpt from Radius on our DPA+ page, here.