Crystal Clean Read Online Free Page A

mania is rare – I’m definitely on the depressive side of the spectrum – I believe that was one of those episodes.
    I was in over my head. I’d taken on too much, which is a pattern in my life. I tend to overextend myself and try to take care of everyone and everything. Except myself. I’ve never been very good at taking care of me. All these years later, it’s clear that being bi-polar was a catalyst for another reason I decided to become a foster mother: it was a substitute for drugs. Another way for me to numb out. When being alone with your demons is the last place you want to be, you’ll do anything to distract yourself. Being a foster mother was a good thing, and I was a wonderful temporary mother to all of those children, but for me it was a lot like drugs. I made sure I had plenty of mayhem going on around me, all in an effort to avoid the way I felt on the inside. I’ve spent most of my life neglecting and avoiding myself in one way or another.
    I was always an emotional child. A few years ago, I came across a note sent home to my parents from my pre-school teacher requesting a meeting with them. “Kimmy shows undue anxiety during normal activities like taking walks. She seems to worry that something will happen to her. Please call so we can meet to talk about this.”
    When I asked my mother why she never called, she said she didn’t think it was a big deal.
    When I reached adolescence things got worse until one day, when I was in the seventh grade, the school district psychologist asked my parents to come in for a meeting.
    I was seeing my counselor often for what I thought were typical things that bother adolescent girls:  my best friend moved away, my new friends were being mean to me, I felt fat and ugly, nobody asked me to the Christmas dance. But I knew I saw my counselor more than the other kids did and I knew I was always sad. It was embarrassing, getting so many call slips to the front offices, but secretly, those little slips of paper felt like love letters. Someone wanted me. Someone wanted to talk to me. Regardless of the fact that I’d initiated those requests, for a few moments I felt nurtured, and entering my counselors office was like crawling up into a mother’s lap.
    But I was ashamed of my emotions, which felt like my broken insides were smeared all over my outside where everyone could see. I would cry at the most unlikely times at school and at home for no apparent reason: Tears of such despair and sadness that it was as if my soul had turned to liquid and draining from my eyes. I was also terribly afraid something was going to happen to me. There were enormous gas storage tanks across the street from the school and I would imagine them blowing up. Some days, it was hard to concentrate in class because I’d be imagining the bloody aftermath of the explosion, caught up in the thoughts of death and destruction that sabotaged my thoughts.
    Walking home after school to our empty house, I was afraid of getting shot. There was no basis for my fear. There is nothing “inner-city” about Boise. The City of Trees, was, and still is, a nice little suburbia with a strong Mormon base, and regardless of what you may have heard, Mormons do not run amuck with Tech-9’s shootin’ up the hood. I knew this, but I couldn’t shake my fears, unfounded and irrational as they were. At home, alone everyday after school, I would draw the drapes and duck when I walked past windows afraid that some unseen someone might be laying in wait to pop a cap in my white, middle-class ass.
    So I would talk to my counselor who finally decided she couldn’t help me anymore and referred me to the district psychologist. After my initial meeting with her, she spoke with my mother, referring us to a professional psychologist. “If you ever want her to go to college,” she told my mom, “you need to get her some professional help now.”
    The first woman we met with had me do the “house, tree, person” test: a