The Best of Times the Worst of Times Read online

  This brave and loving book shows how mental illness is indeed a family affair. Penelope Rowe, and her daughter Jessica Rowe, write with insight, compassion and honesty about the devasting effects of Penelope’s bipolar illness. It is rare to get such a rounded perspective, but far from being depressing, this story shines with the resilience of the human spirit.

  Anne Deveson, founding member and patron, SANE Australia

  THE BEST OF TIMES,

  THE WORST OF TIMES

  Our family’s journey with Bipolar

  Penelope & Jessica Rowe

  First published in 2005

  Copyright © Penelope Rowe and Jessica Rowe 2005

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Rowe, Penelope, 1946- .

  The best of times, the worst of times: our family’s journey

  with bipolar.

  ISBN 1 74114 661 5

  1. Rowe, Penelope, 1946– . 2. Manic-depressive persons—

  Australia—Biography. 3. Manic-depressive persons—

  Family relationships. I. Rowe, Jessica, 1970– . II.Title.

  616.8950092

  994.06

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters,Victoria

  Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  With love

  To all of you who

  have shared the seasons with us.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Contacts

  Foreword

  I first met Jessica about fifteen years ago. Our paths didn’t cross again for another eleven years—this time, though, we went on a date. And so began a journey of love and learning for me.

  Love led to marriage and also to an extraordinary insight into an area of health that I had never much thought about. Mental illness affects one in five Australians. Jessica’s Mum, Penny, was my very real introduction to just how ravaging and raw mental illness can be.

  Over these past years with Jessica I have listened to her story of growing up with and caring for a mum suffering bipolar disorder, while at the same time nurturing, as best she could, her two younger sisters. The story of ten-year-old Jessica having to stand on her school case to pull the bus cord on the way to the psychiatric hospital to visit her Mum makes me cry every time I hear it.

  Fortunately I have seen Penny seriously ill only once, but it affected me greatly. ‘How’s your Mum?’ I asked Jessica one day. ‘Not great,’ she said. We went to see her. Just the week before I had been in the company of the Penny I knew—vivacious, enthusiastic, loving.The Penny I have just described was now grey in the face, her eyes were sunken and her thoughts were rambling. My wife, my sisters-in-law and the stoic DD (Penny’s husband) initiated a well-worn plan and I went along for the ride. My education had just been well and truly cranked up.

  The Best of Times, the Worst of Times is the very real story of a family’s experience with mental illness. It doesn’t read like a psychiatric textbook but instead it describes, in down-to-earth layperson’s language, what tens of thousands of families from all walks of life are experiencing right now. Use this book as a companion; reach for it if you need reassurance or hope. Having a mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. For loved ones, who are often the primary carers, take heart and inspiration from Penny and Jessica’s story. Lean on them through this book.

  I found myself engrossed and enlightened as I turned the pages. Most of all, though, I felt so proud of these two extraordinary women who have had the courage to bare their souls to help others.

  Mental illness is a part of life but sadly it carries a stigma. This book is a step along the journey to diluting that stigma. To those who suffer a mental illness, and to their families, this book is a poignant reminder that you are not alone.

  Peter Overton

  Husband and Son-in-Law July 2005

  Ecclesiastes 3

  1To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: 2A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

  Introduction

  Carpe diem

  —Horace

  My name is Penelope Rowe. I am a 59-year-old woman who was married, divorced, and then single for many years. I have now remarried. I have a Bachelor of Arts from the 1960s and a Master of Criminology from 2004—this latter degree undertaken from a genuine interest in study and scholarship, and also to see if and how my brain was still working! Out of necessity, I’ve been a jack-of-all-trades in my life—among other things, a coffee packer, teacher, freelance writer, columnist, television and radio presenter, office manager and sub-titler. I have also published three novels and two collections of short stories, but nothing in my life has equalled the most rewarding, important and fulfilling task of all: giving birth to, rearing and loving my daughters, Jessica, Harriet and Claudia. They are my testimony. I also happen to suffer from bipolar disorder, formerly called manic-depressive illness. But I hope you will recognise that I am not an illness—that is only part of the package.

  My eldest daughter, Jessica, is 35 years old. She has a Bachelor of Communications from the 1980s and a Master of International Studies from 2003. She has travelled widely and is a public speaker and spokesperson for the mentally ill. She is, as far as I am concerned, charismatic and unaffected, with a disarming, childlike aspect to her personality. She is also a newsreader for Network Ten.

  When the idea of this book was mooted, both Jessica and I were enthusiastic but there were obstacles to overcome. Neither my publisher nor I wanted me to write my life story. They wanted the story of my experience with bipolar illness, so that is what I have tried to do. However, this might give a very wrong impression of my life. It has most definitely not been a life of unassuaged misery, madness and mental hospitals. By far the greater part has been unalloyed joy in the good fortune that has so often come my way, the privileges that have been granted me, the laughter and love I
have shared, and the whole adventure of trying to live as fully as I can in this one chance we get at life. The experience of mental illness has coloured everything, but I refuse to define myself by my illness.

  The second obstacle was trickier. My personal experience of mental illness is clearly going to be different from Jessica’s association with it. If she were to write about how she felt as a child growing up with an ill mother, would she need my help to remember? But wouldn’t this contaminate her memories? Memory is a capricious and susceptible thing—it plays tricks and can be distorted with ease. Memories fade or are altered over time. When a memory is laid down to be encoded somewhere in our brains, it encapsulates the perspective on events that occurred at the time. When it comes to be retrieved and reconstructed, the memory may have fragmented or reassembled itself in a way that makes it quite different from when it was laid down. The final reconstruction also depends on changes in perspective since we first stored away the memory.

  (A fascinating experiment was once done in which children were separately asked to remember a time when they were tiny and lost in a supermarket, even though this had never happened to them. At first none of the children could remember such an event. With more encouragement— including comments like ‘Remember how I found you in the lolly aisle, eating M&Ms?’or ‘Remember how the lady sat you up on the counter at the cash register and that’s where I found you?’—the children gradually began to ‘remember’; indeed, not only remember, but enthusiastically embellish their adventure, so sure were they now that the events had actually happened.)

  Keeping notes and diaries, letters and photographs—as I have done since my late teens—has certainly been helpful, providing possibly tangible evidence of what was happening to me at different times in my life. However, without such aidemémoires, Jessica has had to delve back in an effort to reconstruct the first three decades of her life. But can any of us really trust our memories?

  I did not want to manipulate or contaminate Jessica’s memories. Nor, most importantly, did I want either of us to censor each other. So we decided to write the first draft of this book separately, each from our own perspective, and see what unfolded. We both experienced surprise and sadness about what we discovered, but ultimately this has enriched us both.This, then, is it: the final product.

  Chapter 1

  Stand in the trench, Achilles,

  Flame-capped, and shout for me.

  —Patrick Shaw Stewart

  Jessica: I’m lying in a hot bath, my ears are under the water and I’m thinking about my breathing. Stay calm, just focus on breathing. It was something my voice coach had taught me. The words of my speech were running slowly through my head. I knew that in an hour I’d be in the makeup chair getting ready for the programme. I’d been working on my speech for months. It had been tough to write but I knew it was going to be even harder to deliver. I didn’t want my voice to quaver. I didn’t want to cry. For the first time, I was going to speak publicly about how I felt about Mum’s mental illness. I had given plenty of speeches before about Mum’s experience, and spoken about the impact mental illness had on our family. But never before had I spoken about how I felt. I was scared, anxious and terrified. The only thought that was running through my mind was: ‘What will Mum think?’

  My speech was part of a programme on Network Ten called What Women Want. There was an amazing lineup of women speaking about issues they were passionate about. Jackie Frank, the editor of Marie Claire magazine, came up with the concept. She wanted to get all the women together before the show to talk about our ideas. We met at Murdoch Magazines’ headquarters at Black Wattle Bay for lunch in the Marie Claire boardroom. Beforehand, we all stood out on the balcony overlooking Black Wattle Bay while Jackie made the introductions. Deborah Mailman gave me a bear-hug and her smile instantly made me feel welcome. Libby Gore was assertive and funny. I felt a little in awe of her fearlessness. Zoe Carides was gentle and keen to talk about her experiences of being a mum. Julie McCrossin was enthusiastic and passionate about education. I felt anxious about revealing too much of myself in the company of such strong women. However, the producer, Pam Swain, was very reassuring and supportive of my decision to talk about mental illness. Her words of encouragement gave me confidence as we sat down to lunch. My fears turned out to be totally unfounded because, as the lunch progressed, we all shared our ideas and were very supportive of one another. The executive producer, Ted Robinson, was the only man present. He was happy to sit back, listen and absorb our ideas. I still felt a little in awe of the whole situation, largely because I was concerned about how my story would sit with the other issues. These women were born performers. But I left the lunch feeling excited and privileged to have met such a great bunch of women. Later I confided my fears to my friend, Georgie Gardner.

  ‘I’m not a joke teller. How will my experiences fit in with these entertaining, funny women?’

  ‘Not to worry,’ she said. ‘You’re not there to tell jokes. You’re there to tell some of your story. Your experience is what you have to offer.’

  I fervently hoped she was right.

  I set about writing out some of my story. Initially it was safe. I was worried about being too personal or too open about how I felt. For most of my life I had kept my feelings tightly packaged into an optimistic, energetic bundle. That had protected me; it had got me through the times when I felt overwhelmed by Mum’s illness. What would happen if I let people know about my sadness, fear and loneliness?Would the happy, successful life I had set out to achieve no longer look so good?

  Jackie, along with one of the magazine’s assistant editors, encouraged me to write more openly about how I felt. It was a challenge to step out of the boundaries I’d set myself for so long. I had only ever gone so far in revealing my family’s experience. I had never totally revealed how it made me feel. I think it was because I wanted to protect Mum—I never wanted to hurt her feelings.

  I was ambitious from an early age. I had set about trying to create the life I dreamt about when I was a little girl. Somehow I thought that, by being ‘someone’, I’d fill in the gaps and hurt I felt growing up. I never felt confident as a teenager. I had terrible acne and I was never the girl who got asked out by the boys. It was a lonely, strange time. But even in those awkward years I was dreaming about the career and life that lay ahead for me. From about the age of sixteen, I had my heart set on a career in journalism.

  I studied hard for my Higher School Certificate but I didn’t get enough marks to make it into my first university choice. At the time I thought it was the end of the world. My dream life was in tatters before it had even begun! Of course, there are always other options. And heading off to my second choice, Charles Sturt University at Bathurst in country New South Wales, turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. Leaving my family and friends behind, and moving to live and study at a country university, was a liberating experience.

  Reading back over the letters I wrote to Mum during my time at university, I’m struck by how those years away from home began to shape my adult world. I suddenly found myself in a new environment, surrounded by bright, ambitious young media students. Life was full of lectures, tutorials and lots of long discussions with my friends, talking through our ideas about the world, and how we saw our place in it.

  My Austudy allowance from the government helped cover my twenty-dollar-a-week rent as well as the typical student diet of lots of pasta, rice and beer. I was never a beer drinker until I got to university, but a middy of VB was the cheapest drink at the uni bar! So pretty quickly it was what we all ended up drinking. There was plenty of playing, but I worked hard at my studies. I was ambitious and wanted to stand out from the crowd. By the time I graduated with my communications degree, I thought I knew everything. That illusion was quickly knocked out of me once I took my first steps in the real world of television.

  After I graduated I began as a receptionist at Channel Nine. That was a humbling experience. I’d jus
t spent the past three years studying, only to find myself answering phones and making other people coffee. I was pretty hopeless at the job—I struggled to work out the phone system and I found myself intimidated by the loud, bellowing voices demanding to know why I had hung up on them. However, it was a start. Early on, I was given an invaluable piece of advice: to get into the media, just take any job you can, because once you’ve got your foot in the door it is so much easier to move around. That advice turned out to be spot on. While I was still at Channel Nine, I was sending out a show-reel—a tape with samples of reading and stories I had done at university. The tape turned out to be enough to get a job interview for Prime Television in Canberra. After a few hiccups, I was offered a job as a weather presenter and reporter at Prime. It was the perfect beginning to a television career. I was out doing news stories each day and then presenting the weather at night. I had a nurturing boss, Ken Begg, who introduced me to the world of television in a supportive and encouraging way. I was lucky, because television can be a ruthless and unforgiving industry.

  I then spent about a year in Melbourne working for GTV before I got a call from Channel Ten in Sydney. I’ll never forget it. I was sitting in the Melbourne newsroom, unlucky in love and homesick, and the Network Ten news director, Mike Tancred, was on the end of the phone asking whether I’d be interested in reading their news. Boy, was I interested! But I had to play hard to get and told him I’d have to think about it, and of course I’d be keen to meet him in Sydney. On the inside I was so excited. Finally my dream was coming true.

  Six years later I was still doing a job I loved. I enjoyed the profile and perks that came with the role but I also felt it came with a responsibility to give something back. I had spoken over the years about my family’s experience with mental illness, but I still felt there was more I could be doing. I decided that, if I was brutally honest about my experiences, it might make other young people out there, struggling with their families, realise they were not alone.