Educated

I became obsessed with bipolar disorder. We were required to write a
research paper for Psychology and I chose it as my subject, then used the
paper as an excuse to interrogate every neuroscientist and cognitive specialist
at the university. I described Dad’s symptoms, attributing them not to my
father but to a fictive uncle. Some of the symptoms fit perfectly; others did
not. The professors told me that every case is different.
“What you’re describing sounds more like schizophrenia,” one said. “Did
your uncle ever get treatment?”
“No,” I said. “He thinks doctors are part of a Government conspiracy.”
“That does complicate things,” he said.
With all the subtlety of a bulldozer I wrote my paper on the effect bipolar
parents have on their children. It was accusative, brutal. I wrote that children
of bipolar parents are hit with double risk factors: first, because they are
genetically predisposed to mood disorders and second, because of the
stressful environment and poor parenting of parents with such disorders.
In class I had been taught about neurotransmitters and their effect on brain
chemistry; I understood that disease is not a choice. This knowledge might
have made me sympathetic to my father, but it didn’t. I felt only anger. We
were the ones who’d paid for it, I thought. Mother. Luke. Shawn. We had
been bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and our
heads cut open. We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our
brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might
happen at any moment. Because Dad always put faith before safety. Because
he believed himself right, and he kept on believing himself right—after the
first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us
who paid.
I visited Buck’s Peak the weekend after I submitted my paper. I had been
home for less than an hour when Dad and I got into an argument. He said I
owed him for the car. He really only mentioned it but I became crazed,
hysterical. For the first time in my life I shouted at my father—not about the
car, but about the Weavers. I was so suffocated by rage, my words didn’t
come out as words but as choking, sputtering sobs. Why are you like this?
Why did you terrify us like that? Why did you fight so hard against made-up
monsters, but do nothing about the monsters in your own house?
Dad gaped at me, astonished. His mouth sagged and his hands hung limply
at his sides, twitching, as if he wanted to raise them, to do something. I hadn’t
seen him look so helpless since he’d crouched next to our wrecked station