Running Before Walking

Disorders, diseases, conditions, dysfunctions, afflictions, maladies, ailments, defects, abnormalities, disabilities, brokenness—the whole gloomy parade marched past my name with clipboards in hand. Before I could make sense of any of their labels, however, I was already in motion.

How many disorders can one person be branded with before she begins to feel less like a patient and more like a prize heifer at the local 4H county fair? I do not mean I imagined them. I was not collecting diagnoses the way other girls collected charms for a bracelet. They were handed to me with professional solemnity: a defect on the left side of the brain, hyperactivity, learning disabled, bipolar I with psychosis, Asperger’s, autoimmune disease, auditory processing disorder. Each label arrived with its own stamped form, its own waiting room, its own specialist who peered over glasses as if I were a small, noisy appliance that had come without directions. My life became a carnival midway of doctors, treatments, therapists, insurance adjusters, and hospitals—bright lights against sterile walls, the unique aroma of a cocktail of disinfectants mixed with antiseptics, the quiet murmur of cries, impossible instructions, and someone always shouting, “Next!” The road was never straight. It plunged, lurched, climbed, and doubled back, taking me from breathless lows to dizzy highs and then straight through another set of swinging doors.

I began, according to family legend, with a defect on the left side of my brain. Defective from birth—there’s a cheerful way to start a baby book. I would not hold still in the birth canal, and the doctor later told my mother he had done the best he could with my head. This may explain why, to this day, my skull has the general topography of a potato field after a hard rain. My mother brought home a small thin fair-skinned baby with fire engine red hair. I did not cry so much as issue piercing alarms, long industrial shrieks that could peel paint from the hallway. My sister, after one appraising look, lodged the first formal complaint. This was not the cute baby doll she had dreamed about. She wanted my mother to take me back and return with a better model. They nicknamed me Peanut because I was small, though my birth certificate briefly tried to christen me Barbetta, a name from some distant great-aunt. My mother, bless her, explained there had been a mistake. A name change cost money; correcting a misspelling was free. And so Barbetta became Linda. To this day, I am not sure how my mother pulled that off. 

Years later, when the government demanded proof that I existed before granting a passport, I went to the Division of Vital Records. It occupied a tired strip-mall storefront, the sort of place where hope arrived in sensible shoes and left clutching a number. After a long wait, a clerk produced the sacred document. There it was: Barbetta, executed by a row of typewritten Xs, with Linda written in official ink above the body. I laughed out loud. I had assumed Barbetta was family folklore, like the neighbor who swallowed a whistle. But no. There it was, fossilized in bureaucracy. Some babies are christened. I was copyedited.

I had more surprises packed in me. I never napped. I slept two hours out of every twelve, which meant the household did not so much raise me as endure rotating shifts. At six months I stood up, and by the end of the week I was running. Not walking. Not crawling. Running. Running and screaming, which, when you think about it, was a fairly efficient childhood résumé. My sister and I shared a room: my crib on one side, her bed on the other. At night, probably from boredom and possibly from a criminal instinct, I rolled that crib across the floor toward her bed and tried to pull her through the bars. Unfortunately, her head was too big. My father removed the wheels, believing he had outsmarted me. This was a touching mistake. I simply bounced the crib across the room instead, thumping along like a determined little prisoner tunneling toward freedom, still intent on hauling my sister’s big head through the bars. She was not amused.

One day, she exacted revenge. I was standing on the bed, full of toddler confidence and poor judgment. She grabbed the sheets and pulled. I went up, over, and into the wall with the dramatic force of a circus act gone wrong. The crash traveled through the house like a weather event. My dad ran in, and my sister announced with great innocence that she had not seen me standing there. He did not believe her, which shows that fathers, despite many flaws, occasionally recognize obvious physics. It was not the last time she tried to dispatch me. She owned a three-foot-tall Pink Panther bank, heavy with other people’s loose change, collected from unsuspecting guests who reached into their pockets just to make her go away. One day she hoisted that pink beast over her head to clobber me, but gravity, that old family friend, intervened. Backward she went, bank and all. In our house, even attempted murder had comic timing.