Before Gen X'ers made their "Special Needs" children into hip play-things, serious mental illness was a drawing room subject that could be hinted at politely in mixed company using a bunch of phony-sounding euphemisms, but never to be directly addressed. Once a problem is accurately named (so the thinking goes), superstition held that one had to go about solving the problem, and my parent's "Silent Generation" doesn't do that. We do.
Of course, my family is like any other family; we have some very seriously disturbed people living within it, though how alive they feel is of some debate. In order to quantify as "successful" to a bunch of brain disordered people, my family had to vigorously redefine success as the blind obtainment of objects without purpose. That was it: car, spouse, house, kids. Done. You passed! If it seems too easy, you're right, and just as many of my friends and I escaped the common traps of the falsely upwardly-mobile lifestyle for treasures that can't be bought and sold like so many commodities on the open market.
We invested in ourselves and our education, like our hard-working grandparents taught us to do, so that when the time came for us to give back, we'd give way more than our fair share, which is the world you're living in right now. But the retarded living "secretly" (not so much) among us had to do so much more than us, just to pass as simple 9-to-5 office drones. They needed long-studied Masters degrees, and every time society shifts technologically, they are right back to feeling lost and afraid again.
They are the perpetual students who never really learn or master anything, which is why you'll find so many expensive MBA's working at suburban tax preparers after their initial MA and BA degrees, or rote technical jobs in labs that took them almost ten years to attain. When I presented them with my real accomplishments (like scoring an interview at the Annie Lebowitz studio in the 90s on an Illustration degree as my second ever professional interview), it was undermined and shoved mentally in a drawer in the back of their minds, while I suffered through their bad photography with overly expensive cameras and trite tourist shots taken on plush cruises, with tales of photo contests never won spinning through their delusional heads.
And so it was with one of the more anti-social members of my family who preferred light switches and t.v. fuzz to contact with humans, memorizing train schedules over normal conversational greetings besides a light grunting that replaced actual speech. He was lovingly called "Rain Man", like Dustin Hoffman's infamously Autistic character, for his ability to mentally check out using inane facts and trivia. It was always the same. Always the same. When he finally used his abhorrence of all things personal to his sole advantage by appearing on a game show none of us watched (we were all busy with travel, careers, and love lives), me and my brothers didn't even know about it, much less care, to the detriment of the psychotic gathered among us at holidays.
Ahem. Perhaps we hadn't heard? If it was intended as a snide reference to my hearing impairment as a feeble attempt to correct the imbalance of their completely co-dependent ineptitude, consider that a huge failure as well. And so we had to feign an enthusiasm over his one chance at being in a spotlight, using all three callers for the more difficult questions you had to actually know through real study habits, not blind compulsions. Game over. Still, with the help of his family, he won a nice chunk of change for someone with his limitations. Christmas will be good this year! He and his father were notorious cheapskates who would sit around with glazed eyes and blank stares with their arms folded tightly across their chests, while we exchanged humble gifts at my grandparent's apartment.
They just sat on a couch waiting for food to be served, doing and saying nothing to anyone, except for the one year my uncle gave me some free mugs from his Met Opera attendance that were "too girly" for him to use, or some spare calendars he also got for free. Like any real mother, I was touched by these few shows of humanity that had stolen away from the tight grip of his mental illnesses, as remote and alone as I know them to be. The son never improved, because we were never allowed to discuss his diseases with him, which might lead to a cure. Instead, he languished year after year in the same dull IRS government job that went slowly from PT to FT on a special needs work program, slowly draining his show earnings on a bunch of train rides with similarly disordered people. And he never gave us a thing. Not one single present. Not ever. Not once.
