Crystal Clean Read Online Free PDF Page A

breathe.
    Now imagine there’s another giant vat right next to yours, except that one is filled with cool, clear water. Your friends and family are in it. You can see them and they can see you, but they can’t see the peanut butter.
    What the hell is wrong with you? They ask. You missed your class/meeting/work/whatever because of what ? They do not understand why you are lying there like a lump, barely able to blink, in the middle of the day, having blown off your responsibilities. Snap out of it. What the hell’s the matter with you? You know, if you exercised more/ate right/got out of the house more often/cheered up/looked at the bright side of life/took the right pills, you might...
    Take the right pills. The right medication. Yes, indeed. The right combinations of chemicals that will make me feel “normal.” The magic formula to wash all this peanut butter away so I wouldn’t have to try and explain it to people.
    So when people asked:
    What? You live in big vat of invisible peanut butter?
    I could respond:
    Whaddaya, think I’m crazy? No, I was just joking about that. Hey, pass me the bottle/joint/straw/pipe, would you, please? Because I know my doctor said I’d feel better soon, when we get the medications adjusted, but I need to feel better right now .
     
    W hen I wasn’t abusing substances, I was manically chasing my feelings away using other methods. Like overloading my life taking care of other people.
    After three years, I decided to stop fostering children. It was too stressful both emotionally and physically, and I wanted my former life back with just Andy and myself. So when my last child left for his new adoptive family, I closed my foster home.
    I was fine for a while, working and taking care of Andy, but my parents suggested going back to school. What a splendid idea! With the foster children gone, I now had oodles of time on my hands, what with working full time and raising Andy. To be fair, the decision was mine. I really did feel abruptly empty with too much space, both inside and out, to fill.
    I was in my late twenties at the time and I know I shouldn’t have cared as much as I did about what they thought, but I craved their approval. More than anything, I wanted them to be proud of me, and I figured that maybe if I finished my degree in psychology, I would finally win their hearts and become the daughter they’d always wanted.
    So I dove in. I took classes during the day while Andy was at school, and I had him with me at night when I worked at a hospital daycare from three to midnight. A van service would drop him off after his therapy, and we would go home when I was done with my shift. Then we would get up at six-thirty in the morning and start all over again.
    I started feeling angry. I thought I was angry with my parents for always pushing me and never letting me just be. I was perfectly fine working and raising Andy. I didn’t care about finishing my degree. When I was working on it the first few years after Andy was born, I was an honors student doing research and planning on going to graduate school. But I started falling apart. I had flashbacks during class of when Andy was a baby - of performing CPR on my son, of that time in the hospital when they called code blue on him (the first code blue ever called on the pediatric floor at that time) and all the times I called the ambulance to the house. I kept picturing him dead. I didn’t know what was going on and I didn’t tell anyone what was happening because I was ashamed. I was mortified that these thoughts and images were so dominant in my mind all the time. What kind of mother fantasizes about her child dying? Especially in the middle of an American Lit class. I was worried it might be a sign that deep down I wanted to hurt him. How could I possibly tell anyone that I was having such sick thoughts?
    Finally, I reached the point that I stopped going to classes because the flashbacks came so often and I couldn’t keep myself from