verbminx

(this should probably be friends-only, but i just don't feel like it. lots of little friends-only entries on this in the last day or so, but here's the big updating public entry...)

OK, here is the story to date:

I have arrived home from a drive out to Orlando so that my mother could retrieve the car and the houseguest and Kid. I decided to drive home immediately upon performing the necessary action, so that I wouldn't be too tired to drive. I've been up all night. Meh.

Houseguest is bipolar in a psychotic way - her manic symptoms could easily be mistaken for paranoid schizophrenia. Many of her delusions center on her having a "divine mission." In 1995, my mom visited her up north, and she had gone off her meds. Houseguest was staying up for 48+ hours to scrub floors with a toothbrush, "purging" herself to be prepared for God's Mission, and used several corporate credit accounts belonging to her family business to purchase warehouses from which she planned to feed the poor, because that's what she thought God Wanted. There's more to it than that, but that's a good start. She ended up hospitalized by her family at that point.

One thing I have reminded my mom, in the past, is that you cannot forget that a person you care about is mentally ill, because frankly, people do go off their meds, or meds stop working sometimes. The thing is that you don't necessarily have to attach a value judgment to the mental illness. It's not like "Joe is a bad person, Joan is crazy, Bill drinks too much," it's more like, "Andrea is a brunette. Jake is married. Houseguest is mentally ill." It's just a fact. It is what it is. You can know that someone is 99% insane and two pills away from declaring themselves a god and trying to fly, and still like them and be friends with them and stuff.

Anyway, Houseguest's visit started out fairly normal. But as time went on, she became increasingly odd and obsessed with going to that Holy Land Experience place. There were also plenty of indications from the beginning that, regardless of what she'd said, she was not here to see the momster, but was here to use us as a hotel for her FL vacation. Furthermore, she seemed very uninterested in spending any time whatsoever with her daughter. But it seems that something broke sometime around Wednesday or Thursday. She borrowed the car & cellphone Thursday afternoon to go back out to Orlando, spent all Thursday and Friday sitting around Orlando in hotel rooms, sending Kid to the pool alone to swim, took Kid to Universal on Saturday, and spent all day Sunday at Fake Jerusalem. She'd fasted for two days in preparation for going to Fake Jerusalem. She then simply didn't drive back and sat at a Publix Supermarket near UCF for about, um, at least 8 hours. They were actually supposed to be back here by Saturday night, or Sunday afternoon at the latest; we only attempted to contact her after 9:30 PM Sunday night. She got very pissy that we called her and claimed we were checking up on her. By the time we made the decision to involve the police, around 3:30 AM (she kept hanging up on us, refused to tell us where she was, refused to come back, wouldn't let us talk to Kid, etc), the police were about to pick her up on their own power. Initially they tried to get her to drive back here, but could not even get her to a major road, because she refused to drive with the headlights on. They had her park the car and they took her into a holding station.

When they found her, she had taken all of their belongings out of the car and set them on wet ground. They were not well-packed and I am afraid that some things are soaked through, and some ruined, and most of the ruined or damaged stuff belongs to Kid, for whom I feel very sorry. The sheriff’s deputies who picked her and Kid up repacked the car as best they could, though there were a few small items that I found on the ground (which either would not have been seen in the dark, or which you cannot blame them for missing when dealing with a woman in a near-fugue-state and her frightened 9-year-old daughter). The car's interior is soaking wet and, in some spots, filled with dirt - soil, literally, it looks like potting soil, not the sandy natural soil we have locally. Also the car is stuffed with a noticeable amount of Stuff from Holy Land Experience: mousepad, picture frames, poncho, totebag, snacks, boxes, etc etc. Enough that the deputy who brought her in asked us if she does PR for the place. No, I'm not being sarcastic or facetious.

Anyway, when we arrived at the Sheriff’s holding station, Houseguest was seated, awake but greyfaced and silent and unmoving, against a wall with her eyes closed. Kid was asleep on a nearby set of chairs, under a blanket. We got the car keys from the deputy who'd picked them up & went back to the car, attempting to straighten it out. It's a wreck inside, dirty, but easily fixed with a trip to the car wash. I called

hyper_ballad a little too early because I was a few miles away from her & wanted to see if we could manage to have breakfast, but it didn't work out schedulewise. Ended up just driving home in my car, as my mom took her car, filthy as it was, to the sheriff’s substation to pick up Houseguest and Kid for a trip to the airport. I just got home a few minutes ago.

Somewhere in there is the bit where the deputy shows up as we're trying to get the car in order, and tells us that Houseguest was seen at an ATM machine pulling checks out of her checkbook and throwing them around. The last time this woman was having this kind of mixed-state thing going on, she sent me a check for $6.53 because she was convinced that I would need money for after the collapse of society. & when I cashed the check, cos it's impolite not to, I ended up with a returned check fee because she'd closed the account!

NOW HERE'S THE BEST PART:

Houseguest's sister says she's in no condition to fly. We cannot have her hospitalized ourselves, because of the laws concerning the Baker Act: she's supposedly been taking her meds. We think the lithium may be reacting with something prescribed to her for a recent illness. Thus, she is COMING BACK HERE to spend another day & supposedly fly out tomorrow. I said to my mom, "Can't we keep Kid here and put Houseguest in a hotel?" (not really such a bad thing: the hotel I was proposing is about a block away). I am really not not not at all interested in having Houseguest as a houseguest at the moment; she should be under psychiatric hospitalization. But lucky me! Apparently Chez Verbminx is now a de-facto psychiatric hospital!