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What Is Love


Americans in Bed hand-kissing couple


Part of the sweetness and intimacy of Americans in Bed, an HBO documentary that airs tonight, is the subtle things you learn when the couples who are interviewed are not talking. It is the silent gestures that matter: the wordless looks, the casual caresses.

In this way, similar documentaries in past years (such as the HBO series Real Sex) are simpler and more simplistic. Rather than focus on the physicality of the bedroom, director Philippa Robinson offers a nuanced perspective on what really keeps people together.

Robinson used the same approach for an earlier BBC documentary called The British in Bed, but it doesn’t feel stale. For context, viewers first see a few short lines about the state of our American unions: we have the highest rate of marriage in the world and the third-highest rate of divorce.

Through interviews with a handful of couples at various states of intimacy — boyfriend and girlfriend, domestic partners, married couples — Robinson captures the yin and yang of relationships: the affection and the bickering, the romance and the infidelities. Regardless of their racial, ethnic, class, or gender expression, these couples bring to their love lives a splendid assortment of baggage. Through all these pairings runs a common thread of early passion, too, and yet less certain is whether they each have the commitment to repair bonds broken over time. On one extreme is the polyamorous Leo, a 6’6”-tall man with the looks of a Disney prince, who has broken up with his 4’10”girlfriend Blanca twenty-six times in two years. On the other is Helen and Red, a couple that has been married for seventy-one years.

When couples are talking about how they fell in love and how they negotiate — or fail to negotiate — long-term commitment, the documentary is at its most interesting. The two same-sex couples express the most vulnerability, and their stories end up resonating the most as a result. Linda and Margie hold hands the whole time they’re interviewed. Linda describes having a hole in her heart that was filled by Margie, who was married when they first met and subsequently divorced. Her face turns red as she starts to tear up, yet she beams with pride and love the whole time. George and Farid are more subdued. Their love life started with lackluster sex, but as their level of intimacy grew that improved. And then they became parents to twins. This time, it’s Farid who ends up weeping, overcome with the love he has for his babies.

While there are moments of genuinely inspiring candor in their interviews, the African American and Latino couples in the film come across as tragically one-sided. The women are faithful martyrs; the men are unfaithful and lack remorse. One couple spends more time on screen bickering than anything else.

But what the film leaves unsaid is more compelling. Robinson turns the couples’ beds into background characters — sometimes hosting lovers along with the family dog or cat, and sometimes (tellingly) not. Each couple’s body language, too, is instructive. The ones who truly seem to love one another touch while they talk. They stare into each other’s faces.

Newlyweds Yasmin and Mohamed are the exception. Shy and reserved, they keep their hands to themselves. But as they open up on camera, she lovingly describes a marriage proposal that took her breath away. At another point in the interview, he speaks, with tears in his eyes, about the meaning of their love. “This is my person now and I am her person. I always wanted a person.”

That is the essence of Americans in Bed: we are all trying to find our person. Like the couples in the documentary, some of us have to try multiple marriages to get it right. And others of us are still trying, with varying degrees of success, to love, and be loved.

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Photo by Victoria Peckham.
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Love like Exclamation Points: Growing Up with Mental Illness


Statue of Mother with Child
Photo by Victoria Peckham

This story was selected for the Best of In The Fray 2013.

I said good-bye to my mother only twice in thirty-four years. The first time was when I abandoned her in the Bronx to start a new life at boarding school when I was fourteen years old. I’d earned a scholarship to attend the Emma Willard School in upstate New York, and instead of being proud of my achievement, my mother wailed as though I were the parent leaving her child instead of the reverse.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” my mother, Marguerite, whined with a pout. Along with a borrowed, green suitcase full of my clothing, I carried the confusion, guilt, and shame of leaving my mentally ill mother behind in order to make a life for myself. But I still left.

If there’s such a thing as a normal mother-daughter relationship, what I had with my mother was far from that. Our bond was unbreakable, yet destructive. I was the baby, the last of Marguerite’s five children, and had been born to replace my brother, José, who had been killed in a bus accident when he was twelve. My name is a combination of José and Shunda, and as far back as I can remember, my mother instilled the importance of my life being a tribute to my dead brother.

Marguerite possessed a euphoric mix of bipolar and borderline personality disorders that enthralled me like a whirling dervish. A big-boned, black, Cherokee woman, she spread panic and jubilee whenever she moved. The frayed bangs of her wig splayed around her chiseled cheekbones, and her always-damp skin excreted cheap perfume. A permanent wind seemed to encircle Marguerite, swirling the Holy Spirit around her omnipresent rosary in a way that was messy, endearing, and violent.

My childhood was tormented by my mother’s unpredictable fists, which came interspersed with love in the form of exclamation points. One moment my mother would brutally beat me and call me out of my name like a demon possessed. The next moment she would be a total goofball, dancing wildly to Tina Turner by shaking her shoulders and hips like a quarterback in the end zone after a touchdown.

As a young adolescent, I wanted my mother dead during the worst of her manic episodes. She frightened me by disregarding adult responsibilities, like paying the rent and shopping for groceries. We moved so many times that by the time I left to attend the Emma Willard School, I found stillness and quiet suspicious.

I had no instruction guide on how to deal with my mother’s moods, and I didn’t know her narcissistic fury was the result of untreated mental illness. To be black in America, popular culture suggests, is to be crazy. The only escape was flight.

So, I packed my things and my mother wept. Her tears continued right up until I boarded the bus to leave. “Good-bye,” I said flatly, my stoic demeanor a defense against the range of emotions that tugged at my soul.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” she responded, giving me a trademark sloppy kiss that left her maroon lipstick smudged on my cheek. “I will miss you.”

My mom called me daily, then weekly. Since “good-bye” was her least favorite word, she would always end our calls by simply hanging up.

After I graduated from boarding school, I went to Vassar College. In the land of “normal” folks, most of them white and wealthy, I learned that the isolation and chaos of poverty was just one kind of childhood trauma. There were other traumas that came to pass in other kinds of families. Some of my classmates had been raised with too much money and not enough love. Others developed a deep self-loathing that led to self-imposed starvation. Seeing this was the start of my process of understanding my relationship with my mother.

I began to heal from my tumultuous past when I understood my mother’s emotional flaws emerged not from a faulty heart that was incapable of nurturing, but from a chemical neurological imbalance. Realizing the true culprit of my struggles with my mother, I wanted Marguerite to live forever so I could also free her from the tangled mess of our dysfunctional history.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Vassar College, my mother was evicted from our Bronx apartment and moved across the street from me in Poughkeepsie. I’d stumble out of bed to the cafeteria and find her there, showing pictures of me to the kitchen staff. If she had any boundaries, she never let on.

In my twenties, I left the state and eventually settled in Texas. I carried the inexplicable hope that my mother would get well on her own, that she and I would eventually chuckle about how she ran up my phone bill by calling me at 5 a.m. regularly. But our final good-bye came in a flash, and it was a mixed blessing.

On the heels of my father’s suicide, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. That Christmas, I returned home to spend the holidays with her. The cancer had shrunk her body in a way that made her appear older than seventy-two. She was in a lot of pain, so a nurse administered morphine.

“I love you,” I told her quietly, as she stared at me blankly. “I will miss you.”

“Good-bye,” I thought, but didn’t say, when I walked out of the room.

My mother died six days before my thirty-fourth birthday. When my sister called to deliver the news, I felt bereft and relieved. I understood that my mother’s death was my clarion call, a way for me to be born again and rise from the ashes of our story.

Marguerite’s unexpected passing required me to take a longer, more compassionate view of the many wounds she left behind. My mother never acknowledged that she needed my forgiveness, but I needed to forgive her for never fighting for a better life or her own well-being. I understood my mother had been the best version of herself that she could be, but I never got to thank her or tell her I’d be fine after she was gone. Maybe she understood the words that were left unspoken, just like she understood good-bye.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Photo by alainlm.
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Covering (Up) Mental Illness in the Black Community


African American woman
Photo by alainlm

From Metta World Peace to Rudy Eugene, African Americans confronting mental health challenges are often portrayed as isolated examples of crazy or deranged people rather than members of a marginalized community suffering an illness. Beyond the black blogosphere and social networking events, the dismal state of black mental health treatment and awareness hasn’t been adequately covered by mainstream media.

Journalists, writers, and experts cite many reasons why mainstream media doesn’t cover African American mental health responsibly or consistently. Among them are racism, lack of context about how African Americans interact with the health care system, and stigmas that remain entrenched in the black community and discourage those who struggle with depression, schizophrenia, or other mental health problems from discussing them. Rarely do mainstream media outlets have the luxury of assigning a reporter to cover only mental health since most are now responsible for several beats simultaneously.

“Mental health in general has been a sub-beat in the mainstream media,” says journalist Amy Alexander, coauthor of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African Americans. “It used to be that no one would write about mental health, and the way it would be covered would be piecemeal in the context of a report coming out from the Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention] or the National Institutes of Health. Or you would see a story pop up around a horrific event.”

Since Alexander’s book was published, little has changed. The bizarre case of Rudy Eugene, an African American in Miami who chewed off a homeless man’s face in May before being shot to death, made “bath salts” a buzz phrase nationwide. Eugene took his clothes off along the MacArthur Causeway from Miami Beach before attacking Ronald Poppo in what the Miami Herald called a “ghoulish, drawn-out assault in plain view on a city sidewalk.”

The head of the Miami police union publicly speculated that “bath salts,” synthetic stimulants believed to be the cause of psychotic episodes elsewhere around the country, prompted Eugene’s actions. But, according to the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office, only marijuana was found in his system.

More likely, Kristen Gwynne wrote for Alternet, is that Eugene had a history of mental illness. “But pinning a tragedy to a drug scare is easier (and perhaps more lucrative) than explaining a nonexistent safety net for the mentally ill,” she wrote. “Bath salts, the mainstream media naively believes, can be banned and eradicated. Treating mental illness is a far more complicated story.”

Other than sensationalized portraits of individuals, the only consistent coverage of mental illness in the black community focuses on the psychological fallout of depression and other mental health issues facing black celebrities. These portrayals are opportunities for mainstream media to explore larger questions about the escalating suicide rate among black men, the entrenched stigma of appearing weak and vulnerable in the black community by seeking help, and the dearth of African American mental health professionals. Journalist and author Ellis Cose says these examples explore “celebrities much more so than the black community.”

Even when the topic is more about black celebrity than race, mental illness, particularly in famous athletes, is viewed as “evidence of a criminal character,” says David J. Leonard, author of After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness and associate professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University.

“Media go immediately to focusing on the purported pathologies of the players themselves and don’t want to see what the broader context is,” Leonard says. “The history of race and mental health is a history of racism and the white medical establishment demonizing and criminalizing the black community through writing about their ‘abnormal personalities’ and being ‘crazy.’”

That history plays out in mainstream media coverage, but it also affects public discussions about mental health because it has so often been used to justify exclusion, segregation, and inequality in mental health treatment for African Americans. Recently, Bassey Ikpi, a writer and blogger working on a book about her bipolar disorder diagnosis in 2004, founded The Siwe Project, a global nonprofit for African Americans to share experiences about mental health in the black community. On social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, African Americans worldwide share stories of navigating mental health in a culture that actively discourages blacks from seeking talk therapy, Ikpi says.

At least partial resistance to mainstream reporting on black mental health is tied to blacks’ historical stoicism and belief that religion can serve as a substitute for professional therapy or, when necessary, medication.

“We have survived Jim Crow, beating, lynchings, and fire hoses,” says Mychal Denzel Smith, a mental health advocate, commentator, and writer. “We pride ourselves on strength. I spoke at a high school, and the teacher said, ‘Black folks just don’t have time to be depressed.’”

The Siwe Project is an important starting point for conversation outside mainstream media about the importance of self-care, Smith says.

“It’s about taking control and being proactive in defining our narrative for us instead of waiting for other people to do it. We know that there’s something wrong in our community. We have to be more proactive in addressing these issues and making sure that we take our health into account.”

Originally published by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: