The Happy Treatment

“Honey?” Mom said at the kitchen counter, cooking her usual morning eggs with mushrooms and cheese on the old, rusty but clean stove, “what’s that on your arm?”

I don’t know why she bothers to ask when she already knows the answer. I sit at our small, wooden kitchen table eating a sugary cinnamon roll I know I shouldn’t be eating. “Oh you know,” I say, stuffing a bite of sugar and icing in my face, “Same ole.”

She looks down at her eggs moving them up and down with the spatula. Mom is the only person I know that doesn’t take any prescription drugs for any mental disorders. I don’t know how she does it. Apparently neither does anyone else with all the questions she gets from her coworkers and friends and one time a news segment that was fairly popular for a while.

“When I was a little girl,” here she goes, “people who cut themselves were ashamed of it.” She pauses with her spatula and catches herself, “Now I’m not saying you should be ashamed of it, Dear. It’s just… It’s always been strange to me how it’s not something people bother hiding anymore.” I look down at my arm. I have a diversity of scars, some pink, some white, some not even healed yet, some years old. My arms looked a lot like everyone else’s. It was a hot day today, and I was wearing a short sleeved T-shirt. “It’s hot today, Mom,” I said, “There’s no way I’m wearing a long sleeve in this heat.”

“No, I know Honey,” she continued, “I don’t want you being uncomfortable. It’s just that’s the thing. People used to go to drastic clothing measures to hide theirs. You’d see someone in the dead heat of summer wearing long pants and a long sleeve! I remember in my high school a few girls would never want to swim at the pool during summer because of them, and oh how embarrassed people would be if anyone caught a glimpse of their wrists if their sleeves rolled up. It was such a sad sight.”

I try to stuff my cinnamon roll in my mouth faster. This conversation seems like it’ll be occupying my mind too much tonight and I’d rather hurry off to school. Mom places the eggs on her plate and joins me at the table. Now I’m stuck. I look around the kitchen for any sort of distraction. Everything in the kitchen looks slightly out of date or old. The paint on the walls has a barely noticeable out of date pattern that needs painting over. The fridge works perfectly fine, but is a bit too small. A few knobs on the cabinet doors are loose, and there’s a slightly darker spot on the ceiling that could probably cause a leak soon if enough rain hits.

I look at Mom again, and I can tell she wants to say more. I sigh. “So what, is today’s society happier or something that people aren’t ashamed to show it?”

“I think today’s society is sadder actually.”

I stopped stuffing my cinnamon roll, “Why do you say that? You think people should go back to wearing long sleeves during the summer and suffering in the heat or something?”

“No, I just think people should be more sensitive to it. There doesn’t seem to be any real compassion for it anymore. I don’t think people should have to be uncomfortable with what they have to wear to cover up, but I don’t like how everyone treats it as normal today either.-”

“I mean,” I interrupt, “it is normal though. Everyone does it now.”

Mom sighs, “You know what used to be normal though? People actually caring. Sure, whenever another person saw someone’s scarred up arm they would be ashamed and embarrassed, but usually people would ask ‘are you okay?’ ‘do you need help?’”

“That’s probably why they were embarrassed. Someone pointing it out like that and getting all up in your personal space. I can totally see being embarrassed if some stranger came up to me on the street and started asking me all these personal questions that’s none of their business.”

Mom sighs again, “I just know I’d personally be hurt if someone could clearly see I was hurting and not try to help. That’s all.”

I grunt and roll my eyes, “Ugh it’s… it’s just different, Mom.”

“It sure does seem that way doesn’t it,” she mumbles, picking at her eggs with her fork. I take the last bite of my cinnamon roll and toss my plate in the sink, “I gotta go to school,” I say and head for the door.

“Oh, wait,” I wince and turn around. “What?”

“Let me look in the drawer real quick. I think there’s healing cream and bandaids in here-” she opens the drawer and shuffles through medical supplies.

“No, I’m fine. I have to go,” I say.

“Are you sure? It’ll only take a moment and the cream will make it heal quicker.”

“Mom, come on, we just had a whole conversation. No one’s gonna care, I gotta go. Love you, bye.” I walk out the door. She looked disappointed, and I thought I saw her mouth “I care,” but all I heard was a desperate “love you” back.

:) :) :)

I ride the bus to school. Mom and I only have one car, and Mom is kind enough to make a system that allows both of us to share it. Some days she drives the car to her receptionist job while I take the bus, and other days she car-pulls with a coworker friend while I get the car, and today was her turn to take the car, so I’m forced to ride the dreaded school bus. The bus is just like any other school bus. There’s the kids that blast their trash music as if they’ve never heard of headphones, there’s the quiet kids that sit alone looking out the window that know how to use headphones, there’s the hormonal couples in the back making out, there’s the friends that sit 3 to a seat and compare cuts with each other, and there’s an obnoxious amount of empty chip bags, wrappers, and pill bottles all moving up and down the bus floor as the bus turns and stops that the driver has given up on ever trying to clean and stop the kids from littering.

Classes are the same. I walk down the hallways from class to class although I notice myself doing something I haven’t done in a while: I look at the people in the hallways as they pass me. I look at their arms, I see little nicks on girls’ thighs who are wearing out of dress code skirts, I notice faces. Every face seems to have a depressing background of too much medication and emptiness.

Damn it, Mom, I thought to myself.

English class was probably the worst today. I sat at my desk next to Eva, and looking around the room, everyone looked the same as in the hallway. Students with their arms on their desks reveal little red and pink lines running across their skin. One student has bandages wrapped around one of his arms. His white bandages stand out the most on his dark skin.

Class begins and our English teacher, Ms. Borland, begins discussing our new unit in identifying ethos, pathos, and logos.

“We’ll start with watching a simple ad,” she began, “I want all of you to pay attention and tell me if you can identify any of these rhetorics in the ad afterwards.”

She scurries back to her desk and leans down to her fidget with her computer. The projector connects and the screen fades on the white board. Now we wait a few extra minutes while Ms. Borland struggles with the same technology she’s been using for years.

“Oh,” she says in confusion, “Darrian, you’re always helping me. How do I work this again?”

“Just use your mouse and drag the little red bar back to the beginning and it’ll start over,” the kid with the white bandages announces. She slowly drags the bar back to the beginning to restart the video. Another kid aids Ms. Borland in finding the full screen button and the ad finally begins to play. It’s a woman speaking about a new and improved healing cream, coincidentally the same kind Mom usually keeps in her medical drawer that she tried to offer me this morning. “It’s great for cuts!” the lady on the screen exclaimed. The video shows a teenager sniffling with a razor in one hand and a line of cuts down the opposite arm. The lady hands the healing cream to the teenager and the teenager graciously accepts, standing up and giving a quick hug to what I assume to be his mom now. The mom wipes her son’s tears and turns towards the camera as the teenager rubs the cream on his arm. “It’ll heal up to 3 times faster!” she says with an excited smile. The video continues on to show pictures side by side of cuts with the cream versus without. The ones with cream look a lot better, and I almost feel convinced I should’ve possibly maybe accepted a little from Mom this morning.

The video ends and Ms. Borland comes up to the front of the class again. “So, what did we notice?” she asks the class. A few kids point out logos and pathos and Ms. Borland responds “Yes! This one is logos. It provides information and informs the viewer of their product. It’s also pathos too though. It feeds the audience’s emotional side by showing a loving relationship of a mother and her son, almost persuading that this product can cause bonding in a relationship, since the mother is taking care of her child.”

After a bit of discussing rhetoric in the ad, Ms. Borland goes back to her computer to click on another open tab. “Let’s watch one more then compare the two,” she says, forgetting to put the video on full screen until a student reminds her again.

I wish Ms. Borland had struggled a little longer now that I see what the second ad is advertising. The procedure. Eva and I haven’t brought it up since I changed the conversation about Ryker. I glance over at Eva to see her shift uncomfortably in her seat, almost as if she’s trying to scoot as far away as possible from me in her chair.

The ad begins with a young woman sitting on a bench outside on a sunny day. She’s wearing a short sleeve and her arms look the same as mine. “I used to have to spend too much money on my antidepressants, I was struggling to pay bills and my pharmacy would not give me a break. I felt like my mental illness was spiraling out of control… But then I found a place that would give me a break!” She paused. “A Happy Mind: The Happiness Treatment Center.” The woman was transported into a hospital-like waiting room with walls painted bright yellow and with vibrant and cheerful decorations all around the room and the walls. “After entering A Happy Mind Treatment Center, I can feel like my happy, cheerful self again! Not a day goes by where I feel mentally unstable anymore like I used to.” She holds up her arms to show the camera her scars, “These are old. I haven’t needed this sort of stress reliever since I’ve gone through A Happy Mind Treatment. Not even once!”

She puts her arm down and walks over to a diagram of the brain hung on the wall. “It’s only a simple procedure,” she says, “Here at A Happy Mind Treatment Center, the procedure is not invasive at all.” She holds up a tiny device, “Who would have thought something not even the size of a quarter could change my life! If you get your procedure, you’ll get one of these too, just like me! This is called a ‘Happy thought.’ All the doctors do is give you one of these Happy Thoughts right here-” she points to the part of the brain labeled cingulate gyrus, “and you’ll get, well, happy thoughts! Now I don’t have to worry about making anymore appointments with my psychiatrist, or not being able to afford my medication anymore, because here at A Happy Mind Treatment Center, we value our patients’ health and well-being. Ask your doctor about the happy treatment today!”

The ad ends. Finally.

Ms. Borland comes back to the front once again to hope her students are as passionate about ethos, pathos, and logos as she is. “Anyone ever had one of these treatments? Or maybe thinking about getting one?” she asks casually, an attempt to break the ice before jumping into the lesson again. Around half the students nod or raise their hand, including Eva providing a small nod. I shift uncomfortably in my seat. I mean, of course I think about getting the procedure too, all the time, but it’s not like I could actually afford it. I can only dream.

While Ms. Borland and a few students discuss the ads and rhetoric, I lean into Eva’s desk. “So have you asked Ryker about the medications yet?” I whisper.

“Not yet,” Eva responds, “I’ll ask him when I see him in person after school next week and let you know.”

I wanted to say more. I wanted to grab Eva by the shoulders and shake her and yell “We had a pact!! Don’t do this!” but I didn’t. I’m not sure why I didn’t, I just felt quiet.

The bell eventually rings and Eva hangs back to talk to Darrian and a few other classmates about a science project they’re all forced to work on together in biology class, so I step out into the hallway alone, wishing I didn’t feel so quiet and wishing I had said more to Eva.

:) :) :)

Recently, I’ve been feeling the urge to talk. Not talk like how people do on social media, but actually talk. I get the urge that there’s a conversation sitting between me and another person and the other person feels it too, but for some odd reason neither of us starts, so the conversation eventually grows stale and gets forced to the back of everyone’s minds along with the rest of the conversations no one ever started. I feel that with Eva right now, and I’m starting to think Mom felt that feeling at the breakfast table earlier, like there was more that needed to be said. There was something I didn’t much like about the conversations Mom usually tried to bring up about society today, but since the talk at breakfast I’ve felt drawn to hear whatever else she was thinking.

So now we sit here at the table eating dinner, which is more dry chicken and broccoli not cut up into small enough pieces. I wanted to ask her something I’ve never actually wondered or cared about, though now that I think of it, why have I never really wrapped my head around it?

It was uncomfortably quiet, much like the rest of our dinners, and I felt as if I were breaking some unspoken rule trying to speak and destroy the string of silence.

“Mom?” I said. I winced, that sounded so loud. She looked up from her plate, waiting for a follow up.

“I was thinking about earlier today…” Ugh, no going back now, “and I realized I’ve never actually asked you this question, while it seems kinda like everyone else has.”

“Are you going to keep me in suspense?” she says.

“I was wondering… why don’t you take any prescription medication? Like for mental disorders or anything?”

She pauses for a moment, processing the question. You’d think after the multiple times of being asked that same question she would be able to answer easily.

“Well,” she let out a heavy sigh, “let me start with the practical reasons: it’s too expensive. The people struggling paycheck to paycheck then having to afford medication - that’s probably why they’re depressed in the first place: cause just accessing their medication is an adventure. That’s just a small reason compared to the others though.”

“So what are the others then?”

She’s quiet for a moment. Her eyes look down and focus on a random piece of the table, as if she’s in another world.

“... Mom?” I say. She blinks and looks up at me again. When she doesn’t answer immediately I ask again, “What are the other reasons, Mom?”

She sets her fork down. “Why are you suddenly asking all of these questions? This isn’t like you.”

I shrug. It was unlike me, and I’m not sure why I’ve suddenly started asking questions, but I do know I feel a desperate need for answers. “I don’t know,” I say, “I was just wondering.”

“You never just wonder.”

I pause, “... Well, I guess I do now.”

She sighs and looks down again. She spends another what seems like eternity staring down at the table, as if she’s debating with herself in her head whether or not she should tell me what she’s thinking. Eventually, she finally begins, “... The main reason is because of your dad.”

“You’ve never told me too much about my dad.” My dad. Wow, it’s been so long since I’ve said that. I have vague memories of my dad, and I’ve been told very little. I know he died when I was young, but never how, and I vaguely remember enjoying tagging along with him as we went to visit his side of the family.

“You’ve never asked,” Mom responds.

“I’m sorry.” We sit quietly for a moment, and I wonder if that’s the end of the conversation.

“Medication is expensive,” Mom says after ages, “People go into debt for it now. Your father needed it, I did too.” Mom closes her eyes for a moment and rests her head on her hands, “He never told me he needed it though. He didn’t want us going into debt and struggling so he just let me have the medication.” She put her face in her hands and rested like that for what seemed like forever. I let her and waited patiently. She wiped her eyes before any tears could fall. People don’t often cry in front of each other.

“What an idiot,” she said, “We could’ve split the medication or we switch who gets to take a pill each day or… or… something. But he never said anything and I never bothered to pay attention.”

“Mom,” I spoke quietly, “I didn’t know you needed it, if you need some you can have some of mine whenever we get more or-”

“NO,” she says sternly, “I don’t want to be near those things. I don’t want to have anything to do with those things. I had my turn with them when I was the only one taking all the pills your dad and I could afford.” She buries her face in her hands again and sniffles quietly. I don’t know what to do. I rarely see people cry unless it’s someone on social media crying for attention.

“Mom,” my voice feels quieter each time I speak, “you can’t blame yourself. It’s not like everything was wrong because he didn’t have medication. Medication helps but it’s not everything.”

“Oh but I wish it were. I wish it were everything, Cindy, I do, but I can’t be allowed to have it that simple. It’s not like people with medication don’t kill themselves and people without do.” She violently wipes away tears like she’s failing for letting them escape, but more come as soon as she wipes others away. “Sometimes all people need is to be heard, Cindy, and I didn’t hear your father.”

I feel my eyes glisten and my vision is a little blurry. I’ve never seen Mom cry before, but then again, I’ve never asked her hard questions.

“You hear me, Mom,” I say, a pathetic attempt to cheer her up. It was a true statement though, now that I think about it. Whether I wanted to talk to her or not Mom would always listen to what I had to say. If she noticed anything at all no matter how small she would often tell me “Talk, even if you don’t want to, you need to,” and I would. Sometimes my words would come out jumbled and I wouldn’t be able to put what was in my head into clear words, but she’d sit and listen anyway.

She sadly and quietly laughs to herself. “Thank you, Cindy,” she says, “I learned how to do that the hard way.”

I stand up from my chair and hug her. She hugs me back tightly and lets out a shaky breath of air. We don’t normally do this, and it feels strange, but it’s nice. It’s a sort of new feeling. We’re not exactly crying, but sniffling with a few tears in our eyes, yet it’s a warm feeling, and I feel okay. What a strange feeling. I feel tears and I’m not happy, but I like this moment.

When we let go of each other I sit back down in front of my now cold dinner.

“Sorry I ruined dinner,” I say. Mom stands and grabs my plate and hers. “You didn’t ruin dinner, Honey,” she says. She puts our plates in the microwave for a few seconds then sets them back down on the table, “Dinner is perfectly fine,” she says. We finish eating, and I don’t feel a silence as heavy as before in the room anymore.

:) :) :)

Tomorrow is Saturday. After English class today along with all the out of nowhere deep conversations I’ve had with Mom, I’m ready for the weekend. I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling. Then I hear a buzz from my phone. I pick it up and Eva’s name appears on the screen with a text that reads “Hey, you seemed a little off today, everything okay?”

I sat up on my bed and stared at my screen until it went black. This was unlike Eva. We don’t usually ask each other those kinds of questions we already know the answer to. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so I replied lightly, “What do you mean? I’m off everyday lol” I wanted to say more, but it felt strange saying anything more personal than that with Eva. “Well,” she responded, “I have good news…”

I waited a moment, then texted, “Whatttttt.”

“Come over tomorrow and you’ll find out.”

I guess I was going to Eva’s tomorrow.

I heard a knock on my bedroom door, and Mom entered. “Hey,” she says, “just saying goodnight and that I love you.”

“Love you too, Mom,” I responded.

She starts to pull the door shut, then pauses. “I just wanna let you know it caught me off guard earlier because you usually don’t ask such questions, but I’m glad you did.”

“Thank you,” I say. She starts to close the door again, but then I remember the ad from English class earlier. “Oh, wait,” I say. Mom opens the door again.

“I was thinking. With that Happy treatment becoming more popular, maybe we should try it. I know it’s expensive but when you think about it it’s cheaper in the long run with having to pay for medicine so often. The procedure is a one time payment.” Mom looked as if her heart just sank, and the color in her face disappeared. She shook her head slightly. “No,” She said, “don’t get that procedure.”

I was confused, “Why? What’s-”

She interrupted me, sternly, “Please. Don’t.”

“O-Okay.”

She sighed, “I’m sorry,” she says, “but maybe later we can talk about this, but I can’t anymore tonight.”

I nod, “Okay. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Cindy.” She closes the door.