Zig-Zag Boy

Z I G - Z A GB O YA Memoir of Madness and MotherhoodT A N Y A F R A N K For Zach and the elephant seals “Insanity—a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”—RD LAING CONTENTS Author’s Note BIRTHING SEASON Winter 2017 ONE The Break TWO Psychosis Nos THREE Formidable FOUR Pretty Boy FIVE Transplant SIX Renaissance Man of the Year SEVEN Shifting Diagnoses EIGHT Crash NINE Año Nuevo TEN Stranded ELEVEN On the Streets TWELVE Home THIRTEEN The Swaff FOURTEEN The Langham FIFTEEN Yorkshire SIXTEEN Cranworth SEVENTEEN Pulled Over EIGHTEEN Lockdown NINETEEN Lesson TWENTY Home Acknowledgments AUTHOR’S NOTEDear reader,Zig-Zag Boy is a love story, an urgent tale of a fierce battle a mother wages for her child. I worry about telling such a personal story, one that isn’t just my own, but I hope that sharing it will help others to feel less alone, to give those of us who contend with psychosis a collective voice. Families like ours live on the edge, in a no-man’s-land, our voices often stifled or ignored by bureaucracy and archaic laws. Despite being the closest witness to Zach’s suffering, I came to realize that I was often unable to advocate for him, to break through the barriers created by current mental health systems.Psychosis is often thought to be genetic, or a symptom of brain chemistry gone awry, yet no disease markers show up in brain scans or blood tests. It may well be caused or triggered by the interplay of various factors we are just beginning to understand, from epigenetics to trauma to culture and environment.For many years I despised Los Angeles, because that was where Zach’s psychosis first presented, but now I know that LA didn’t cause this experience any more than I did. Psychosis is more complex than this.I hope that the simple idea of being with someone and not doing to them, of asking what has happened and not what is wrong, will resonate and proliferate. I firmly believe in the privilege of supporting each other in this way and will continue to advocate for such a basic philosophy, which will conserve money as well as lives and help to promote a more compassionate world.Tanya FrankFebruary 2023 Z I G - Z A GB O Y BIRTHING SEASONWINTER 2017I walk out to South Point. It is wild and desolate; the air smells of molted seal fur and guano. I take my binoculars so I can see her more clearly—the first elephant-seal mother to haul off. She is lumbering and clumsy as she heaves her body over the dunes and past the willow.Early winter is birthing season at Año Nuevo, the elephant-seal sanctuary in Northern California where I am training to be a docent. My fellow volunteers are eating lunch in the barn. I am alone out here. Walking helps. I make new footprints in the sand, my skin tingling in the salty air. I clench my fists and release them.Out on Cove Beach, the surfers in their black wetsuits carve up the face of a wave. My boy used to surf, raising his limber body onto a shortboard. That was when he trusted the water and its purity. I didn’t suspect that anything could get in the way of his dreams.The mother seal dives into the water when the beta males aren’t looking. She knows that if she is caught they will try to mate with her, just in case she hasn’t been impregnated by the alpha. It doesn’t matter that she is spent and famished.Somehow, she isn’t spotted. Her skin shimmers like silver foil as she dips into the surf. She heads out into the deeper, darker water where she moves more easily and only has herself to think about. She doesn’t look back at her pup, who lifts up his head and chest from the beach as he searches for her. This is the first time she has left her baby’s side since his birth. She has given him all of herself, even when the tides were wild and threatening, when the huge elephant-seal bulls rose around her, roaring and fighting violently for the alpha position, when she was empty from birthing and had lost one-third of her body weight from lactating and fasting.Now something tells her it is time to leave him, to ignore her pup’s cries that carry on the breeze. He continues to call the way he has done for the last month, the sound that had always worked to keep her close and protective of him. But she is far away now, hungry for fish and squid, deep-diving, alone. Her blubbery pup is still too fat to swim, and his buoyancy would attract the sharks. He must slim down and learn when to take the plunge himself. I stare at him, stranded, rejected.The pups have a fifty percent chance of surviving their maiden voyage, and even if this pup one day makes it back to Año Nuevo, to the very same breeding ground where he was conceived and born, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that he and his mother will ever reunite. The mother will forget the scent of her pup, his cry and the bond they forged during their early days together; she will mate again, give birth and propagate. She is all instinct.As I stand on the bluff I think about Zach, my youngest son, lying at home, curled up inside his sleeping bag, hands over his ears to shut out the voices only he hears.My eyes prick with tears behind my sunglasses, and then I am crying more freely, fiercely, and it hurts my throat. I want to climb down to the beach and pick up the seal pup, to feed him myself, but the laws of nature govern here at the reserve. There can be no human intervention.I leave South Point and make my way back under the low sky. The marine haze is still heavy on the northern side of the reserve. The other