Why Mrs. Manic? Why Embrace the Label?

I've been asked why I choose the blog moniker "Mrs. Manic." Frankly, like most things I do, it was the first thing that popped into my head. But I've been thinking about this blog for a long time. And generally, when I let things stew for long enough my subconscious (we'll call it Fred) works these things out all neatly for me.

I never took Mr. Manic's name when we married. It never occurred to me. In fact the only time I ever did an online search for how I could legally change my born name was when work slapped my legal name and not my name of preference on my email, confusing both colleagues and customers. That was last week. I've been married for the better part of a decade.

The Mr. Manic Fred calls forth to my mind's eye is a very specific image of my spouse from a poem he wrote that goes a little something like this:

A graceful ghost
plays stumble bum
pianissimo
and shuffles
off the buffalo
his astaire frayed and threadbare.

He lurches
with the snap
into a minor key.
The melody wanders like a lost soul
dancing on the ceiling.

Caterwauled and vaulted
into stone
heaven,
his echo re-echoes
fanfare and flourish,
percussive steel
toes play taps
in remorse code,
a bit of the old soft shoe.

Marleyed Boo Jangles
taxidancing with Madame X
for spare
prophecy.

This is the melody I unchained in life...

And that leaves me, in Internet parlance anyway, to be styled Mrs. Manic. In this blog, this space, not taking that name seems to distance me from my beloved. Not acknowledging that at the core of himself he has embraced the labels bipolar, manic depressive or merely crazy would be to dismiss the ways a label can be used as a battering ram, a whacking stick, a cave to hide in, a warm blanket and finally simply a jaunty flower for one's lapel.

Mr. Manic liked to shock the rubes with his madness in the protohistory of our life together. He would announce it at parties. I would grind my teeth. He would tell my friends before he had committed their names to memory. I would glare daggers. It's not his madness that rattled me, I like to think, as much as his rudeness.

But such behavior has its consequences. He did not have a drivers license. I heard endlessly of the years he did not have a car, did not drive and the depths to which he was uninterested in obtaining a license. I was unrepentant. You will get a drivers license, I insisted. It came up in counseling. "He will not get a drivers license," I would hiss at my end of the couch, the sane and defensive end. Our counselor would nod and Mr. Manic would astound her with yet another technicolor dream, dancing gracefully and distracting all comers with the shine of his charm and the glittering refractions of his madness.

Finally, Fred suggests, the badgering and foot stomping wore him down and Mr. Manic managed his way to be tested. The important question was asked (and here I imagine Billy Burke in her plastic crown and princess gown), "are you a good witch or a bad witch?"

To which witch, Mr. Manic giggles (remember this is my story) and answers that he is indeed, very, very bad. A check is made by the civil servant, whose pink sparkles have now vanished, on a form which will cause Mr. Manic and his Psych Doc to swear or affirm that he is not a menace to the driving public on a regular six monthly basis into eternity.

Mr. Manic was relatively new to his diagnosis when we crossed paths. I believe his struggle was to own it and not let it overwhelm or alter him. It is both at the core of what he is and incidental. We are now much more casual about both the label and the labeling. I use the term manic and manic depressive most usually, falling back on bipolar as a more clinical explanation if I share his status with co-workers. Our friends have long ago learned of his madness and sometimes gently ask if he's feeling a bit manic (or depressed).

Words get a good worn feel if you use them long enough like tools that come to fit themselves to your hand. Manic is not all that he is, but in this context, on this blog, he is wearing his tails, top hat and spats, taking his rented hands out for a spin, and I am playing Ginger Rogers, trying to follow his moves backwards and in high heels. He is Mr. Manic, and I am along for the ride.