An excerpt from Are You My Son?, a memoir.

The year I got my hands on a book called “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask),” was the same year my mother was admitted to a mental hospital. In my case the book would have been much more aptly titled, “Way Too Much Sex Info (Long Before You’re Ready For It).” And it probably should have been bound a bit more sturdily, to better withstand my ravaging of its pages. The mental hospital was Steilacoom, first founded as Fort Steilacoom by the U.S. Army on a formerly tranquil piece of the Puget Sound, then abandoned as a military fort and reopened, its barracks filling up this time with the mentally infirmed. That happened in 1871–almost one hundred years to the year before my mother and I crossed its threshold.

It was now somewhere between my eleventh and thirteenth birthdays, and my hormones were on the verge of officially declaring themselves mutinous. As if that weren’t enough, I lived in an almost constant state of self-inflicted information overload. I hadn’t decided yet if life was one big mystery or just a series of conundrums, but in either event it seemed apparent that the adults in my life either didn’t have any more clues than I did, or had conspired to keep them to themselves.

So I read insatiably, to the point of playing hooky from school to hang out in the local library. To a prepubescent sleuth it seemed the perfect hideout, highly classified archives with forbidden titles stacked from floor to ceiling, just waiting to be cracked wide open. One of my earliest brushes with the angst of betrayal may well have been when I learned that truant officers had shown up, and The Nice Public Library Lady whom I’d assumed was an ally, had snitched.

And then there was my mother. As of late she’d been acting unusual, even for her. Which is what brought us to Steilacoom, her for a stay and me for a visit.

I wasn’t surprised by Steilacoom’s massive size. For some reason I had expected it to be big, even formidable. But I think I might have been hoping for something more like a castle than a fortress-something similar but softer around the edges-like the difference between saying “mental hospital,” or “asylum for the insane.” I had half expected I think, to see my mother precariously perched on an upper sill, hugging a turret with one arm and with the other, wildly flagging her kerchief. And when I saw this, everything would make sense and I would be filled with courage, and would know exactly what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to do it.

Instead, as I stood looking up from Steilacoom’s cold courtyard into stark undressed windows, I felt small and towered over, spied upon by the hollow eyes of a stern taskmaster. If the stone facade and crumbling columns of Steilacoom’s exterior walls were mammoth and austere, its interior walls were that, and more. They behaved, it seemed to me, as if they had once been alive but were now actively dying–prone to perspiring heavily and groaning ghost sounds, like my mother’s father when I last saw him on his deathbed a few years back. My mother seemed to read my thoughts when noticing my observance of them. “Don’t worry about those poor old walls, honey. They can’t help themselves. It’s their calling to give up the ghosts.”

Of the two incidents that stand out from my visit to Steilacoom, only one directly involves my mother. The one that doesn’t is of a stooped little woman in a quilted housecoat and padded slippers with a frayed towel wrapped turban-style around her head. She gravitates toward the asylum’s one lone, ancient piano when anywhere within its vicinity, as if an invisible magnet pulls at her. Scooting across the bench she bows prayerfully over the keys. Her head slowly begins to move to her own steady rhythm; chin up–then bowed, up–then bowed, like a bobber being tugged by an unseen predator from underneath the water’s dark surface.

She plays only one song, “Hey Jude” which has been out a few years now, since its release by Paul McCartney when I was only eight or so. While she plays I fancy that she is experiencing a kind of leaving go of her senses, but a good kind; that as the fragile harmonic bubbles filled with melancholy drift outward, some part of her soars, distancing her from that unseen predator, lurking it seems to me, from somewhere down inside her. 

I know most of the words: “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better…”

Maybe I really don’t know the words. Maybe the walls, sure to have heard this rendition more than any of us, have memorized them and are murmuring them back into the ears of anyone who might listen: “And anytime you feel the pain, hey Jude, refrain. Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders…”

I can’t escape the feeling that the hunched piano lady is the asylum’s own Pied Piper, that her release is a kind of calling together of kindred spirits, and that for whatever time I stay within these walls, I am one of them.

“Hey Jude” will take on even more meaning for me when I learn that it was written by a caring father figure for a son, about the son’s special relationship to his mother during a particularly dark time. 

Then there is the Steilacoom incident that does involve my mother. Waiting for my oldest brother and his wife to consult with staff, my mother and I are alone together in a holding room that the other rooms and hallways empty into.  Men and women mill around us, glassy eyes and shuffling feet passing through, but to where? 

My mother sits alone in the corner, in a high-backed wooden chair that like so many other things here, gives off the impression that it hasn’t always sat stiff and shoved aside. That once it lived a very different life, with others of its kind, gathered around a grand table adorned for entertainment. It is accompanied only by its rickety twin that I sit myself down in, to be next to my mother. She is chain-smoking while simultaneously staring and blowing smoke into the air in front of her. She doesn’t seem aware of me for a minute or maybe longer. Then she turns my direction and I see her mommy face, the upward lilt of the corners of her mouth and shiny glint in her eyes which always makes me feel better, at least fairly certain that she knows who I am and is glad to see me. I seize the opportunity to ask the burning question on my mind. “Mom,” (I have recently decided I am too grown up to call her “Mommy.”) “What’s it like, living in this place?”

She doesn’t answer, instead asking a question of her own. “Honey, how old are you now? Such a big boy already!” Then she specifies a couple of years of age. “Eleven? Thirteen?” 

I don’t register exactly which ages she asks about, or my response. Only that neither of her guesses is correct, which amplifies the out-of-time-and-place sensation I’ve been feeling since I arrived here, that maybe I have it wrong and it’s been months or years and not just a few weeks since my mother and I last saw each other. 

But then she says, “I’m coming home you know. Soon I think! Maybe today even. That doctor keeps asking me if I know why I’m here. He supposedly runs this place, so why’s he asking me? No wonder we’re in such a mess. I’ve seen barnyards in better shape.” 

“Are you hearing voices?” She parrots the doctor. “That’s the other thing he keeps asking. ‘Of course I’m hearing voices, I told him. Everyone is, or at least they should be. How else can any of us expect to hear the call of God on our life, or for that matter, resist the devil’s temptations?’”

Then she leans in with more of a whisper and one long string of oscillating syllables: “That’s just it though, sometimes I’m not sure it’s even the doctor I’ve been talking to the way he hides out and when you do see him it’s such a fright how he peers at you through those goggled eyes of his, brings to mind those giant toads your uncles used to bring home, dangling them at me their eyes bulging like that before they got their hind legs whacked off for soup, what a bloody mess that was, tastes like chicken they used to say, I never really thought so, your father had a cow once with those same eyes called her Betsy or some such name but I always thought Buggy-Eyes was more like it…”

I have long since grown accustomed to hearing my mother talk like this, phrases darting off in all directions, an audible game of connect the dots gone squirrelly. Sometimes where she ends up seems a gazillion miles away from where she started. I’m also accustomed to the way her voice trails off, like now, as her thoughts become less and less connected and her speech less intelligible. 

In a moment she collects herself, scanning the surrounding rooms and hallways and their inhabitants. Then it arrives. Between puffs of smoke, she leans in again. With a soft voice into my ear, she answers my question, delivering the unintended punch line with complete sincerity and just the right emphasis: “Honey, please get me out of here. Just look at these people. A person could go crazy living in a place like this!”