On the Brink
By Regina Landor
April 15, 2026
April 15, 2026
“Please tell me what’s wrong.” An ache rolled behind my forehead from the twisted expression I felt in my eyes and brows.
I’d been here before, a few years prior, when he was in fourth grade. His school counselor told my husband and me that our son is “excessively shy.” We understood shy. We could live with shy. We had more language when he was diagnosed with ADHD. We had drug options. The drugs made him lose his appetite. I begged him to eat dinner. He preferred eggs. I made him one omelette after another. He grew. He cried one afternoon but he wouldn’t tell me why. Finally, he told me he didn’t want to have ADHD.
Sitting on our new couch in our new embassy housing, all our household belongings on a ship somewhere, holding my son’s hand after school that fall, his lanky limbs smooth and white, his track uniform still on, he sat immovable. He wouldn’t speak. The sun was setting behind the iron bars covering the window to the garden, the rain having ceased for the day giving us some reprieve from a typical rainy season in that mountainous city. Soon the hillsides would explode with tiny yellow flowers. We didn’t know that yet. The interiors dripped with incessant wet on the concrete walls and we all hated Addis Ababa in the beginning from being cold non-stop, and because we longed for cycle rickshaws, for mangoes, for coconuts with their tops lopped off and a straw stuck in the center to drink when we had a belly ache. We longed for what we knew from where we’d just come.
Finally, some movement in his face. He succumbed to the pressure in his body. He was able to move the words from his heart to his mouth. He was able to blurt out through sobs, “I miss my friends.”
I saw their faces, their warm, sticky bodies of varying shades enveloping him in the lobby of our school in Dhaka, leaning into him for one more hug. I stood against a doorway watching my boy. He wore a tee-shirt with funny, endearing expressions—good luck chicken butt, I’m gonna miss you like crazy—signed by his sixth grade peers.
They clustered around him that late afternoon, his blond floppy hair tucked behind his ears, his blue eyes and long lashes looking up into my camera. But move we must. The Foreign Service was the life we chose. My husband’s job with the United States Agency for International Development was calling us. USAID kept us in Bangladesh for four years, but now we were in a new country—Ethiopia.
He found his seventh grade people at last. They played Dungeons & Dragons. They walked the few blocks from school, across the rows of traffic near the church where white-robed men and women gathered in the courtyard under the clanking bells, past the stray dogs sunning themselves on the sidewalk, under the branches of acacia trees near his Spanish friend’s home where his friend’s mom laid out bread for dunking in olive oil and the parents smoked pot while the boys played D&D and slept on the floor of the living room. For two years he had his people.
When we moved again, back to the U.S., we didn’t know that trauma could weasel its way into a child’s heart from repeated goodbyes. My husband and I set our own hearts on the future—our two boys would have the American high school experience we hoped they’d have.
Our elder son needed a physical for cross country and when the pediatrician asked him to bend over so she could examine his spine, my heart stopped for a sec when she asked, “Was his spine ever examined by your embassy doctor?” because I couldn’t remember his spine ever being examined by any doctor.
The x-ray lit up a lazy river running down my son’s back. The orthopedist told us, point-blank, “You’ll have to wear a back brace until you stop growing. Twenty-four seven,” he said. “You can take it off when you shower and when you run.”
The doctor closed the door behind him as my son put his head on my shoulder. We cried together in that examination room.
He stopped talking to his peers. He didn’t attend the annual cross country spaghetti dinner. “Why would I eat spaghetti in someone else’s house?” I laughed but I thought to myself, Kid, ya gotta make an effort here.
He wore oversized clothes. He removed his brace in the locker room, put the clunky plastic in a shopping bag, carried it to the field, and shoved his belongings against the bleachers during practice. At night, I could hear him behind his bedroom door releasing and fastening the velcro as if he would wear that thing like a shackle just to feel anything other than the pain of loss.
Eleventh grade. What could he do to release his rage—at the brace, at having ADHD, from moving and leaving friends? He could play his violin. Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E Minor came from his bedroom, from his instrument, and became the soundtrack of our home and of the pandemic, the minor notes filling our minds with the beauty of them and preparing us for unthinkable sadness.
And he could run. Like the wind, that boy met his goal—a 4:30 mile. He and a trackmate kept pace with each other, urging each other on. They were a blur in the trees as I watched a race on a hilltop in Maryland. I ran across the field to catch up to them.
“Who won?” I shouted. They were neck and neck up to the end.
“I did,” his friend panted, laughed. He flung an arm around my son’s shoulder and drew him in for a hug as my heart soared by that gesture of camaraderie. “But he beat me last time.”
He ran so hard that year he fractured his foot. He was still in that boot when cross country season rolled around again, senior year. And like the song about the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, once that foot stopped working, all the rest became unhinged.
~~~
“I think your son is having a mental breakdown.” I stood in my preschool classroom after my students left for the day trying to comprehend the words on my phone. My son’s therapist sent them to me and I didn’t know what they meant.
I sped home through yellow lights. What does that even mean? My mind returned to the conversation with my son from the previous night. “It’s like all my friends have died. Everyone I knew died. Three times,” he said, again and again.
At home, our son paced, moving up and down the stairs, a caged animal. He threw pills across the room. He pulled me towards him and told me he loved me. I was as tall as the top of his enclosed heartbeat and it fluttered within like a bird wanting out. He wouldn’t stop saying he loved me, a stranger’s words emerging from my son’s mouth. He hugged me like he was trying not to slide into a black hole. We put blankets on the L-shaped sectional in our lower level and he agreed to sleep on one side, me on the other. My husband sat up in a chair all night, following him each time he sprang off the couch and up the stairs. Before I fell asleep I looked up the word “psychosis.” I read the words over and over, trying to understand a condition that causes a person to be out of touch with reality.
My husband and I couldn’t recognize our son. Where is our son in his face? He agreed to get in the car in the morning and we drove to the ER. The pandemic was raging. Only one of us was allowed in there. My husband accompanied him as our son yelled at a nurse.
I signed all the papers then my husband and I sobbed in our car in the parking lot before driving home. The one consolation I felt—the tiny bit of relief—was that he was still 17. He’d be placed in the children’s ward of the behavioral health unit, the BHU. He was still a child. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words “psych ward.”
~~~
The night he came home was the same night he packed a bag and took off. He told us later, when he came home after midnight with wet, grassy feet, that he’d tried to sleep in a park near our home.
No longer a child, he became detached from reality again. He went on long walks when everyone in the house was asleep. He jumped in a pond at midnight.
What I learned is that all you have is pattern. It’s what informs us. It’s what landed him the bipolar disorder diagnosis. The best description I’ve heard from the slew of medical professionals is that the brain is like a big ball of yarn. I get it. How do you untangle all that yarn?
And then—he signed up for classes, he did homework, held down a job, and fed the cat while I left him alone and went abroad to visit my husband. USAID would soon topple like a pile of Lincoln Logs. I returned home. Only one of my plants had died.
He wanted friends. He met no one. And I pondered again about how, from the moment of conception, we do everything to keep our children alive, to see that they thrive. We feed them, shop for them, keep them clean, cut their fingernails, frame pictures of them as toddlers in the bathtub with their bubbly wet smiles, sign them up for sports and classes, drive them anywhere, take them everywhere, around the world, to the moon if we could. Except we cannot give them friends. We want to hold their hand. We don’t want to let go but we must let go.
He stopped sleeping again as mania hurtled towards him. I thought about the words from one of his doctors: “What 21 year old young man wants to be told he has a mental illness?” His third breakdown crept upon us and then hit us full-on. He came home with a new drug: lithium. He emerged from his cloud. He was home from the wild language of his accusations. Home, for now, tying his shoes to go to the gym and asking me with his sweet, gentle smile what’s for dinner and if I’d make an apple pie.
But then—“I feel fine,” he said after a few weeks. He told me and my husband he doesn’t need drugs. No matter what I said, how I begged, how angry I became, how loving I behaved he refused to take the meds. I sat up with him for hours the night he told us he’d stopped taking them. Finally, I had to go to sleep.
~~~
I wake up to a noise from the floor above me. I look at my phone. 3:05. I get out of bed, see my son’s light is on. I crack open his door, glance at his rumpled sheets. Upstairs, the front door is unlocked. I startle my husband awake. “He’s gone,” I say. We both lie in bed not saying a word. I’m not confident he’ll return, that he’ll ever come back. At 3:55, I hear the front door open.
June 20, 2025, 6:45 a.m. I bolt from my bed when I hear him shout. He’s yelling at my husband not to come into his room. “Get the fuck out!”
He eats a nectarine at the kitchen sink. I notice his long, lean fingers, elegant, pale tools for spreading wide on violin strings. His violin teacher used to keep a small pouch of nail clippers for his young students. It drove me nuts that he’d take time out of the expensive lesson to clip his nails, but I’m always happy when those nails are gone. I notice his unclipped fingernails as he eats his piece of fruit, twisting it around with each bite like he’s tightening a ball of yarn. I have a longing to take his hand and hold each finger over a wastepaper basket and clip those nails. He shuffles to the garbage can to drop in the pit where my husband stands holding open the lid. Hands shaking, he lifts a spoon up to his mouth to finish his bowl of cereal. He’s experiencing withdrawals from the drugs. His doctor told us on the phone the day before that messing around with lithium can be lethal. We watch him eat.
We get our bags ready and lead him to the front door. He cries, screams. “No! No! No! I just want to lie down.” He jerks away from our arms and makes it downstairs.
My husband calls the crisis center.
He lets me come into his room. I sit next to him on the bed. He’s calm. I wrap his delicate fingers through mine. I whisper to him, “Dad and I love you and your brother more than anything in the world.” He’s still. “And we’re scared. You’re not well right now. What we love is buried. We’re so scared. You’re lost,” I say looking up into his face. I don’t want to tell him the police are coming, but I want to offer words as a way to prepare him for what’s going to happen.
He stares off into some unknown place. I hear him whisper, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault!” I put my arms around him and he leans into me. I don’t know if he feels my tears on the back of his neck but I know with my arms around him he feels my quiet heaving. His arms are limp at his side. I want to stay until the cops walk in the door, come into his bedroom. I won’t leave his side until they do.
When they loom over us sitting together on the bed and filling the space with the blackness of their uniforms, guns, tasers, hidden cameras, the cop nearest the bed, not the one blocking the door, speaks in a soft tone. He’s Hispanic. Something about the vulnerability of an accent comforts me. He asks my son to stand because he wants to check for knives or anything else, he says, and he rubs his hands up and down his pant legs and around the pocket of his hoodie. Then he asks him if he’d come with him and my son follows the cops up the stairs to the front door. They pause for him to slip on his Crocs. I stand on the sidewalk as my husband talks to the EMT drivers.
I watch my son. With the same legs he modeled for me after a run one afternoon, posing in the sun on our front door stoop and flexing his calf muscles as I smile at him and take a picture, he steps into the back door of the ambulance. As it rolls to the end of the block and turns the corner the sirens blast. My son hates loud noises. Was he covering his ears? Was someone holding his hand?
~~~
Eight months later, I’m sitting up in bed reading my book. It’s late. I’m waiting for him to come home. Earlier, I watched as he grabbed his bottle of pills from the dining room table and popped a couple in his mouth. We lent him the car for the night. It’s past the time he said he’d be home.
“Where are you?” I text.
My phone pings. “We’re getting food.”
I stop myself from reprimanding. Instead I go for, “How was bowling?”
“Fun.”
“Who won?”
“I did.”
My heart speeds up. I put my phone down and stare at the wall. Another ping. I zoom in on the picture he’s sent. A ragamuffin crew of guys from his job, bunched together, one guy lying on the floor posing. In the picture, my son is part of the group. He’s holding his bag of food by his side, and he looks like he’s about to start laughing.
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Regina Landor is seeking representation for her memoir of living abroad while raising her two boys, both with mental health challenges. She’s an alum of The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her essays have appeared in Salon, Black Fork Review, Tales of a Small Planet, Brevity Blog, The Foreign Service Journal, The Rappahannock Review, and the anthology Peace Corps at 50. She and her husband served with USAID for 17 years and raised their sons in the U.S., Serbia, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Substack: @thistravelinglife Website: www.reginalandor.com/@reginas_cooking |
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Author’s Note:
This piece is dedicated to the volunteers of the Rockville, Maryland chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) for the compassion shown to me and my husband while we lived there.