Comedian Zack Stovall reevaluates his past battles with his mother in light of a new diagnosis.

Zack Stovall is a writer, producer, cartoonist, and comedian. He currently produces the Story Collider and has performed stand-up and sketch comedy across the South, Midwest, and New York. Zack has written for St. Louis Magazine and Vulture, and is the author of a collection of cartoons, 'Fancy Things.' He currently lives in New York City with his wife, Rebekah, and their goldendoodle, Newman. Zack tweets as @zstovall and lost most of his hair sometime in 2009.

This story originally aired on May 23, 2019 in an episode titled “Mental Health, Part 2.”

Story Transcript

So I’m eight years old at Dale’s Donuts.  I’m with my friend and his dad.  His dad looks at his watch and he begins scrambling because he's got to get me home by noon.  I had spent the night with them earlier. 

He starts rushing and we’re trying to delay and he stops me and he goes, “Zack, I’m not scared of your dad,” who happens to be six-foot-five, 300 pounds, former marine police officer.  “I’m not scared of your dad.  I’m scared of your mom.” 

My mom was really interesting.  Throughout my childhood, I'd be playing baseball games and you'd be able to pick her out because there was a small perimeter around her in the stands.  She would yell things, like most parents do at their kids, but instead of ‘woo’ or ‘yay’ or general support, she would get very specific.  She’d be like, “Widen your stance,” “Shoulder width,” “Extend your arms,” “Lock your elbows,” “No,” “Why,” “Swing,”  “No, no, no.  Why?” 

I like to think that I missed out on a couple of All-Star games because of that but, really, I wasn’t that good. 

Mom and I had a really interesting relationship.  She worked nights a lot at the beginning.  She works for the post office and she has the night shift for the first little while.  One morning, she had come home early and my brother and I woke up.  We decided to we wanted to go get some cereal, and we’re going to go get the top-shelf stuff, Golden Grahams. 

Being kids and it being on the top shelf, we decided we were not going to just get a stool or anything to go climb up.  We would jump up, open the door, jump up again and grab the cereal, jump up a third time to slam it shut.  This is an indelicate maneuver, obviously. 

So we obviously wake up my mom and instead of coming out and just saying, “Hey, stop it.  I've been working all night,” she comes out and just starts screaming, opening the doors of the cabinets and slamming them shut, saying something along the lines of, “This is what it sounds like,” just screaming at the top of her lungs, opening and shutting and slamming.  It sounded like the band Stomp if they were falling down a flight of stairs, but they're supposed to love you. 

It was, in a word, terrifying.  My little brother, I remember, didn’t finish his cereal because of that.

But I think the most interesting thing about growing up with my mom was definitely the elementary school talent shows. 

So I’m from a small town.  You might have heard of it.  It’s called Arkansas.  Our school town shows were like big deals.  You know those stereotypical Southern dads who are like, “My boy is going to play football,” “My boy is going to play quarterback,” and, “My boy is going to love beer,” my mom was kind of like that only it was, “My son is going to sing,” “My son is going to sing in public,” “My son is going to sing contemporary Christian rock songs.”  Guys, I was not good. 

And we’re talking about bangers only, the hits.  Steven Curtis Chapman, DC Talk, Jars of Clay, the Christian version of a boy band - 4Him.  The hits.  I would do this every year and every year I would object strenuously. 

I would say, “No, I don't want to do this anymore.”

And she’d say, “No, you have to.  You're so good.”

I'd be like, “No, I’m not.” 

And she’d be like, “You have to.” 

Then one year I just snap.  I go, “No, I’m not doing it this year.”  She finally convinces me to do it but I say, “If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it on my terms,” which is a very bold thing for a fourth grader to say.  I drew a line on the sand.  No more contemporary Christian rock songs. 

The problem, fourth graders don’t have any taste.  They have no taste.  There's no Pitchfork Magazine within those classic bookmobile flyers.  They don’t exist.  The only think I cared about were superhero movies and eating meals designed for adults.  That’s all I cared about. 

But I was in luck.  Fourth grade, a superhero movie had come out.  Batman Forever came out.  It came out and everybody knew what it was.  It had a soundtrack and everything.  So I decided to sing, on my own volition, fourth grade, Seal’s Kiss from a Rose.  You never realize how sexually graphic the song Kiss from a Rose is until it’s sung at you poorly by a morbidly obese fourth grader in an ill-fitting vest. 

For those of you who don’t remember, the lyrics go something like this.  It’s like, “Baby…”

Sir, you are just a baby like eight years ago. 

“I compare you to a kiss by a rose on the grave.” 

What does that even mean?  Are you getting molested by an undertaker?  Whoa! 

“Ooh, the more I get of you, the stranger it feels.” 

This is already extremely strange. 

“But now that your rose is in bloom…”

This round boy is talking about vaginas. 

“A light hits the gloom on the grave.  Dadada.” 

My small-town church elders all gathered to figure out whether they were going to run us out on a rail or just burn our house down.  Men were screaming and women were crying and children were puking and all were denying the existence of God. 

So I waddle off stage and my mom is back there because, of course, she forced her way back stage. 

She goes, “Zack, you did such a great job.  You're the best.  Everyone loved it.  I love you so much.  Way to go.”  Completely untethered from the reality of what had just occurred. 

And that continued, that sort of distance from what was actually going on versus what she was saying was going on. 

A few years ago, I got a call from my dad and he said, “Son, your mom’s cheese has finally slid off the cracker,” which, like most Arkansas phrases, sounds like it has a long proud history but has never existed before. 

“Son, your mom’s cheese has finally slid off the cracker.  She moved out three months ago and she's been living with her parents, your grandparents.” 

I didn’t know what to think.  None of us did.  We would try to reason with her.  We tried to talk to her.  We’d call her.  She’d answer the phone and seems like everything was normal.  And we tried to say, “Hey, what’s going on?  Is there something wrong?  My dad certainly isn’t blameless in any problems that you guys would have in your relationship,” and she would just push us away to the point where she would hang up as she was screaming at us. 

She would completely distance herself from what was going on to the point that when… my dad wasn’t one for ultimatums, but what he did say was when she took half of their retirement savings in order to buy her own house, he said, “This is effectively the end of our marriage,” and he told her that. 

So he went to the bank to sign over the paperwork and then she's walking in, he's walking out visibly upset.  She looked at him and she goes, “What’s wrong?”  Completely untethered from the reality we were seeing. 

She would also create stories that put herself as the victim always.  One Christmas, fairly recently, we went over to her house and we spent eight hours with her that day.  Then we went to go leave and see my great aunts on my dad’s side, great aunt and great uncle.  She got so incensed, so mad she drove 45 minutes to where I was staying with my brother and she took all of our gifts that we had gotten her for Christmas and threw them in the front yard in the rain and said she never wanted to see us again.  Completely untethered. 

After that my brother and I started talking.  His wife is a psychologist, M.D., and she told us about something called borderline personality disorder.  She gave me four books on it.  I read them all and they described my mom to a T. 

It’s a disorder.  It’s not like depression.  And not to generalize about depression but where there's a chemical imbalance where you can take medication and sort of weather that.  This is conditional therapy that they have to be willing to take. 

It’s extremely high functioning so it’s extremely hard to diagnose.  My mom was able to hold down a job for years.  She would always say the right things sometimes and then she would always come down with the worst things also. 

It’s always very contradictory.  She would say stuff like, “I can’t be selfish,” “I hate myself,” “You don’t know how much I love you,” “I don't want to see you anymore.”  And this contradiction would cause us to have to set up what books about borderline personality disorder would tell you are boundaries.  You have to establish rules for people, for your loved ones to interact with. 

In order to interact with them, they have to abide by these rules.  And when they don’t, you have to keep them at bay, otherwise it’s a symptom called caretaking where you will actually start to exhibit those behavior just to avoid those behaviors in another person, and it will begin to manifest as a personality disorder of your own. 

I've always thought of my mom’s condition as sort of like this time traveler’s terminal illness.  Usually, a terminal illness somebody gets sick.  They may last for a year, a few years, but there's a finite amount of time and then that person is gone forever. 

My mom has been sort of in and out.  After that Christmas, I didn’t talk to her for three years until we ended up seeing each other at my niece’s birthday party, which she then made a scene during and left.  But the last ten months have been great. 

One of the things about borderline is that it’s very hard to diagnose because the people don’t want to hear it.  They'll get very violent and push that away so we've never had an opportunity to even talk about this.  The only thing that we have even gotten close to talking about is when I was visiting this summer, my mom looked at me and goes, “Pete Davidson, he's got borderline personality disorder.  He made it Saturday Night Live.”  And that’s it. 

So throughout this entire journey with my mom, I've been asking myself this one question.  What’s the difference between somebody with an overt, abject mental illness and somebody who’s just really being a complete and total asshole?  I've sort of come to realize that when it’s somebody you love, it doesn’t really matter.  You'll take them through whenever they're time traveling in with their disease.  Sometimes it’s good.  Sometimes it’s bad.  Sometimes a light hits the gloom on the grave, and you have to leave your hometown for forever. 

Thank you, guys.