He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the wood stove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like? I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick.
The thing about depression is that, if you're not the one who's suffering from it, there's very little you can do to be proactive. If someone in your family is depressed, all you can really do is send them to the shrink, get them their meds, be gentle, and wait. A persistent bedwetting problem, however, is a call to action. Surely there must be a way to stop a small amount of liquid from moving a short distance during a certain time of day.
It's a very tangible, physical problem. A science project, really. Combating my depression was a job for an army of geniuses. But the solution to my bedwetting problem, Dad still believed, was within his grasp. It really killed Dad that I couldn't stop wetting the bed. He was a bedwetter as a kid, too. And, his father, too. For a while I had to wear diapers to bed. That way there was no messy changing of the sheets. It was humiliating, but I got used to it.
Plus, it was convenient. But it was just a Band-Aid, and Dad wasn't about to give up on me. He put an electric pad under my sheet, designed to set off an alarm when moistened. Though "alarm" doesn't really do it justice, I'd call it more of a shocking, heart-attack-causing scream. That first night of the screaming aluminium sheet was the last night I slept at my dad's house. I mean, I still spent the night as the joint-custody schedule dictated, but I didn't sleep. The horror of waking up to that stunning alarm kept me up most of the night, or until my body couldn't fight it any longer — and you know what happens then: total submission, and all it entails.
I was sent to another shrink. When I told him I was taking 16 Xanax a day, he was horrified. He called my mother in and told us that this was fucked-up shit I'm paraphrasing and that his very own brother died going off Xanax cold turkey.
He explained that I would go off the Xanax gradually, a half a pill less each week. It was eight months before I was completely off meds — and the day I took that very last swallow of half a Xanax was the happiest day of my life to that point. I finally grew, bladder and all. Around the time that I got my driver's licence, and the final traces of Xanax left my system, and the cloud of depression lifted, my enuresis went away.
Just as the doctor had predicted, more than a decade before. I was a late bloomer all around. My period came late, my ability not to go off like a fucking lawn sprinkler every night came late, and sex came late.
Essentially, everything having to do with the general flow of traffic in my vagina came late. Ironically, I was this girl in high school through whom everyone came to learn about sex, though I, myself, had never gone past kissing a boy. And then, in the summer before my last year of high school, I had my first experience of live comedy. I'd never been inside a comedy club before, and I was underage, but somehow I weaselled my way in. As I entered, I heard a woman's voice on the mike.
It was Wendy Liebman , who at the time was an emerging talent but would go on to become a major comic. Each joke she told was funnier than the one before it. I was blown away. I found out when the next open mike was and signed up. My first set was pretty successful. I told some jokes about high school and ended the gig with a song about being flat-chested, which at the time I was. I was not especially nervous. It might be that I'm one of those people who are naturally comfortable on a stage.
Or maybe my lack of stage fright was the upside of years of nightly bedwetting. Maybe that daily shame had ground away at my psyche, like glaciers against the coastline, so that somewhere in my consciousness, I understood that bombing on stage could never be as humiliating. My early trauma was a gift, it turned out, in a vocation where your best headspace is feeling that you have nothing to lose. Sarah Silverman: My nightly terror. For the young Sarah Silverman, sleepovers were hell, school camp a nightmare.
Because until she was 16 she regularly wet the bed. The comedian writes of the shame, the soaked sheets and the plus-sized nappies that haunted her childhood. Topics Sarah Silverman Comedy Children extracts.
Reuse this content. Share Tweet. You May Also Like. Michael Ordman November 15, Reggie Reiner December 9, Travel Rating Israeli hotels. Jewish Business News January 1, As the title makes explicit, her early life was dominated by one very specific handicap, which continued well into her teens and left her feeling isolated, ashamed and unhappy.
Sleepovers and school trips became psychological torture for a girl who already felt a misfit, as a Jew in a town of New Hampshire Protestants. Family tragedy — the accidental death of a baby brother, her parents' divorce — is mentioned only as an aside, its impact deflected by retrospective wisecracking: a section in which she attempts to joke about her baby brother's death to the grandmother in whose care he died is sub-headed "The First Time I Bombed"; another, about the miseries of summer camp, is called "The Second Worst Kind of Camp for Jews".
Perhaps the rawest part of the book is her description of sudden, paralysing teenage depression. This is the tone that informs the childhood sections of the memoir; Silverman has clearly decided this isn't going to be The Bell Jar , and in her recollections of her depression she creates an impression of intimacy without giving away much about its deeper impact. Her treatment at the hands of the medical establishment seems horrific: by the age of 14 she was taking 16 Xanax a day.
When her stepfather asked what it was like to be depressed, she replied: "I feel homesick. It's hard to escape the sense that she is so determined to avoid the slightest hint of self-pity that she stops short of saying anything really meaningful, though she makes explicit the connection between her unhappiness at school and her apparently fearless desire to make audiences laugh: "Maybe my lack of stage fright was the upside of years of nightly bedwetting… My early trauma was a gift, it turned out, in a vocation where your best headspace is feeling you have nothing to lose.
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