Questions I Want to Ask My Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner

When you say That makes sense, does it actually make sense? Or do you just say that when someone says something so crazy you don’t know what else to say?  

Do you ever think that anyone is truly crazy, or have you been trained to think of us as something else?  

What is it? Can you tell me?  

And then can we be friends when this is all over? Because you make me feel like things will be okay.  

But will they, really?  

Are you allowed to lie to patients?   

Were you drawn to this field because you too fell off the deep end once? Or was it because you never have, but from the safety of the lifeguard chair, you saw someone slip and believed you could do something about it? 

Or was there someone you held once but couldn’t save, and now you try to save us to make up for the one that got away?  

​​​​​How does it feel to pull out someone who is drowning?  

Does it give you a high?  

Why else would you put yourself through all this? All the listening to someone talk about what it is like not to operate correctly, not to function in the brain sense, to stall out in the human sense. To stop working, like a deeply soaked thing that was never meant to get wet and is now impossibly heavy. ​     ​ 

Does it get old, all the brokenness? 

If you ever meet my mother, will you tell her she should have gone to you, decades ago, and still could? Since we are friends now?  

Can you tell her how you will listen and nod and look to the ceiling as if there are answers up there, in the panels, and then look back down with an idea, something to try to make everything hurt a little less?  

​​​​​​​Tell her there are so many roads to better without having to leave her family the way I always feared she would, trading us for the quiet of a snowdrift. 

Tell her she doesn’t need to drive a car into a lake like her grown baby brother did, in the daylight, looking for answers under the water.  

She doesn’t talk about him much.  

Can you tell her she can, and that it makes sense if she does? 

That it makes sense if she doesn’t.  

Shannon Dale is the mother of three young boys, a retired farmer and educator at thirty-nine, and an intrepid explorer of life with inflamed joints and eyeballs. She publishes a monthly advice column for fellow beleaguered parents as the Mediocre Mother on Substack and is proud to be one of the founding members of the Unreliable Narrators writing group in her home state of Montana.    

This essay is a Short Reads original.