Poker Face

Chapter 34

I realized within a week of him coming home that nothing had actually changed.

Not really.

The chaos had stopped. The suspicion seemed to have stopped. The all-night pacing and paranoia and bizarre behavior had stopped. He wasn’t hanging things from chandeliers anymore or accusing me of impossible things with the same manic intensity. On the surface, it looked calmer.

But underneath it, the delusions were still there.

Just quieter.

Controlled.

I started asking about the therapy he kept claiming he was getting because my therapist had finally told me she thought I was ready to move into the next phase: marital counseling. The plan was that we would each continue individual therapy separately, then eventually meet together with a third therapist who specialized in marriage counseling. She explained that our individual therapists would submit notes and observations beforehand so the counselor would have context going into it.

I remember asking her directly, “If he’s schizophrenic, would they know?” Would the marriage counselor see it?

Because by then, I had spent weeks researching every possible explanation for what had happened to my husband. I had gone down every rabbit hole I could find trying to figure out how a man I had known for twenty years suddenly became convinced I was conspiring against him, spying on him, leading him into traps, communicating through phones and televisions and invisible signals only he could see.

I knew what I had witnessed.

And the deeper I researched stimulant psychosis and schizophrenia, the more terrified I became by how closely the symptoms matched.

Paranoia.
Hallucinations.
Disorganized thinking.
Suspicion.
Insomnia.
Withdrawal.
Mood swings.
Rapid speech.
Delusions.
Fear.
Distrust.
Aggression.
Believing things were happening that were not actually happening.

Every single symptom was there.

Every single one.

The pacing all night long. Sleeping all day. The sweating. The obsessive talking. The cameras. The drones. The hidden meanings in everything. The accusations. The bizarre connections his brain was making between completely unrelated things. The belief that I was somehow orchestrating elaborate psychological attacks against him inside our own home.

I wasn’t imagining it.

And what terrified me most was that once the Adderall was gone, the beliefs themselves never fully disappeared.

This was the part nobody prepared me for. Adderall is prescribed every day to children and adults, and most people hear the name without thinking much about it. I know there are people it genuinely helps. But when abused, especially in high doses over long periods, stimulant medications can trigger terrifying psychiatric symptoms, and in some cases may unmask underlying mental illness that does not simply disappear once the drug is gone.

I am not a doctor. I only know what I witnessed, what I researched obsessively, and what never fully resolved afterward. And that terrified me.

I think I had naïvely assumed that once the drug left his system, he would wake up one day and realize none of it had been real. That he would look around and say, “Oh my God. I was sick.”

But that never happened.

The intensity lowered, but the framework remained. The accusations were still buried underneath conversations. The suspicion was still there. The thinking was still distorted. It was just more controlled now, like he understood he had scared everyone badly enough that he needed to contain it. He was using his poker face. And he was good at it. He had me fooled, once again. But, when you live with it, you catch glimpses. You catch what others never see.

And meanwhile, I was trying desperately to determine whether this was addiction, mental illness, or both.

My therapist told me that if there truly was an underlying psychotic disorder, a trained therapist would likely notice it eventually, especially if he became emotionally activated during sessions. She explained that my notes and concerns would be included beforehand, and that if his thinking became disorganized or paranoid in front of the counselor, it might finally lead to answers. She also was confident that when both of us were in front of a therapist, I would be triggering enough for them to see it clearly.

But when I brought up marriage counseling to him privately, he immediately resisted.

Hard.

He said there was no point because we would just have to go all the way back to the beginning of our relationship and unpack everything from day one. He said we would never agree on anything. That I had covered up too much. That therapy would just be pointless fighting because I wouldn’t be truthful.

And as he talked, I heard it again.

That language.

That twisting logic.
That paranoia underneath the words.
That same delusional framework quietly surfacing all over again.

That was when it hit me.

He hadn’t come home for me. He hadn’t come home for me at all.

He came home for the house.

For the couch.
For the routine.
For the comfort.
For the life that allowed him to exist exactly as he wanted to without accountability. For my enabling.

And I remember realizing, almost instantly, that therapy was never actually going to happen.

He had simply waited long enough to convince everyone he was stable enough to come back.

Then Christmas arrived.

And I lost my mind trying to make it magical.

The boys had already endured one of the hardest falls of their lives. Their dad had been out of the home for weeks. The house had been filled with fear and confusion and tension they didn’t fully understand. I knew something was deeply wrong even if I couldn’t fully explain it yet, and I think somewhere deep down I already understood that none of this was truly fixed.

So I overcompensated in the only way I knew how.

I created magic.

This was not a lazy, exhausted kind of Christmas where presents are tossed under a tree and everyone survives the day.

No.

I built an entire world.

Everything matched. The wrapping paper matched room to room. The lights glowed warm against the walls. The stockings were perfect. I wrapped gifts for hours and arranged them carefully like scenes in a movie. I bought matching buffalo plaid pajamas for the boys on Christmas Eve because I wanted them to wake up looking cozy and happy and safe in the photos. I wanted proof that for one morning, despite everything, they still had magic.

And the puppy.

God, the puppy.

Weeks earlier, we had secretly picked out a golden retriever puppy for Christmas, but the boys had no idea. On Christmas Eve, after they finally went to sleep, I drove to pick her up and took her to my brother-in-law’s house because she smelled so terrible from kennel filth that I had to bathe her over and over in the middle of the night before bringing her home.

At nearly one in the morning, exhausted and emotionally wrecked, I carried that puppy into our house with a giant red bow around her neck and hid her in my bedroom so she could “appear” Christmas morning like a miracle.

And honestly?

It worked.

That morning was beautiful.

The boys still believed in Santa. My oldest especially held onto the magic longer than most kids his age, and when they walked into the living room in their matching pajamas and saw the puppy under the glowing tree surrounded by mountains of perfectly wrapped presents, they lost their minds.

Xboxes.
TVs.
A couch for Gabriel’s room.
Every single thing they had wanted.

I gave them all of it.

I wasn’t trying to spoil them. I was trying to repair something I didn’t know how to fix.

The photos from that Christmas still hurt to look at because they are genuinely beautiful. The lights. The wrapping paper. The tree. The boys smiling with Bella curled beside them.

If you didn’t know the truth, you would think you were looking at the happiest family in the world.

But behind the camera was a woman desperately trying to hold reality together with Christmas magic.

And then, after Christmas, reality came crashing back in wearing muddy paws and razor teeth.

Bella was a nightmare.

Not a cute little clumsy puppy nightmare. A full-blown monster of an animal.

She barked back at me. Growled at me. Refused to potty train. Knocked the kids over constantly. She smelled awful for weeks because the worms were so bad, and despite all the money I had spent on this supposedly perfect golden retriever, she behaved like an unhinged gremlin trapped inside a fluffy dog body. Remember the movie from the ‘80s? Gremlins? The kitchen scene?

I cried over that dog more than once.

I wanted to send her back.

Instead, I dragged her to vet appointments while they treated her for worms over and over waiting for clearance for obedience classes. This AKC and beautifully pedigreed dog had to have been born in a barn. She had every parasite imaginable. She was a nightmare. All of this while simultaneously trying to hold together a marriage that was quietly collapsing all over again.

And somewhere shortly after New Year’s, whispers started circulating online about a virus overseas.

At first it sounded far away.
Temporary.
Unreal.

But I paid attention immediately because unlike most people, I already knew what viruses could do.

My son had been hospitalized repeatedly from ordinary illnesses. Normal flus had nearly destroyed him more than once. I had spent years terrified every winter already, so when reports started surfacing about a mysterious illness killing people overseas, my fear level went from cautious to catastrophic almost instantly.

People laughed it off at first.

I couldn’t.

I watched the stories spread from country to country with a pit already forming in my stomach, because all I could think was:

If normal viruses almost killed my child, what would this do to him?

And while the rest of the world was still debating whether COVID was real, serious, or overblown, I was already terrified because it had hopped on a plane and landed stateside.

If this chapter landed with you and would like to support my work, you may do so here:

Buy Me A Coffee