Read Online The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs by Chrisann Brennan - Free Book Online Page A

what Cindy was saying with such sincerity confirmed what I knew, and I adored her for her courage to speak up with so much careful kindness. What I didn’t know then—and what she did know—was how good a mother could be.
    The situation was clear to many. By the time I’d gotten together with Steve my mother’s eyes met mine with pure hatred. A friend from this time told me that she saw me as tough and sparkling, fragile and soulfully earnest. Some of my teachers at Homestead knew I had trouble at home but no one really understood mental illness then. I think they chalked it up to mother/daughter issues. After my father moved to another house and my older sister went off to college, my younger sisters and I lived a growing nightmare. Without those two at home there was no mitigating the cruelty and so my mother got worse.
    My mother and Steve’s first meeting was disturbing. She began by sitting on the floor with us and acting like a teenager, flirting and competing with him over whose literary acumen was more developed, his or hers. It went downhill from there. Steve burrowed into himself and used words sparingly as he moved to hold his position. Soon after arriving, he left the house bristling with anger, and I was left dizzy and disoriented and wondering if I had lost him.
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    I don’t blame my mother. As far back as I can remember my heart has been moved by the way her fragile immaturity and wobbly sense of personal identity combined with her great love of life. Prior to the availability of birth control a lot of women had children before they were ready. Ultimately, I valued the importance she always placed on truth and her exquisite, refined curiosity. I felt she was like an Olympic runner who handed us the dazzling torch of all her work before she was felled from the exhaustion of her cruelty. Yet back then, when she held the power in our home, she was brittle with brutality and self-hatred that she projected outward onto us. There was nothing we could do but escape.
    I was in my mid-twenties when my mother was diagnosed with a hodgepodge of mental diseases that included paranoid schizophrenia, clinical depression, and bipolar disorder with episodes of psychosis. I don’t think anyone even knew the extent of it, and I wonder if it ever mattered what they’d called it, except that by naming such things it seems easier to have compassion. It would take me years to understand exactly how such terms might be translated into the behaviors we’d endured.
    As the full cataclysm of my mother’s illness unfolded I worried that I would end up like her and this propelled my interest in all things healthy and alternative. And so it was at twenty-two that I made a plan for handling my own mental illness, should I see signs of it. Number one: I would be responsible for my own health. That became my first priority. Number two: I would not eat meat. Numbers three, four, and five: I would meditate, practice yoga, and work to stay connected to my ideals. I also thought—number six—that developing my own creativity was crucial for my health. I saw that my mother only read and critiqued, but never created anything outside of food, and even then she followed recipes. I understood that people who didn’t develop themselves through their creativity would end up redirecting that energy adversely.
    These were my mantras—my self-appointed marching orders—and all that would pass for a life plan in my youth. It provided me with a curious, defiant security based on a stunning belief in my own internal resources. With this, I armed myself for destiny, come what may.
    Before I left my mother’s home to live at my father’s, I remember being suspended in a recurring thought: What if people were just good to each other? What if they only paid attention to what was needed, with deep-hearted common sense and a commitment to kindness for the common wealth? It was a feeling from a dim radiance centered in my heart but it