I am making a trip to my home town next month to see my family. Family in this case is limited to my eldest sister and my mother. I usually make this pilgrimage alone without my husband or children due to both logistics and also emotional reasons. It is hard for me to “go back home” because I have so many traumatic memories of my childhood and growing up. As anyone with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can tell you, going back to physical places where abuse or trauma took place can trigger a frightening re-enactment of that despair and fear. I like to think that each time I make that visit I become a little bit stronger and more able to cope with the ghosts of the past. Yet I must admit that seeing my mother still makes me feel weak and vulnerable.
For those of you who do not know my personal story, my mother has paranoid schizophrenia and this is the person who raised me. My father died when I was four and my half siblings from another marriage never lived with me. So it was just me and my mother trying to survive both poverty and her mental illness for many years.
In ten years of therapy I feel that I barely scratched the surface for dealing with how I feel about my mother. I love her first and foremost. But there were so many bad times where her mental illness almost killed me that my love is sometimes overshadowed by fear, anger, and confusion. Note that I said her “mental illness” almost killed me because when she was stable she would never think of harming a fly. My mother, for the most part, is a kind gentle soul. Even some of her delusions are altruistic as when she declares that she is giving me a pink Cadillac with all her imaginary millions. But there are also times when she reacts with fear and violence to her voices and hallucinations.
The unpredictability of whether or not she would be the sweet mother who helped me bake heart shaped cookies or the mother who might take a swing at me because I refused to believe that aliens were on our roof made for an emotionally tumultuous childhood to say the least. But now I am no longer a child, a teen, or even a young adult. I am in my forties. I am a mother to two teen-age boys. And my mother is a grandmother.
My trip back home this year will be radically different for one reason. I will be taking my eldest son with me to see my sister and mother. Talking to a child about mental illness is hard but I feel it may be harder still to talk to a teen about it. I think the reason is that they are more aware and they don’t just say “okay” and run off and play. They think and dwell and wonder. My son knows about my mother’s mental illness but it has been many years since he has seen her. I have to say that I am nervous about this visit and I am trying to come to terms with why.
In preparation for our trip we watched the movie, A Beautiful Mind, which tells the story of John Nash who won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 but also battled paranoid schizophrenia throughout his life. As with all movies which depict mental illness, there is some departure from what most people experience. Not every person with schizophrenia, depression, or bipolar disorder is a budding genius. I have the same reaction when we watch such movies as Temple Grandin or Rain Man. Having a son with autism, I know firsthand, that many people have this perception that just because my son has autism that he has some sort of computer-like memory or can play blackjack like rain man. These movies are wonderful but they are but impressions of real life and the lifetime struggle of people who live with mental illness or a neurological disorder.
