I am 56.  From as far back as I can remember my mom lived with undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia.  I know this because her struggles enveloped our home.  My dad left when I was young.  I never knew from morning to morning, night to night, day to day...what she would be like.  It was a fearful, scary, lonely and an unbelievably inconsistent way to grow up.  She loved the three of us.  Only, she struggled to maintain a handle on that love.  She refused help and even "protected my younger brother" when he, too, developed the symptoms of schizophrenia at 18 years old.  He lived in the upstairs of our million dollar home pacing for 10 years.  My older brother developed symptoms in his mid-twenties.  He lived on the streets until finally getting effective help.  Both brothers live independently now and concentrate their lives on being stable. I am a very lucky daughter and sister to have known these three family members during their most trying times.  I did not see it then.  I did not see it as I struggled with how I could raise my own healthy family in the wake of such unconventional childhood relations within a family.  Although I look to my years growing up the daughter of a mom with schizophrenia with mixed emotions and unresolved sadness, I also have a depth of appreciation for those who live with mental illness as well as with the family members who must survive and attempt to thrive within their own particularly unusual four walls.  The years I spent hiding in my room, hiding under my bed, plugging my ears so tighting with my fingers to block out her all night ravings that my head hurt, the years holidays were to be dreaded and feared, friends to be shed once they became aware of my strange mom...all of those years I tried so hard to be loved by a mom who could not do so without an odd sort of filtering system, a family who abandoned us and then blamed me for not doing anything about her illness...all of the years of feeling so alone while trying to be a normal kid and knowing how devastating the stigma was...are simply part of life and what we make of it.  I have two sons.  I waited a long time to delve into motherhood.  I feared it.  I feared me.  My sons are my hope for a future without such ugly stigma which squashes children's dreams.  They know about mental illness without stereotype.  They have experienced the devisiveness it can cause within a family when family members do not work together as a unit for the benefit of the ill family member.  In talking now with my sons, 19 and 21 year old college students, I don't know if they too will in some way be affected with an illness, what I do know is that they are educated, supported and loved each and every day of their lives and always will be.  My mom was unable to express appropriately or adequately the love children need to thrive.  From her devastating illness, through my rather wacky childhood and search for my self in early adulthood...there is hope and there is happiness.