At first I thought she’d gone to Florida with my grandfather for the winter, but as time passed a darker explanation crossed my mind. Suicide? I called a relative, who said she had spotted my mother around town. So as long as I dialed her number and it wasn’t disconnected, I told myself that she was alive.
Four months may sound like a long time for a parent to be out of touch, but it’s not, considering my mother’s history. At one time, more than a decade passed without a word from her. My mother had developed what I later realized was paranoid schizophrenia. I’ve never heard her say those words, but her symptoms were clear enough, even to me as a middle-school girl and my 8-year-old sister.
I was 12 when I realized I had to escape from my mother. It was the summer after 7th grade, and I was spending it with my father in Hawaii. One day Mom called, and we had an unusual conversation. “Something wonderful has happened, Gret. Something important,” she told me. She sounded happier than I had ever remembered, and serene. I was eager to learn what it could be (the lottery, perhaps?), but Mom didn’t want to discuss it over the phone.
When I flew home to Alaska, she told me the details. An Indian spirit had informed her of a communist plot to overthrow the U.S. government. At first I wanted to believe what my mother was saying, but even a child has the ability, eventually, to discern that her mother has gone completely insane. She had long suffered from depression, but I remember just when I realized that her increasingly bizarre behavior was a sign of something more serious. I had been spending as much time at school as possible, but one morning Mom said I couldn’t leave the house. She was rushing around, opening cupboards, pulling dishes onto the floor, going window to window jerking the drapes shut. She ran to the kitchen sink and started filling plastic milk jugs with water.
“Mom, what are you doing?” I pleaded. “They’re here,” she screamed, her voice redolent with panic and fear. “Who?” I walked into the living room and started to pull the curtain aside, but my mother came up behind and tackled me onto the couch. “Get down,” she said, clutching me in her arms. “They’re trying to kill us!” She was trying to protect her children, but she didn’t move fast enough to protect me from the truth. There was nobody outside at all, and the only thing stalking our family was a terrible disease that was destroying my mother’s mind.
Why am I trotting out these painful details from my life for public view? For one thing, schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses are far more common than we would like to believe. They’re egalitarian in their impact, affecting 2.5 million Americans in the case of schizophrenia alone. It doesn’t matter if you’re Marilyn Monroe’s mother or the Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Nash. Yet those people who avert their eyes or wrinkle their nose in disgust at the soiled and homeless man mumbling to himself in the park would probably be appalled if someone did the same thing to an Alzheimer’s patient. Schizophrenia is a brain disease, not a lifestyle choice.
As a journalist, I hope I can help people understand that we lose some of our humanity when we let people suffer so. As a daughter, I wonder why, when the authorities placed my sister in foster care, they didn’t place my mother in medical care, too?
The rest of that year is difficult for me to remember. After I finished 8th grade, I moved permanently to Hawaii. My little sister, having a different father, stayed behind. She later told me that she started sleeping with a butcher’s knife after she awoke one night to see our mother sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at her, or through her, not saying a word. Eventually my aunt took custody of my sister, but with both children out of the home, my mother was no longer eligible for welfare benefits and couldn’t pay the heating bill on the trailer. She would huddle inside a tent under the blankets until the Alaskan winter forced her into the homeless shelters each year.
My mother is still alive, but when I think of her I end up inside something akin to a eulogy. I remember the times before she became so sick, when she bought art supplies for me despite our limited finances, and how she would take me to classes–ballet, acting, gymnastics, karate, jazz, violin–until the weight of her depression confined her to the house once again. My favorite stories about her have been passed along to me by my relatives. How she ran home sobbing from elementary school after the nuns who taught her declared that she never could have created something so fine as her driftwood painting of a pirate ship on the open seas. And when she boycotted her nomination for valedictorian as a protest against the school’s continuing support for the Vietnam War. People still talk about her in Hawaii, years after she followed a husband to Alaska, saying she was so beautiful back then that men would put dollar bills in my chubby hand as an excuse to speak with her.
Almost 12 years passed after I left her in Alaska, and then she called. She hadn’t been feeling well, she explained, but was doing better now. Some very bad things had been going on, things she didn’t want to talk about. She did say she was taking Zyprexa, which I learned was one of the newer antipsychotic medications, and had finally applied for public assistance. It was still too dangerous for me to fly in for a visit, she said, referring to the communist assassins, but I came anyway. She refused to see me, and the plane tickets her sister sent to lure her back to her childhood home in the Midwest expired unused. Another winter went by, but it wasn’t until she developed cancer that my mother ended her self-imposed isolation. After successful surgery, she got on a bus and then a train and traveled across country to live next to the river near where she grew up.
Sometimes I think, if I was a better person, I’d be living with my mother right now, making sure she takes her medication, driving her to appointments. But should I sacrifice my adult life, too, after losing so much of my childhood? It was easier to forgive my mother for my chaotic upbringing once I could deem her “not guilty by reason of insanity.” My mother’s flair for choosing bad boyfriends and worse husbands (my father excluded), was more than a blues riff. She really did need the “peace and quiet,” she begged for those summers before locking us out of the house. Left to our own devices as she sank deeper into depression and later, psychosis, my little sister and I really did run wild. But at least I know now that it wasn’t because Mom didn’t love us.
We had our reunion last year, on Mother’s Day weekend. I wore the matching mother-daughter floral skirt she had sent me. When we walked across the grass toward each other, I could hardly recognize her. The medication had made her gain weight and obscured the fine bones of her oval face. But there was no denying that she was still my Mom, however changed. First thing she did was burst into tears. Next she couldn’t stop admiring me (what are moms for, anyway). “What a gorgeous young woman you’ve turned out to be,” she gasped. “Like a movie star!” It was so nice to see her smile, and she still loves to laugh. We ate hamburgers by the water and tried to catch up on things.
There is no cure for schizophrenia. In my mother’s case, the disease was allowed to progress so long without treatment that her chances of a major alleviation of symptoms are slim to nonexistent. Even so, she moved into her own apartment and made friends from a club for people with “nervous problems,” as she described it to me. If you ask her, she still insists on the reality of her delusions, but mostly our conversations are pleasant. Maybe it’s better anyway that she doesn’t realize how many years she lost, terrorized by her own mind.
Denial is a natural response to something so frightening, but it’s difficult even for me to look at schizophrenia as nothing more or less than an illness. “Some people live with diabetes, other people live with schizophrenia,” a representative of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill told me when I was preparing to meet my mother again. But I ask myself, if you could choose, would it be better to die of cancer surrounded by your family or live with schizophrenia in a state of mental isolation? I still don’t know.
On a personal level, too, I worry that the illness which so clouded my past may take over my future as well. I passed my early 20s, the most common age of onset for the disease, without any signs. But would I even know if I was becoming sick? Will a future husband understand if I tell him that I want to adopt children because I am afraid that I could pass on a genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia? Or that I avoid cats ever since a prominent researcher told me that a feline virus could cause schizophrenia in some people?
Sitting in my cubicle in New York while I was working at NEWSWEEK last week, I impulsively dialed my mother’s number. I had been thinking a lot about her as the magazine prepared this week’s cover story on schizophrenia. I alternated between wanting to offer my expertise in the area and mini panic attacks over the idea that someone would ask me to do just that. This time she picked up after the first ring. “Hello?” she said, breathless. “Mom, where have you been?,” I cried. “Why haven’t you answered the phone?” “Oh, I didn’t feel like talking to anyone,” she said, her tone dipping for a moment. “But I’m better now.”
If you look inside your head, it’s very dark in there, just wisps of ideas, memories, hopes. Without them, who are we? When I lose my normally cheerful disposition and become depressed, I can’t tell if it’s just me, or if it’s this world that is such a sad place, where so much can be taken from you with no fault of your own.
