My mother got diagnosed as a bi-polar, then as a schizophrenic while I was in my last high school years.
The best way I can explain it is that it’s comparable to running through a unending and self-repeating gauntlet of emotions every day of your life: confusion, fear, sadness, disgust, shame, pity and self-pity, anger, envy, indignation, tolerance, patience, surprise, appreciation, hope, and then back to fear again.
Confusion:
How would you feel if you and your younger sister came home in 2008 to your mom telling you she’s on Obama’s head team, and that since she’s been on this team the FBI and CIA have been following her everywhere (while residing in Canada)? How would you feel the next day when you walk in on her treating the living room as if it was bugged, asking her what’s wrong, and being led to her bedroom and she quietly telling you that the people in the TV were watching and listening to her every move? Now, how would you feel if the day after that you came home and found that she had packed all her clothes in suitcases because Obama was apparently sending his men to pick her up that night?
Yeah, confused is the gist of it. So you do what anybody would do, and take her to the hospital to figure out what’s wrong.
Fear:
The first thing you feel when the doctors (and eventually psychiatrists) tell you that your mom is a schizophrenic is a slow build-up of fear. They give you booklets of information on schizophrenia on your way back home which all-in-all tell you that “this thing that happening to your mom, yeah, sorry – it’s incurable, but you can adjust.” That’s when that slow-build up picks up speed. You realize that your life is never going to be the same again. That you can no longer depend on your mom (the only parent you have at this point) to raise you, and that you have to raise not only yourself but also the person who is supposed to be raising you. That… &., &., &..
Sadness:
Once fear has had it’s way with you, sadness creeps in. You stop thinking about yourself for a minute and realize that your mom can never have a normal life again, that she’s either going to be on pills for the rest of her life, or end up the homeless lady yelling obscenities to the local kids from the corner if you don’t take care of her. You realize that, it’s less noticeable than a missing arm or leg but, she is in fact disabled now.
Disgust:
After having gone through fear and sadness, and after living with her in the worst moments of her condition for a bit you develop disgust. You can’t help it. She neglects showering to the point where you have to do it for her. She neglects eating at times, and wearing clothes. (Ever walked in on your parents naked? Multiply that by a thousand.) And most of all, she backslides back to all childish emotions and habits (she doesn’t do anything while thinking of the other). For example, she’ll spend rent money on chocolate, booze, massages, or any short-lived pleasure she comes across first (and like a child doing something she knows she’s not supposed to, she lies and hides that she does this), she’ll put something in the oven, walk away lost in her thoughts, and you realize about four hours later that something smells burnt and that maybe you should check the oven this time, again, to make sure the house doesn’t burn down. It all eventually gets to the point where disgust wears down into extreme annoyance. But this is all home-life, life outside of the public eye. In public you feel shame, pity, and self-pity.
Shame/Pity/Self-pity/Anger/Envy/Indignation:
You start feeling ashamed of who your mom is in people’s eyes, the crazy lady. Walking in public with her becomes a mental exercise in hoping, and praying, and pleading to a god you don’t believe in, asking that he make sure that she doesn’t do anything to embarrass you this time, just this one time. And this too eventually wears you down to the point where you’re never seen in public with her unless you absolutely must.
Ashamed is how you feel when, in another of her episodic fits, you call the cops to help you take her to the local mental hospital/ward, and you notice that the cops know you or know of you.
Then your friends and family hear the news, “I heard about your mom, I’m really sorry, I can’t imagine what you’re going through, you and your sister are strong kids, &. ,&., &.,”… and after enough of this you realize something, they pity you. Wait, those cops pitied you too! And why shouldn’t they? You’ve just grown up faster than you planned, you’ve just lost your childhood. You’ve just lost a childhood which all your friends are still experiencing right in front of your eyes. And what’s worse is that they’re enjoying a childhood you’ve just lost while looking at you with eyes of pity. That’s when pity starts to make way for full blown anger, envy, and indignation. Everyone you see your age and happy becomes a beacon of light pointing to the one thing you desperately want and can’t have, young abandonment. A month, a week, a day where you have no worries. A day where you can live life like every normal teenager who doesn’t have to worry about bills or putting food on the table. Or better yet, a day where you don’t have to sleep half-awake with your door open just in case your mom decides to leave the house running again at 4 AM in a fit of paranoia. Everyone becomes a beacon of how life’s just not fair.
And let me tell you, that feeling holds onto you for so, so long. But somehow, in that same breath and sentence, you realize something quiet profound in it’s simplicity- life’s not fair.
Tolerance/Patience:
Yeah, life’s not fair, but not just for you. There are people all over the world starving unjustly. There are animals and plants dying under hands that could care less about them. There are kids who wish, and plead, and pray to a god that’s long forgotten to answer back asking for him to let the worst of their worries tonight be that their mother or father went out at 4 AM, but please, not in there rooms, not in their beds, not tonight.
And when you fully realize just how unfair life is, a schizophrenic mom starts to look less like someone’s out to get you, and more like, well, life. You start to not only tolerate her strange habits, but accept them. And you start looking on the positive side of everything in the same manner, such as how you growing up faster is in fact an advantage; you’ve learnt how to handle money, time, and sleep a lot better than people twice your age, yes – it was hard, but how is that not a positive?
Surprise/Appreciation:
And in looking at the positive side, you realize that your mom being schizophrenic and you being male and an artist is very much linked. You realize that this gift of thinking differently, of feeling emotions just a little more sensitively than the next guy over, of seeing patterns where others don’t see it, and of writing is a gift from her genes. You realize that your shunning of sports to read books because you got so happily lost in the worlds they provided is most likely because of her genes. And you realize that all those childhood signs of her developing paranoid schizophrenia, of her keeping you and your sister in the house and away from untold dangers by being overly protective in fact helped you nurture those creative gifts that her genes gave you in the first place. And every day you find something she wrote poetically in a trace, or talk to her in her fits of sanity you can’t help but be surprised at her talents and in some sense appreciative of this mental condition.
Hope/Fear:
All this leading to hope. Hope that your mom can overpower this condition like some people have and use it for good instead of it overpowering her. Hope that these genes that rubbed off on you, the child of a schizophrenic, don’t grow and develop into their own form of schizophrenia but stay in you, in low quantities, where they can do more good than harm (children and grandchildren of schizophrenics are more likely than the general population to develop schizophrenia). Hope that, similar to growing up too fast, this whole journey with your schizophrenic mom, yourself, and your sister, is hard now, but later a gift you can look back on.
But in all that hope, you can’t help but hear that little familiar voice in your head; that one that starts the gauntlet of emotions running all over again, that fearful one that whispers, “What if tomorrow’s the day you can’t handle it all? What if this all gets worse not better? What if she gets worse not better? What if what’s holding onto her so tightly sets its beady little eyes on you and your sister next? What if…“