My Mother's Illness
By Jill Williams
My mother has a mental illness. I was eight years old when my mother was diagnosed with
Schizophrenia. The disease is misunderstood my many people. Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain that
is expressed clinically as a disease of the mind. The symptoms of schizophrenia are very diverse. They
include hallucinations, delusional thoughts, disorganized speech, disorganized behavior and avolition. The
faces of schizophrenic's are usually blunted with expression. You can almost see it in their eyes. A lot of
people mistake the disease with split personality, that of which the movie Sible portrayed. Hearing voices
is the most common kind of hallucination in schizophrenia, but they do not act them out. People with
schizophrenia also have impairment in many different cognitive systems, such as memory, attention, and
executive function. I feel it is very important to have some type of understanding of the illness before I
continue.
My two brothers and I were living with my mother at the time. She was in the middle of divorcing
my stepfather and suffered a nervous breakdown. She never completely recovered after that. As a result,
my two brothers and I moved in with my father, whom we had not seen or talked to in four years. He was
recently married and I had a new little sister. It started off as a summer visit. That summer visit ended up
consuming 10 years of my life. In the beginning, my middle brother, Tony, and I were not told about my
mother's illness. David, my older brother, who was fourteen at the time was the only one told. For him, it
was as if someone took the rug right from underneath his feet. My oldest brother remembered my parent's
bad marriage and my father's abandonment and had a really hard time adjusting to the new situation. To
top things off, my stepmother was only twenty-two years old at the time. I do not remember David being
around much, he consumed himself in school sports and activities. Tony and I were so young we adapted
to the change very well. My mother reminds me frequently about a letter I wrote her soon after I had
moved to Texas. Texas was where my father lived. In the letter, I told her that she did not need to find me
a dad anymore because I had one. I always had a connection with my father, even when he was not around.
The moment I saw him, I knew I was home. It was as if I had never left his side.
I remember the first time I discovered something was wrong. My brothers and I spent every
summer break with my grandmother in Orlando. My mother also lived in Orlando. My grandmother
pulled up to this building located at the back of a hospital. She told us she would be back shortly, she had
to visit a friend and they did not allow children. My brother Tony and I sat in the car with our bucket of
chicken my grandmother had picked up prior. We waited and waited. It may have only been a few
minutes or so but to a ten and twelve year old it felt like a lifetime. Well, curiosity killed the cat and I went
to investigate. I walked into the building. I saw two large doors to my right and walked up to them. I was
too afraid to go through the doors but I listened. Along with my grandmother's voice, I heard my mothers.
I remember running out the front doors of the building as fast as I could! I told my brother and we sat there
wondering why she was there. Tony and I promised each other that we would never tell anyone what had
happened in those last few minutes. My grandmother came out and we went about our lives.
My first real exposure to my mother's illness was the summer after my fifth grade year. I was
eleven. My mom had been in and out of mental hospitals for the last two years and was finally regulated.
That is a term doctors use when they find a drug that works the best for the individual patient. The six
months prior to that summer my mother had been working diligently preparing for our summer visit. She
wanted to surprise us with a furnished apartment for herself, my brothers and me. The loss of her children
devastated my mother into a deep depression. She wanted more than life itself to have us back. She
wanted so much to get back what she had lost. We arrived that summer and my mother had succeeded in
the surprise. About two weeks into the summer break, my mother had an episode. I call it the summer of
hell. She began to have hallucinations again. She heard voices and saw demon like characters. She
became very paranoid and overly protective. I can remember walking into the living room and seeing her
sitting there rocking back and forth staring at the fan that sat across the room. She would laugh and nod her
head with a yes and no motion. In her mind the fan was talking to her and she was merely responding. She
would sit there for hours upon hours smoking one cigarette after another. I would lock myself in my room
and ignore her when she would knock to see how I was doing. The delusions started to kick into place at
this point. She would tell me that she knew the "games" that were going on in Texas. That people were
telling her all about the conspiracies that we were planning. She got worse and worse as time went on. She
told me that we were the devils children, not her own. My father picked us up early that summer. She did
not say good-bye, only warned my father that we were not the children that they conceived. She told my
father that his mother, who had died the September before, was not in heaven but rotting in hell. The
disease had once again beaten my mother.
My mother obviously was hospitalized again. The next stage that I remember was what I like to
refer to as her "Virgin Mary" phase. My mother became very religious. She wore long flowing dresses, no
make up and quit dying her hair. In the past, she was always very glamorous. She had her hair frosted and
always up to date in fashion and jewelry. She would go around preaching and blaming everything bad on
the devil. I remember her famous words, "the devil made you do it". Once my grandmother, my mother
and I went out to eat and on the way home my grandmother and I were joking about how we ate too much
and my mother from the back seat said, "the devil made you do it". Although her behavior was mild
compared to the summer before, I thought she was crazy. I was too young to understand her illness. That
summer my mother found Jesus. That summer was my mothers last major episode. With the proper
medication, and from what my mother says, the help of Jesus, my mother no longer gets delusional nor sees
hallucinations. She is still haunted by one "voice", as apposed to nine. She says he is friendly and jokingly
refers to him as Casper the friendly ghost. She leads about as normal of a life as she can. She wakes up
every morning taking pills and goes to bed taking pills.
I have had the hardest time coping with my mother's illness. My brother's handle her like champs.
I guess I am waiting for a "normal" relationship with my mother. Over time and through maturity I am
learning to accept what has happened. I will never understand why this has happened to her, or me for that
matter. Underneath the layer of my mothers illness is a giving, caring and generous person, who I feel was
put on this earth to be a mother. As an adult, I have tried to see the person my mother is and accept the
consequences of her illness. I have tried to learn different methods of communicating with her to make it a
little less stressful. She did not choose to have schizophrenia, it chose her.