When Living with a Mentally Ill Parent

I would like to thank my new Facebook friend, Jake Rothschild of Jake’s Ice Creams & Sorbets, for opening up another level of healing for me today. He courageously posted to Facebook for his friends that have little or no happy memories of Mom to celebrate today. Then, one of his friends posted the article When Mothers Day Hurts, and when I read this post, I knew I had to share my experiences with you. After all, I say that I share what’s up for me on my blog, so here goes me walking my talk.

Background

My Mother was a creative genius – concert pianist, cellist, artist, craftsperson. But, what I remember most about my relationship with her is that she was mentally ill. As I look back, it seems to be a hereditary condition. The women in my family who inherit creative genius also inherit mental illness as their dark passenger. They seem to spend their whole lives desperately managing circumstances so that experience doesn’t plunge them back into the night/daymares they experience as part of their condition. How do I know this pattern so intimately? Because I used to live like this. Fortunately for me, I decided to walk away from this pattern and over time found the support and resources to help me be aware of when I’m making a free will choice or responding from my inheritance.

Living with a Mentally Ill Parent

As I look back, my life with my Mom was one of extremes. When she was having a “good day,” she was funny, bright, creative, caring. Her “bad days” were excruciatingly painful for all of us. When you woke up in the morning, you never knew which Mom was going to appear, “Dr. Jekyll” or “Mrs. Hyde.” Our whole lives were filled with strategies, rules, and regulations that were designed to make sure that “Good Mom” was around, because we lived in hell when “Bad Mom” showed up.

These are some of the rules we lived with in order to entice “Good Mom” to come forward:

• Never say the word, “Cancer”
• Never ask her to attend a funeral or wake
• Never mention a friend or relative who was dying or who had died. This rule was so extreme that my Mom refused to talk to her favorite brother and his wife, when she knew he was dying of cancer. She literally wiped his existence off the face of the earth. In fact, if her friends or family members weren’t in perfect health, looking like they would live forever, we had to act like they never existed. She even ejected my Dad from her reality, as he lay dying of cancer, and started packing for her new life without him.
• Dress the way she wanted us to dress.
• Talk the way she wanted us to talk.
• Keep our body in line with her idea of what it should look like – weight, size, figure.
• If you had a talent, you had to develop it perfectly and monetize it. There was no doing something for sheer joy.
• If you had housework to do, it had to be done to her standards.
• If you had a job, you had to be the best at it.
• Conform to the thousands of rules she had about what you should be doing and how, when, where, and with whom you should be doing it. There was no activity that didn’t have dozens of rules to follow so that it perfectly fit in with the reality “Good Mom” wanted to live in.

There was no room for error. Punishments were out of line with infractions and designed to be as painful as possible. We even had punishments that were delayed. “When I find something that will hurt you the most, then you’ll know how you are going to be punished for this infraction.” For example, I had a minor skirmish over late homework with my Latin teacher. Almost a year later I was not allowed to go to Homecoming  as punishment, even though I was on the Steering Committee. I had two emotional breakdowns during my first year of college, and my punishment for returning to school and then failing was that my parents said they would never support my education again. Years later when I had a chance to go to Italy to solidify my place as a future soloist with an opera company, my family refused to help. My coach thought they were crazy when they cited my second breakdown as a freshman as a reason why years later they wouldn’t support me.

My Dad was complicit in this construct. He didn’t want to acknowledge her mental illness, let alone deal with it as primary. So, he took over family obligations, told us not to “get her going,” and left the care of his mentally ill wife to a grade school child who didn’t have the capacity to deal with the evil that chased her through her mind. Any chance for a normal childhood for me was eaten up by my role as her caretaker. I can still remember sitting up with her every night watching television because she was scared to fall asleep. She didn’t leave it at that; she wouldn’t shut up about her suffering. I heard about her demons, her unsatisfying sexual relationship with my Dad, and felt the fear, anger, and pain that bled out from her constantly. I wasn’t even 10 years old at the time.

Projection

I write this section with a great deal of love and compassion for anyone else who has been the object of a mentally ill person’s projections. My Mom needed a persecutor. My sister was too young, pretty, sensitive, fun to be with to cast her in that role. Since my Dad was at work most of the time, he could only get blamed for things that happened when he was around. So, my Mom decided to frame me as her persecutor, and as long as she was alive, she continued to justify this role to herself and anyone around her that would listen. Unfortunately, many did. By the time I decided to end this pattern by walking away forever, my Mom had cast me in the role of evil seed with just about everyone who came into her sphere of influence. As the defective persecutor of this wonderful woman, no one cared about what happened to me. When I tried to talk to a favorite aunt about not wanting to be trapped in this role, she told my Mom what I had said and I was severely beaten. That’s when I stopped asking for help.

When I was 16, I had my first full time job and after went to college. I started developing relationships with people outside my Mom’s sphere of influence. It was eye opening to receive reflections from my bosses, work mates, professors, and supervisors. They didn’t see me as the demon seed who persecuted Mom into continual mental illness. It was the first time I had hope that I was someone other than the person she said I was.

Getting Free

Getting free was a process. I married a man who was just like my Mom and lived abroad for ten years. Learning to take care of myself in a foreign country, with no family and nowhere else to go, helped me develop many of my natural talents. When the owner of the law firm I worked for saw something in me that needed more than an abusive, mentally ill husband, he was the first person who had me consciously look at creating a life that wasn’t based on someone else’s perverted notions of who I am. This scared me so much, because who would I be without my conditioning, that I went back home for five years. I was the perfect daughter for my Mom, and she was happy in our relationship for the first time in my life. But, there was a butterfly yearning to be released from the chrysalis. I would wake up in a cold sweat every night, exclaiming, “I have to do this until I am 70 years old? There has to be something more than this.” I prayed for the end of the pain I felt. Little did I know that I was asking for my authentic self to be free.

The answer to those prayers came to me a little at a time over 30 years. I had my spiritual awakening, received empowerments that wouldn’t go away no matter how I tried to give them back, started rich relationships with mentors, friends and extended family who encouraged my exploration of who I am. In fact, a few years ago when I was ready to make a 100% commitment to my own authenticity, I went through a miraculous rebirthing ceremony with my Indigenous Elders and chose a new name to celebrate who I am. A few years ago I made it legal because I know I am no longer that child sitting in the dark with Mom.

Am I completely authentic today? No. But, I feel awareness of when I’m running family programs and when I’m at choice. When a program comes up, I know it’s an area where I have no self-love. That’s when I ask Infinite Source to bring Source’s love into that area of my life. Then, I watch what comes my way and see that pattern dissolve to the extent that I can “relax and allow.”

A Gift for Those Who Hurt on Mothers Day

We all have our own strategies to move forward. But, this is what works for me. One of the most connecting and loving things I do for myself when old pain resurfaces is breath through it and allow it to be. When the pain dissipates, I listen to music, pet my cats, or talk to friends. So, I would like to share with you one of the songs that opened my heart and helped me see that the person who lives inside this body is a living, breathing, walking, talking miracle.