Growing Up with a Psychotic Mother

I was ten when my mother had her first psychotic break. It was May. I was looking forward to lazy summer days at the pool, an art camp, a stack of Babysitters Club books, and daydreaming about my first crush, a boy with a splay of freckles and a mop of dark hair. Instead, I was forced to grow up too soon. This meant wearing deodorant and shaving my arm pits. It also meant seeing my mother in a state of complete psychosis, one in which she thought maybe she had killed the postman or the neighbor girl. “I didn’t. Mean. Tokillthepostman.” Her words were all wrong, strung together in a series of hiccups and stretched entirely too thin, like a ribbon was attached at the end. She pranced around the house naked, claiming no one should be ashamed of their body. My mother had recently had a hysterectomy and was feeling ‘less than,’ she wasn’t even sure if she was a woman any longer without her uterus. She thought she was going to die on the eve of her birthday. She said, “I am afraid that if I go to sleep I won’t wake up.” She had no idea how this would happen, just that she was not fit to live any longer. “Don’t worry,” she said to my dad, “It won’t be like with Aunt Lorraine; it won’t be suicide.” And then she said she smelled something funny coming from the basement. “My brain,” I think, “My brain is rotting and it’s trapped in the basement.” She thought she was an angel and could fly. She thought she was God and had a mission to sa...
Source: Psych Central - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Bipolar Depression Essays Family General Personal Stories Psychology Bipolar Disorder delusions hallucinations Hospitalization involuntary hospitalization Manic Depression Manic Episode Psychosis psychotic mania Source Type: news