Simply Complex
A daughter’s reflection on love, resilience, and growing up with a mother living with schizophrenia.
Simply Complex,
Life with my Schizophrenic Mother
Her life was difficult, tragic yet triumphant towards the end.The mother I knew was brave, determined and simply complex. And what I mean by that, was she was orphaned at 14 with an eighth-grade education, no siblings and trying to survive during World War II in Poland. What I’m going to share about her life is how she navigated living on her own at a very young age during the war in Poland, living in poverty, and was in a constant state of self-survival. She watched her cousin get shot in the back by the Nazis trying to cross the town border. They were trying to go to their uncle’s farm who had milk and eggs for them.She herself had to polish the Nazis’ boots. They would steal her pens and I’m sure many other things in order for her to be able to just cross the town border to get help from her uncle.
I want to take you through her journey of getting out of Poland and making her way to Canada as a young woman only to be diagnosed with tuberculosis. I want to share her story of finding love, getting married, having three children and becoming schizophrenic in the midst of it all.And I want to share how as a family, we watched her struggle with her diagnosis, her medication and her treatment, and came out of it on the other side. To finding love again with the man who stuck by her side, all the way to her final years. Her story is just fascinating, her bravery was compelling at a young age, and some of her life stories were truly humorous.Writing this I’ve laughed. I’ve cried. I’ve unleashed many buried emotions, but I can look back and truly believe that she shaped me to be the person I am today.I want to share her story in hopes that it will help other families dealing with a schizophrenic relative.Although we’ve come a long way in our mental health treatment, we really haven’t in many ways.
Stories, reflections, and lived experiences.
Where My Mother Ended and Her Sickness Began
A story of a childhood shaped by love, loss, and the gradual realization that something in my family had changed.
Where My Mother Ended and Her Sickness Began
There were many layers to telling the story of my mother’s life, and at times I struggled to put the pieces together in the right order.I do not want my mother to sound like a monster, because she was far from that. She was a woman who became very ill, and that distinction matters.Before fear, confusion, and the painful memories that would come later, there was love.My earliest years with my mother, especially my preschool years, were filled with warmth, comfort, and moments I will always cherish. Some of my happiest memories are of her love, her presence, and the feeling of safety I once knew as her child. She taught me so much, and all that she taught me, I carry with me to this day.But illness can slowly change a person, and for a young girl, it was difficult to understand where my mother ended and her sickness began.As I began putting together the story of her life, I realized that although this was my mother’s story, it was also mine to tell—because her illness shaped my childhood, my family, and the way I came to understand love, fear, and loss.So, I begin where my own memories first started to shift—when I was old enough to realize something may have been wrong.I was eight, maybe nine years old, when I remember saying to my father, “Dad, I think Mom is mental.” Of course, that’s not language anyone would use now, but I was a child and didn’t know any better.We lived on the West Island of Montreal, in the suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux. From the outside, we should have looked like a normal suburban family. But by then, my mother was beginning to show unmistakable signs of psychosis.Even something as ordinary as grocery shopping could turn into a nightmare.As we moved up and down the aisles, my mother would suddenly target someone with her shopping cart, deliberately crashing into them. Then she would loudly accuse the startled stranger of hitting her first. She would call them Nazis, scream profanities, and curse at them with shocking vulgarity.I remember feeling utterly humiliated. I wanted to disappear, to crawl under a rock while everyone stared.But there was one incident, when I was about nine years old, that truly solidified the realization that our family was different.We were driving out of our suburb onto a main road where construction crews were working. A small backhoe was reversing nearby. I can’t remember every detail clearly now, but I think my mother should have stopped and waited. Instead, she kept driving forward.The backhoe clipped the side mirror of her car. My mother slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car, and erupted. She screamed hysterically at the driver, hurling obscenities at him in a rage that felt completely out of control.The driver looked horrified. He kept apologizing and backing away while my mother continued shouting at him.That was the moment I realized I might actually be afraid of my own mother.When my father came home from work that evening, I ran to him. I had to tell him what had happened. Again, I remember saying, “There’s something wrong with Mom. I think she has a mental illness.”I can’t clearly remember my father’s response, but I do remember his anger toward my mother. Looking back now, I don’t think his anger helped her — or any of us — considering the state she was already in.But as a frightened little girl, all I really wanted was reassurance. I wanted my father to tell me everything was going to be okay. I wanted him to protect us and to get my mother the help she so clearly needed.Those early days of my mother’s illness taught me to watch for every warning sign—to stay alert for what might come next. They also opened my eyes to my father’s shame, frustration, and helplessness. He didn’t know how to carry it all, and in many ways, that was the beginning of when I felt I had to.More to come......
