My Mother's Keeper

Growing up I always thought that my mother was Superwoman, able to defy all odds who possessed the power of Zeus in the tip of her finger. I also thought that my grandmother's one bedroom house was a a mansion and that money did in fact grow on trees, but now that I've grown I now know that I was wrong about so many things.
I was like Tom Sawyer in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, who saw adventure in every day life.  So when I came home from school one day at the age of six years old to see that my mom had removed all of the pictures off of the walls, sold some of our items and loaded the four of us on a Greyhound bus headed for a new life in Seattle, Washington I thought of it as an adventure. Just like the adventure that we had when she packed us all up to move us to California a few years before. I thought that it was cool that we got to move every two years when most people stayed in one neighborhood their entire lives. I was too young to realize that my mother was dealing with issues that my young mind could not understand.
I am the middle of four children. While my father was a solid entity in my life, he didn't live with us. He came to see us once a week and made sure that he provided for us, but mom was not about to give us up despite the things that she was dealing with.We often spent days and weeks living at my grandmother's house when my mom as sick. I remember asking my grandmother where mom was and she simply told us, "Your mother is resting." With the understanding of a child, I thought that she was in the hospital sleeping because she was tired of cooking and cleaning for us.
It wasn't until I got older did I come to understand that my mother was not resting as my grandmother put it, but she was in a mental hospital because my mother lived with schizophrenia and bi-polar depression. I have always thought of a schizophrenic as the undesirable homeless man living on the street corner begging for spare change who talked to friends that only he could see and hear. In my mind a schizophrenic was a person who was homeless, filthy and who would go crazy if provoked.
My mother was too pretty to be crazy. She was too hip and too clean to be mentally ill. Mom could not have been a schizophrenic. She didn't fit the bill.  She kept a clean house, she cooked fantastic meals for us, she taught as the importance of being a lady at all costs. The doctor made a mistake! My mom was not a schizophrenic! My mom was an ex-model, she was thin with Asian features she had legs that most women would die for and an unmistakable walk that not only turned heads, but broke necks! Her wardrobe was something that could rival any modern day movie stars so there was no way that she was hearing voices.
I hid from it.
I kept it a secret.
I didn't want to face it.
We had too much fun with my mother for her to have been sick. One of my fondest memories of my mother was when she would load us all in our sky blue 1981 station wagon to go for rides while listening to the radio. We had so much fun so there was no way that mom was crazy! She smoked pot on Alki beach with a friend when we lived in Seattle. Mom and other neighbors got together and threw a Halloween party for the children and mom was the most beautiful ghost ever. My uncles called her Disco because she loved to party. I remember sitting on her bed watching wide-eyed as she got dressed up in clothes that I only wished I could fit to get ready for a night out on the town. 
Then there were the times when my mom would shut herself off from everyone and she'd lock her self in her room and just cry. When I asked her what was wrong she'd simply say that she was sad and my next question was why and she'd simply say that she didn't know. Shortly we'd be packed up and shipped off to my grandmother's house because mom needed 'rest' in the nearest mental hospital. Most people don't know how it feels to visit their parent on the psychiatric unit of a hospital and feeling that she didn't belong there.
Times when my little sister and I'd be in the bedroom talking about boys or whatever it was that teenage girls talked about and mom would get angry and say that we were talking about her. She'd say that I thought that she was crazy and her voice would anger me so much that at one point I did the unthinkable, I called her crazy. I have regretted that moment since.

Society puts a negative stigma on people dealing with mental health issues. In the African American community this stigma is even worse. African Americans are suppose to be mentally strong people, and if a person has a known mental illness they basically wear the scarlet letter around their necks. That is why many in the African American community do not address their mental issues live in shame and never get the help that they need. Instead they self-medicate with drugs, alcohol or other risky behaviors. Unlike so many others who actually do suffer from these diseases, my mother got help at the first sign of something not being right. She takes medication to stabilize her condition and she goes to see a psychiatrist one a month for talk therapy. I have been with her on many of her appointments and it helped me to understand the world that she lives in.
Education is the key when it comes to mental illness. If I had not educated myself on my mother;s condition I would not have known that schizophrenia cannot be cured, but it can be treated. I know that schizophrenia is caused by an abnormality in the brain and its brain chemistry. There is evidence of abnormally low activity in the frontal lobe, and some studies even suggest that there are abnormalities int he temporal lobes. Basically people who live with mental illness do not choose the illness no more than someone with cancer chooses to have cancer.
Now that I am in my mid-thirties I now have more of an understanding on what it was that my mother dealt with as well as how it affected me. I no longer live in shame that my mother has a mental illness, in fact I often tell people that my mother has schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder because I am proud of her.

Me and my Mommy

I have come to realize that because of my mother's condition we lived a life that was better than the lives of most of my friends whose parents didn't live with a chronic mental condition. Not only did we get to travel, but we also got to live. My mother never put constraints upon us, she was who she was and she was not ashamed of it. She taught us to be who we are and to love ourselves no matter what society says. She taught us how to dance, how to laugh and how not to sweat the small stuff in life.
Now that my mom is in her sixties, she is still the same vibrant and sassy woman that I know. I asked her why didn't she marry my dad and she said because he wouldn't allow her to be who she was. Something that my naive eight year old mind would not have understood I now understand.
My mom didn't suffer from schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, but she LIVED with it.

TTYL