Honoring Mothers and Mental Health Awareness
Interesting timing all in the month of May
Dear Reader,
Thank you for being here and taking the time to connect with me. It means more than you know.
As I continue to find my voice and not let procrastination, imposter syndrome and fear get in the way of writing what needs to be expressed, hang in there with me. I am working to be vulnerable and truthful without alienating or too esoteric. Maybe even helpful to some. Much of what I want to write about is buried or comes in blips or moments and then it’s gone. The lessons of surrendering continue to show up daily.
“See all women as mothers, serve them as your mother. When you see the entire world as the mother, the ego falls away.” — Neem Karoli Baba
When my kids were young, I adored their painted ceramic mugs and rock, sappy sweet homemade cards and morning cuddles with breakfast in bed. Today, I feel loved by them but now that they are young adults, it is shifting into more about letting them go. My daughter is headed to college this August and she’s ready to launch. She is a ray of sunshine, lighting up every room she enters, singing and playing her guitar from the moment she wakes until lights out at night, inquisitive and intelligent. She is intuitive, vivacious and wise beyond her years. We truly enjoy one another’s company. Mother’s Day is loaded with love and bittersweetness. Instead of rebelling the ginormous somewhat obnoxious Hallmark holiday, I’m exposing it for how it is.
In Tibetan Buddhism, there’s a practice of honoring all sentient beings as if they’ve been our mother in a past life, because chances are, they have. I’ve been told by a seer that my son was my mother in a past life and I was his child. We are definitely connected beyond this plane even before he was born. I can't tell you how I know this but I do.
I have situational depression that’s transient, low level ambiguous grief as the last 8 years has been about coming to terms with my son’s challenges with his own mental health and the daily existence living together. Thanks to my spiritual practices, I remember that sangha (community) and friends are important, feelings are impermanent, that they will eventually shift, and that I am allowed to have joy and laughter and find my own expansive freedom in this one precious life. Attending live rock shows is a necessary outlet!
While I write about him and describe what his challenges are it may seem like I’m exposing him however, this is my story too. It is my perspective and observations as his mother and making sure he’s on track to become communicative and autonomous. To help him move forward from what he has lost from this strange and peculiar mental illness. His very existence has driven me to finding myself, my purpose and my own healing through some pretty radical experiences. Don’t get me wrong though, this illness is not a blessing nor is it a curse. It just is.
It’s my daily routine of finding new ways to help him, to dispel my own stigma around mental health by learning about what it means to live with a neurodivergent individual, a person who lives with schizophrenia. I still am fearful of even saying that word even though I know so much about it. I care about what others think about that word as it has so often been mischaracterized, misunderstood and even my closest friends still don’t get it because at times I don’t either!
Why don’t I get it? Why after 8 years do I still not understand my son’s thought disorder?
Because he has negative symptoms. Negative symptoms show up like non verbal communication, internal stimuli causing distractions, inability to find words to feelings, inability to have ongoing conversations or relationships, unable to react to social cues even if they are felt energetically. Kind of sounds like autism, doesn’t it? It’s so confusing. So I continue to research, learn, go to meetings and webinars with an unsatiated hunger.
Positive symptoms are driven by visual and auditory hallucinations and delusions. I’ve seen these too but only in the beginning of his first break with our societal cognizant reality. I can only assume that medication keeps this at bay.
What I do know about people living with schizophrenia is this:
It is a spectrum. There is no one pill or therapy that fits all.
Individuals are highly sensitive and feel other people’s energy.
Individuals are highly intelligent and maybe in one specific area.
It can be caused by trauma-related experiences, from ancestral trauma, bullying, drug experimentation, even pharmaceutically induced and hereditary.
Carl Jung observed that it is a merging of the subconscious and conscious wakeful mind at the same time. Imagine being awake and not knowing if something is a dream or real?
People are not a schizophrenic, they live with the symptoms of schizophrenia. Don’t say, “He is a schizophrenic. The proper way to express it is, he lives with schizophrenia.”
I often think that if I love him enough, send those positive love light beams his way so his whole body fills up with light he will come back to our present. Or during another meditation, I imagine tying an imaginary rope around my waist on one end and the other end is around his waist. I pull us to the earth so we don’t float away and we feel the support of the unseen magic of gravity.
Living in this life, witnessing schizophrenia on a daily basis demands that I relationally extend myself into difficult territory, struggling to bridge the gap between the voids, the loss of what I thought it would be like at every age. This uncertainty on a daily basis, the thick silence hovering in my home behind his closed door as he isolates paralyzes me some days more than others. I see this sweet young man with a kindness behind his eyes, a world of isolation, and the past hurts on a daily basis because he is emotionally unavailable to me and our relationship is strained. In his eyes, I am his time keeper, reminding him to brush his teeth, to eat nutritious food, to make an effort to communicate with his younger sister and offer to take her to ice cream. And he is high functioning - driving, has basic cooking skills, does his own laundry etc. My husband and I have kept our son safe and out of the hospital for over 5 years and barely without incident.
I’ve read that people who live with schizophrenia have an emotional disconnection with feelings of otherness and shame. He’s stuck on this deserted island of isolation without the ability to be vulnerable because of a shell of protectiveness he’s had to create. So many people have left him. And now he can’t seem to process or cultivate any relationships with depth not even with his family members. He has memory issues and doesn’t remember anything about the beginning of his symptoms.
When I have moments of ethereal highs from meditation (or an edible) sometimes we make a heart connection and he lets me hug him. This sustains me for a day or two.
My experience of motherhood has completely radicalized me more and more, year over year. I’m beginning to think that its purpose has been to heal all my own wounds, move on from them and show the world how important it is to understand mental illness and the systems from which it is oppressed into institutions called hospitals and pharmaceutical companies who don’t value nutrition.
In a country hell-bent on continuing to oppress and control women by the antiquated policies it is working to reinstate, I am seeing women and particularly mothers as the strongest warriors alive. In many cases, mothers are fighting for their children in extreme mental health crises and are cast aside by judges, doctors and police officers. Perhaps we seem like animals - fierce, protective, sometimes aggressive. Our animalistic nature is in response to anyone who gets in our way of what once was the comfort of motherhood used to be, when we were soft, caring, cuddly, and sweet.
Coming out Wednesday, May 16, in the Mad in America newsletter, I will be sharing an article about one such mother who has been in this fight for her son longer than I have. Her story needs to be told.
This is a public post so feel free to share links to Meditations & Musings on social media or forward it to somebody who might benefit. Thank you for reading!
Again I am touched by your honesty and vulnerability. What strength you have.