living with schizophrenia is hard

Not my schizophrenia, my mother's. My childhood is a blur of shame, neglect, violence, drug abuse, and total madness. My mother thrives on manipulating people, is sweet and loving, hears voices and sees hallucinations, loves Jesus, becomes the devil, flies into rages that are uncontrollable, and would give her life for her children. Her illness is her personality. There's no way to reconcile the pieces or fit them together in any meaningful way. There's no way to accept the love without fear of the flip side. I have not allowed myself to love her freely since I was about 9 years old, the first time I contemplated suicide. I sat on the cold linoleum floor of our dilapidated rental house in greenville, ms holding her gun and trying to think of a reason to live. I found one. A good one. And I never seriously considered that option again.

I just read a book called Swallow the Ocean by Laura Flynn. It chronicles her life as a child whose mother is paranoid schizophrenic. After all the shame, pain, and isolation of my own childhood I never expected to read this book from this normal girl about my age who has been through so many of the same things. It's so hard to separate the person from the disease. I choose to be generous and credit my mother with the positive attributes, and the disease with the negative. I choose to forgive her and let her be a part of my life and the lives of my children. I want to protect them from what I went through, and I want to protect them from her. Already Lakelyn knows that grandma is different from other people. That's okay. I'm not going to hide things, just protect them from her worst and indulge them in her best. Some day they can come to their own understanding of what it all means.