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15. My Mother’s Mental Illness
- Syracuse University Press
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210 15 My Mother’s Mental Illness W h i t n e y Jo n e s - G a r c i a 18 July 2008 My mother has run away from home.1 She is hiding in a bathroom stall in a department store basement. “How did you manage to call me?” she asks. “My phone doesn’t work. It’s in emergency mode.” She talks quickly, breathlessly, stringing her words together so quickly that I can barely keep up. She was ordered to leave her apartment by her neighbors—criminal pieces of garbage—who live two floors below. They set up a sound system so that my mother can hear them and so that they can hear her. They have a hellhole under their bathroom floor where they torture and kill people, but sometimes they say “kill with kindness,” which means they drug people instead of killing them. My brother, or his twin, is there now, and if she didn’t leave when they told her to, he would be killed, but maybe they meant something else, like kill with kindness. Criminal pieces of shit. Someone is knocking on the stall door. It’s 10:00 p.m. The store is closing. I call my brother Dylan for help. Almost twenty years ago, my brother asked me, “Do I have a twin?” Our mother says so many things. Some things are true, some things are related to the truth, and some things are 1. Whitney Jones-Garcia is the pseudonym of an associate professor in the humanities at a university in the northeast. Her essay records her experiences of actual events. With the exception of Esmin Green, Steven Sabock, and Millie and Susan Smiley, all names and place names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. My Mother’s Mental Illness • 211 true only to her. I showed my brother his birth certificate, and the solid check mark beside “single birth,” and the familiar loops of our mother’s signature. “They forced me to sign that,” she would insist later. My brother leaves work early—he has a new job bartending—to look for our mother. She won’t tell us exactly where she is. Her calls are being monitored. She shouldn’t even be talking to us on the phone. “I was told that bad things would happen to Dylan or Zack if I called,” she says. Zack, the twin, seems to move in and out of her consciousness. Years have gone by without any mention of him, but right now he is a fixture. I wish he did exist. We could use the backup. This is the first time in over three years that our mother has left her apartment by herself. My brother Dylan takes her to the grocery store every week. Occasionally my brother Tom visits her. But he lives on the opposite side of the city, in an adult-care home, and shares my mother’s diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia. Planning and executing a trip to see her can be difficult for him, and lately she tells him that he cannot visit. She is worried that he will be kidnapped by her neighbors. I live hundreds of miles away, but I visit usually once a month and stay with her for several days. I take her out shopping, to lunch, to dinner, and to meet the manager of the rental property she inherited—her only source of income. Under other circumstances (“normal” circumstances?), I would be thrilled that she left the apartment by herself. But she left tonight not only out of fear, but also because the voices she heard ordered her to leave. She followed a command. I am used to her having delusions and hearing voices. I am even used to her talking back to the voices she hears sometimes. But this time is very different. She is doing what the voices tell her to do. This feels dangerous. My brother easily finds my mother. She’s at least somewhat predictable , and it’s late. There’s only a short list of places she might be and he finds her at his first stop. Her phone really is in “emergency mode”—she had called 911 earlier in the day, which enabled the GPS tracking on her cell phone. Explaining this to her, of course, only reinforces her other beliefs that her calls are monitored. Dylan takes her back to his apartment , where she stands by his front...