This is a beautifully heart wrenching piece of writing. It really shows the loneliness and desperation that both her and her mother are feeling.
“The Times : November 15, 2008…
Growing Up With A Mentally Ill Parent by Francesca Okeke
Imagined enemies at the gate, bugged TVs… In a raw and revealing dissection of her childhood and life now, writer Francesca Okeke describes what it’s like growing up with a mentally ill parent.
Francesca Okeke
The letter box is thickly wrapped with masking tape, inexpertly applied, the house alarm is permanently on and, when not in the bath, Evelyn Okeke sits in bed, ramrod straight, one hand on her tattered copy of the Bible.
The door is wearing its plastic protection because she is convinced that people unknown are, at some point today, going to post petrol bombs through it. Despite her genuine terror, she still sounds almost relieved, triumphant even. With one action she has foiled them. Okeke 1, Forces of Evil 0.
“Promise me,” she weeps, “you’ll be careful, and if you see anyone following you, come straight home.” “Yes, Mum,” I soothe, briskly, “of course,” as I hurry out of the door in an attempt to be on time for work. Her face betrays no semblance of the urgency that coats her voice with a thick layer of panic, as if she is wearing a mask; her words are at odds with her expressionless features.
She is, we agree, having a “psychic attack”, hence the door, the alarm and taking refuge in the bathroom, where the prying eyes of hidden cameras cannot, for some reason, see. Submerged in water is the only place that she feels safe, so she reasons that she must actually be safe. People like her are always targets, she says proudly, but nobody said that having second sight was going to be easy. This is her burden and she is proud to bear it. Except I don’t really agree, and my fingers are crossed behind my back. I’ve lost count of how many times I have nodded in agreement with my free hand defiantly crossed out of sight. Whatever – the point is to try to keep her feeling as safe as possible while I am out of the house.
My mother has regularly exhibited signs of being a paranoid schizophrenic, and over the past 30 years there have been many such episodes. When I was 8, she told me specific radio DJs had special messages only she could decipher. At 11, she was convinced that a conspiracy of friends, family and work colleagues was trying to make her resign her job. As a teenager, I was regularly admonished for telling my friends the most innocuous pieces of information. That was rule number one: don’t tell anyone anything. Ever. Now, that rule has been turned around – I avoid telling her anything that could be construed as controversial.
I spend most of this woeful day on the phone, trying to persuade her not to call the police to report the circling helicopter she swears is tracking her every move. When not issuing strings of reassuring sentences, I’m trying to persuade her boss not to sack her for failing to go to work. Would you bother to call in sick if you thought somebody wanted your family dead?
“She’s near a breakdown, Francesca,” says her well-meaning boss. “Near?” I reply, too bewildered to say that, actually, she is slap-bang in the middle of one, and no, it isn’t the first, second, third or even fourth time, and yes, I would like some help, please.
I was 30 before I realised that my mother’s “eccentricities” were slightly more pathological in nature than just the jagged edges of a complicated character. Writing that now, all these years later, feels slightly pathetic but, in my defence, I thought it was normal. My childhood was difficult but not unhappy, we were poor and Mum was mentally fragile, but I was a child and didn’t intellectualise her behaviour. By the time I started to think about it, “it” was normal, and I was too busy whizzing up the career ladder as a journalist. Looking back, she has probably been like this all her life; she’s certainly displayed strange behaviour for all of mine.
Three weeks after I speak to her boss, it’s me who’s handing in my notice. My mother is having the mother of all breakdowns; now is not a good time to be writing about spoilt pop stars, effectively my job description in my role as a press and marketing manager.
Mum, sensing trouble, also resigns from her job, realising that, otherwise, not only would she have to undergo some kind of medical on her return, but that she would have to go to the doctor for a sick-leave certificate. Neither of these things can happen – mad she may be, stupid she is not..
Ironically, Mum had been a disability nurse for 25 years, cheerily caring for those physically incapable of doing so themselves. She can be strangely callous about things that she doesn’t consider important, but about physical illness she is all sympathy and kind-hearted empathy. Her illness means that she cannot see that anyone else’s emotional problems are worthy of her attention.
Now we are both unemployed, but she is at least happy. Her biggest fear is that the “they” who are out to get us, do so while one of us is out. So now, there is no “out”. There is just “in”, and that makes her feel secure. Financial adversity gives Mum life-is-hard bragging rights; but we are a team and have withstood worse.
As a teenager, I told her that I was going to college to study, when actually I was going to work. I understood that money worries made her worse, and so I wanted to work to ease some of the pressure, but to avoid a parental conflagration, I didn’t tell her. A couple of years later, as an 18-year-old trainee journalist, I left London to learn my trade on the South Coast – I was happy and so was she. It wasn’t until I started working for a music broadcaster, three years later, that her behaviour took a definite turn. She would write letters to my colleagues, haranguing them for perceived transgressions, leaving me making bewildered apologies to people she had never met. Some time later she wrote a long rambling letter to my boss’s wife. It was around this time that the truth gradually dawned on me: other people didn’t behave like this.
When I was a child, there were lots of things Mum couldn’t do: go to the shops, collect the child benefit, or housework. It wasn’t that she was physically unable; rather that she had misplaced her will, but was always hopeful that it might turn up at any minute. She covered her inability to do anything in the house by forcing me to be independent. I took on the role eagerly, an award-winning performance of nurturing, caring motherhood. At the age of 8, I was well known on the high street, eliciting extra apples and winks from Ron the greengrocer, and a friendly and regular admonition from Mr and Mrs Singh in the Post Office not to spend all of the money at once.
I cleaned and polished the house, went to the launderette and asked, quietly, for credit in local shops – without which we might well have starved. “Hello, Mr Mann. Mum says will you let us have some bread and milk, sardines and cornflakes and tea? She’ll give you the money next week.” The shame of having to ask for something that I need has never left me.
Mum, weighed down by a tangible sadness, slept, alone – my father having taken the sensible option to return to the West Africa he hated in the face of an unreliable, unreasonable and demanding wife. Apparently, she asked Dad to leave, finally realising that their relationship was doing nobody any good, least of all me. He retaliated by saying that, if she were to demand that he leave, he would never see me again. In one fell swoop, I went from child of the house to mini co-conspirator.
She had (and still has) an unnerving habit of addressing letters to one person and sending them to another; this is meant to be a heads up, a warning that she knew what they were up to, and Was Not Having It. In her world, people plotted against us, and by warning them in this way, she could try to control the outcome.
My childhood is scarred by memories of her scurrying up the road to the post box in nightdress and curlers, as if speed alone would be her saviour. Who is “they”? That is a question only she can answer. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that the “they” have remained remarkably consistent over the past 30 years.
Mental health illnesses are cruel because the brain convinces you that what you see and hear is true, even if what you see and hear is hallucinations. It seduces you into believing that all of the minor coincidences of life are clues to a bigger conspiracy. It teaches you to trust no one. It demands that you and you alone are the holder of the truth. It is, above all else, terrifying and exhausting in equal measure. I have, over the past seven years, read reams about her symptoms, which is what leads me to believe that she is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia – but I am not a doctor. Schizophrenics of popular imagination are dangerous and violent – she is neither, she’s just Mum.
I have been spared no detail of the horrific things she was convinced were happening. Relatives and strangers ganged up with her former employers to stop her getting a new job; sinister men followed us around South London, hiding in the shadows. The phone box at the end of the road was bugged, as was our enormous black and white TV, and there was a recording device in the oven.
Trying to get explanations I could understand was problematic, to put it mildly. I was a literal child and would constantly ask questions that she couldn’t answer, her face heavy with sorrow at the thought that her daughter could be an unbeliever. Prissily, I needed to connect A, B, C and D before I could arrive at E. She could go from A to Z with nothing so much as a safety net between them.
Financially, things were now difficult; poor when there were two incomes, we were now sliding into uncompromising poverty, as Mum had stopped working once Dad had left. In the Seventies, when we were a two-parent family, Mum working nights and Dad working days seemed the perfect solution for a couple out of love but with nobody around to take up the child-minding slack. Dad’s going made this unworkable. So, she decided to stop working nights and stay at home with me. This came as a bit of a shock. A true daddy’s girl, I was used to his company when Mum was at work. I’m not sure if I saw her presence as a consolation prize for his sudden absence, but I suspect as much.
It was just as well – she was in no fit state to be working with sick people. Unhappiness radiated from her. Into the Eighties, she put a spin on her unemployment, saying that she wanted to be home when I returned from primary school. And I was glad that she was. When she was having a good day, she would be up and dressed; the table would be laid and the smell of cake would hang in the
air. On a bad day, she would be in bed, curtains drawn, with nothing but the smell of misery. Occasionally, the good times would trick me into thinking that she had somehow been “cured”. A comment about people following us, or a “message” from a radio DJ, would swiftly put me back in my place. Just because she isn’t talking about it, doesn’t mean she isn’t thinking about it.
This went on my entire time at primary school, and, all the while, I was beginning to recognise the triggers: unpaid bills and letters from the bank were all filed in the bin before she could read them. Thoughts were edited before they were uttered. House rules were kept. She demanded total loyalty; transgression was punished by being sent to Coventry. When I was 11 and starting secondary school, she returned to work part-time, then full-time work when I was 13.
Whenever a breakdown beckoned, she was adamant that she didn’t want to see a doctor. Partly because she didn’t think there was anything wrong with her, but also because she recognised that, were she to articulate the horror of her life, she could get carted off. So, we continued on together, like a warped version of The Golden Girls, our secret locking us together.
Once I left school, our lives settled into a pattern. I would try to keep her insulated from stress, recognising that financial difficulties would propel her towards emotional meltdown. Sometimes though, despite my best efforts, the doom would descend: she would try to restrict my life in order to keep me “safe”, and I would repel her efforts, to keep me sane. She pulls me, I push her.
Once, bitter, teary and weary, I went to my doctor to see if Mum could be referred to the local mental health team. Would you like Prozac, she asked. Er, not really, I replied, but I would like a psychiatric nurse to visit. Apparently, Mum has to be referred by her own GP. Except she hasn’t got a GP – physically, she is as strong as an ox and has never needed one, and besides, there is nobody as leery of a doctor as a nurse. My one cry for help went unanswered; Mum was right, it’s just the two of us.
The letter box survives, but, like a victim of a horrific chemical accident, remains scarred. The Bible remains within hand’s reach. I have learnt to live my life on tenterhooks; there I remain, waiting for the next time.
Some names have been changed”
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