CornySenior Contributor
My Inheritance
Signing up to this forum I got a choice – 'Carers' or 'Lived Experience'.
I am an exhausted and wearied, Carer with Lived Experience, what can I say.
Two Worlds. Both Sides. Split.
Born into mental illness, a double shot. My parents – and then me.
I’ve had people call me loyal. A saint. Other mothers evangelise me….”where did I go wrong with my kids?’…..”why can’t I have a daughter like you”…as if this is what was expected of me. Like all I am worth is to serve and sacrifice. That is my role in life.
I feel that I can’t have an opinion and actually make any coherent sense because I will contradict myself in the first sentence. I am trapped in this silent, vacuous hum of nothing-ness, perplexed, fed up and utterly exhausted by my mother’s mental illness. I feel like I am in suspended jelly, I want to scream at her and nothing comes out.
Maybe I’m just a gutless coward, because to scream at her would be to ridicule myself now.
I think about her being taken to hospital in the 60s against her will and given shock treatment.
I think about her uncle being placed in the same hospital just before her, the exact same hospital, never to get out. His sister, down the coast, locked up forever, my grandfather visited her twice. And then me, 2016, placed in a locked ward of a public hospital, nurses behind a glass wall watching me. Doctors telling me it will take you at least 18 months to get over this. Tick tick boom. It was my turn.
Mum still doesn't know.
I don’t have schizophrenia like my Mum and great Aunt and great Uncle. I still may get it. But I don’t have it today. I know that categorical thinking has done zilch to help me understand my illness. I seem to be a kaleidoscopic smudge of what my shrink calls…..when a mixture of mental illness meets a ‘chronic trauma syndrome’.
I love my Mum.
But sometimes I hate her.
She was my first complicit bystander.
I can’t sugar coat it in sympathetic dew simply because schizophrenia sucks.
She let me down, and I don’t know if she’s even a nice person. She doesn’t even appreciate everything I do.
I look at my friends, and they are so free. I get jealous. I cannot imagine what that feels like.
They feel worthy of their own lives. No guilt. No knots in the stomach……..I have absolutely no concept of what free feels like.
All I have are guilt trips. My mother on one side and my father on the other. Pulling at me and clawing me down.
The two of them, with their weights, don’t even cancel me out.
I just feel nothing.
I am fed up with my responsibilities.
This is my inheritance.
An inheritance that I live out privately.
My mother is completely oblivious.
Corny.
