What it was like growing up with a schizoaffective mom

I was adopted at 17, now I want to help more people talk about mental illness

Mental health is shut out from daily conversation and those who are mentally ill are hidden away, isolated, and suffer alone.

My mom is diagnosed with a severe mental disorder called schizoaffective, which is a mixture of bipolar and schizophrenia.  Her inconsistent behavior leads her to be unable to hold a job or maintain healthy relationships with me, friends or any potential husbands.

Only those who have a mental illness can understand what it is like.  I struggle everyday trying to understand how it can be possible for my mom to be unable to be a mother for me.  How can a mental illness hinder someone from being a whole person?  And what would my mother be like if she weren’t to have this mental illness?

Living with my mom meant that I was never able to have a life for myself.  It meant that I was constantly on edge and having to predict her every move while handling the consequences of it.

She experienced anxiety attacks, where she would not give me any space, and harass me with ridiculous questions that could range from, “Why is the chair out of place?” to “Are you having sex?” at ten years old.

She was also constantly in and out of hospitals, either due to her choosing not to take the medication or the medication being ineffective.  What would suck most was that she had to be a certain degree of “unstable” for her to be admitted into the hospital.  I would have to wait days/weeks at a time for her to become more and more far gone, while her behaviors would get stranger and more uncomfortable.  She would talk to herself, stop eating, leave the house to God-knows-where, or be naked sometimes.

This damaged my view of what a mother was supposed to be and  I looked for love and family in all the wrong places. I was expecting  friends, guys, drinking, and a bunch of other coping mechanisms to give me the love I needed.   For a long time I didn’t believe I could be loved, and to this day I still struggle with believing this.

Even though it felt like rejection from my mom, I knew she wasn’t capable of providing me with the emotional care I needed as a child. But it doesn’t really take away the pain or the damage that has been done by her being allowed to take care of me in the first place.

However, this brings up a bigger problem in our society – how this issue continues to be an unspoken topic.  I found out that surprisingly, other people had relatives who were experiencing mental illness, but never had the courage to discuss it in front of other people.

I was once that person.

Since I’ve been adopted at 17 years old by a family who went to my church (HOW AWESOME IS THAT RIGHT), my mom has mostly lived in the mental institution because she is unable to take care of herself, or a child for that matter.

This topic being unspoken of leads to a lack of attention and progression on this issue.  There are not many resources for my mom to live in a structured environment with people she can talk to, that are not extremely expensive or unsafe.  It costs more for her to be institutionalized than if these kinds of homes were available.  She gets extremely lonely, which leads her to stop taking her medication so she can actually go into the hospital to be with other people.  How desperate must you be to WANT to go into the hospital?

Mentally ill people are put to the side and not given opportunity to be active in our society.  To some degree, they cannot, and should not have the pressures of being part of society.  But on the other hand, they should also not be shut out completely and have some place within it.

How my mom had the right to take care of me, I have no idea.  But the systems in place don’t seem to care about the emotional well-being of children, and many other people for that matter.

This is an injustice and we all have a part to play in it.  The first step is to step out of our comfort zone and talk about it.

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