She finds a guide who bears the lamp of wisdom to illuminate the path ahead.
The schizophrenia diagnosis sent me into a spiral. I searched through my paperback dictionary and our set of encyclopedias for definitions that could help me decipher how to communicate with my mother. I read about Eugen Bleuler, the Swiss psychiatrist who coined the term when he treated famed ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in 1919. Nijinsky had a nervous breakdown at thirty, never recovered and never danced again. Out of the list of possible symptoms I found—grandiose delusions, auditory hallucinations and paranoid beliefs of godly persecution—none described her expressionless gaze, or the delight she took in the suffering of others.
Even after her medical assessment, no one in the extended family knew what to make of my mother’s erratic behaviour.
My Aunt Ida, my mother’s sister-in-law, called from Montreal. “She should have another baby. That would focus her attention, and she wouldn’t have time to throw these tantrums.” Uncle Mauro, a man my father tolerated for Aunt Angelina’s sake, suggested dad’s leniency caused all the problems. “If you took off your belt and walloped her, she wouldn’t fall out of line. She’d behave.”
Everyone had an opinion they insisted on sharing with us, no matter how caveman or clueless their tips. Our dismal situation supplied two pastimes dear to southern Italians—gossiping and opining. We drifted in a sea of dreadful advice.
Old-world attitudes exported from the motherland: ground zero. All of the chaos so familiar. Molise, the pastoral region of big-hearted, loud-mouthed people who shouted at me—“She looks like her Nonna! She’s so tall! Over here, come here and let me have a look at you!”—lived on as a place where objects in the memory were much closer than they appeared.
Dad drove me to my first appointment with Dr. Salima and sat in the waiting room. Dr. Salima was short; at 5’6”, I towered over her. Her round face glowed a gorgeous caramel, the kind people in the 1980s tried to copy in tanning salons. With her auburn hair pulled back, she bore an uncanny resemblance to the actress who played the psychic in the movie Poltergeist. A good omen, I thought.
Her office was located in the same medical building on Bloor and Jane that my parents had gone to for my mother’s psychiatric assessment from Dr. Amante. After a few follow up sessions with him, my mother’s aggression, hostility and noncompliance put an end to the treatments.
In a fury over losing her driver’s licence because of her diagnosis, she’d poured her Thorazine down the drain and pulverized the bathroom mirrors again. Arguments soared to atomic levels.
“Take your medicine, don’t take your medicine, I don’t care—I’m never letting you use the car again. You could kill somebody. You could ruin a life, and that means nothing to you.” Dad turned to me mid-rant. “Can you believe this?”
I shrugged. “Sure. She’s ruining our lives.”
“That’s right.” He shouted down to the basement, where my mother was hanging the laundry and shrieking out a foul tirade. “Did you hear what your daughter said?”
“Pa no—”
“You’re ruining our lives.”
My mother paused her obscenity-strewn monologue. “I’ll show you, gypsy. I’ll show you.”
“Thanks a lot, Papa. That’s gonna cost me.”
“I can’t take any more. My nerves are broken. Me vade a prende nu caffè.” He headed for the door.
“And now you’re leaving? You’re not serious? You’re going to leave me with her like this?”
“I should stay here and be insulted in my own home? Go to your room and lock the door.”
As a result of all this chaos and instability, I underwent a series of frightening and debilitating anxiety attacks.
“How can I help you?” Dr. Salima asked after I sat down.
I opened my mouth to speak and let out a muffled sob. A long, snot-ugly cry followed each time I tried to regain my composure. Not an unusual occurrence for my distraught 15-year-old self, but also not the first impression I wanted to make.
She handed me a box of tissues from her desk. She sat across from me, calm and quiet, waiting for me to finish.
I blew my nose several times before I could lift my head. The heavy weight of shame gripped me: embarrassment and despair pulsed through my body frequently enough that I thought the states of being could be tracked coursing through my veins.
She gave me an encouraging smile.
I imagined her banishing malevolent ghosts and sniffled an apology. “I don’t know if I should be here. My mother probably should. She—she’s very sick. She tried to kill me once when I was a kid. She believed I infiltrated and led a spy-prostitute ring.” I bawled again as I told her about the diagnosis.
“That’s a terrible illness. Hard on everyone. I’m sure it’s been extremely confusing for you.”
I nodded.
“Is that your father in the outer office? Why is he here?”
“I didn’t know how to get here by myself.” I’d developed a new tendency to panic anytime I went somewhere new. Timid and terrified all the time, exhausted from feigning normalcy, I adhered to my father like a baby duck—albeit the moody teenage version.
“I see.” Dr. Salima stood and pointed out the window. “That’s the subway station, right across the street. You sound brave. Maybe you need to practice independence. Next time, come without your father.”
Bewildered by her compliment, I assured her of my cowardice. Bit by bit, I revealed the public panic attack that had spurred me to her office. Months before, I’d attended a special student-priced event at Roy Thompson Hall. An operetta, The Merry Widow. I arrived too early, and sat alone waiting for friends. A group of private school girls glowered at my outfit, a brown velour dress nearly a decade out of date, and snickered at my dirt-trapped-under-a-manicured-nail status. I filled the slot of the pre-show spectacle. I ignored them by moving to another bench, where I pretended to study the program. When that didn’t work, I escaped to the bathroom. Two followed me in and spoke loudly about my hideous clothing while I hid in a stall.
My mother had loaned me the frock and helped me prepare. I’d trusted her uncharacteristic kindness when I should have known she had set me up to be mocked. Everything my mother touched turned to lead. I waited in the washroom until closer to curtain time to make my way to my seat.
By the time my friend Nicole showed up, I was an inconsolable wreck. She walked me to the lobby where my father happened to be waiting. He had decided it wasn’t worth his time to go home. Nicole hugged me goodbye and said she’d call me the next day. I barely heard her promise.
I paused, and Dr. Salima jotted down a note.
“The worst part is how I can still hear them talking about me.”
“Of course. That’s what you’ve learned from your mother, but that’s her problem, not yours. Does what I’m saying make sense?”
I frowned. “Not really.”
“Your mother has schizophrenia, and if she came here, I wouldn’t be able to help her. You don’t have schizophrenia, but you learned from your mother how to behave, how to respond when you felt threatened. This is not particular to you, we all learn from our families. You, I can help.”
I focused on the aloe vera plant on her desk. Finally, I broke the silence. “Will this take long?”
“The appointments are an hour.”
“I mean, how long will I need to come for?”
“That’s really up to you. To both of us.”
I leaned back in the plush chair, relieved. Stories of people going to psychiatrists for years worried me; I hoped six months of weekly meetings could prevent me from losing my mind.
For the next two years, every Friday after school I took the bus north, the opposite direction from home, to meet with Dr. Salima. Each week I sat in the comfortable chair opposite her imposing wooden desk and tried to make sense of the absurd or the plain awful.
She listened attentively, and advised on how to cope with my mother’s wrath.
In the time since the diagnosis, months that turned into years, my mother had grown more paranoid, more disturbed, more violent, harder to handle. I responded by retaliating with mindless force: when she wouldn’t drink her medication one night, I threw it in her face, the orange juice mixture dripping onto her nightgown and bed sheets as she shrieked at me. She chased me down the hall and around the dining table where my father was reading the Italian paper.
He moaned, “O Dio, when will we have peace in this house? Lucy, take your medicine.”
By then, I’d lost faith that my father would put an end to my mother’s savagery even though he kept insisting I didn’t need to worry, that he’d figure out a solution to the situation.
She lunged across him to reach for me and crumpled his newspaper.
In a fit of frustration, he stood. “I’m going for an espresso. Who can live like this?”
I said nothing. My mother waited for him to leave and cornered me in the living room. I turned and struck the side of her head with my fist.
She kicked at my knee.
I punched her ear again.
She grabbed my forearm and bit hard.
I fought back, scratching across her neck to force her jaw open.
Days when I couldn’t muster the stamina needed to defend myself, I beat a hasty retreat, calling friends for help from the phone in my bedroom. When I was thirteen, my friend Athena had rushed over on her bicycle and ushered me out of the house; now at seventeen, we went to different high schools and had fallen out. She’d befriended a girl who detested me, and in the period that followed, I recognized Athena’s domineering presence and petulant temper as a kinder-hearted version of my mom.
I told Dr. Salima about a recent fight. I’d barely made it to my room and had managed to shove a dresser against the door as my mother tried to crash through. Her right arm stuck in the doorway. The lock my father installed as a protective measure had broken months before during a different argument when my mother kicked the door open, breaking the wooden frame and metal latch. Pinned between the wall and the doorway, she screamed a slew of obscenities.
“Let me in,” she shouted, hollering about what she would do with me when she got through the door. Three routine threats spun through her limited repertoire: she’d kill me, maim me and make me sorry I was ever born.
“I’m sorry you’re my mother—get away from me!” I braced my shoulder against the side of the dresser and pressed my strength forward. “Go away!”
My mother’s arm slammed repeatedly between the door and the frame. I could see the limb whiten as it was squeezed, as I pushed back.
She yowled. A pitch I imagined a wolf caught in a leg hold trap would make. As the cause of her pain, I relented.
As soon as she felt my resolve weaken, she owned the brawl. She bulldozed the obstructed door and clambered over the dresser.
“You want to fight me, ingrate? Disagree with me? Test me? I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.”
She screamed her favourite insults. “You weren’t born, you came into the world as shit! You understand? I shit you out of me. You’re nothing but a piece of shit. You think you can beat me? Garbage whore. You want a fight, I’ll give you a fight, you gypsy slut.” She landed blow after blow.
I curled on the floor like an armadillo, waiting for her to tire. I kept my head covered and kicked out when I could. One punt to her side knocked her off-balance. She fell next to me. Lashing out like a feral cat, she latched on to the forearm I’d flung across my face for protection with her mouth, sunk her teeth into the soft fleshy part and growled.
“Ma va fanculo—Let go, you raving fucking lunatic—”
“I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget!”
“Go ahead psychopath—” I shrilled. “I’ll dance on your grave when you’re gone.”
This stopped her cold. Her eyes narrowed. She threw back her head and chortled.
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
Repeatedly, she responded with belly laughs when she pushed me beyond my breaking point—that ledge I clung to until I tumbled into a chasm of sorrow and returned to lash out with rampant animosity. She goaded me until she got what she wanted: a nasty reaction. Each scuffle replenished her insatiable desire for another, and every time I stooped to her level of cruelty, she rejoiced. Engaged in one altercation after another, I felt stuck in an eternal staring contest with my mother. I always blinked. She always won.
She stood up and pulled the dresser back into position and then left the room, still laughing, as if we’d watched a hilarious comedy routine.
I panted as I dialled my father’s number at work. I never called him there, but I had the number in my nightstand drawer. The receptionist at the factory could barely understand me through my tears. She’d have to make an announcement over the PA system, since my father worked on the main floor. From her tone, I understood that this was a considerable inconvenience, and against protocol. Heavy machinery in the factory generated a high volume of white noise, the type found on construction sites. She hinted that it was dangerous. No one received calls on the job.
I pleaded, “It’s an emergency.”
My father answered the phone in an anxious tone, “Lucy? What’s happened?”
“Papa—”
“Oh, thank God,” relief flooded through my dad’s voice.
I told him I couldn’t take it anymore. Huddled on the floor with my arms wrapped around my legs, I stammered out the details.
“Don’t provoke her.”
“What did you say?”
“Don’t upset her. When I come home, it will be another world war again. Every night it’s a fight. I want a peaceful life. I’m at work. I can’t do anything from here.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My father, a traitor siding with the enemy.
“You have to stay calm. You know how she is.”
“Meh tu si pazz. You’re crazy. Thanks for nothing, Dad.”
“Nothing? I sacrifice my life and work so you can have a future, and this is what I get? You say thanks, this effort is nothing? I give you nothing? You don’t know what it means to have nothing.”
I held the receiver away from my ear and stared at it. My father’s voice sounded frayed.
“Never mind.” I slammed the phone down. I crawled under the covers and faced the wall until the outside dark took over the room.
Hours later, the garage door creaked open and shut. I said nothing when he came into my room to ask if I was mad at him. I couldn’t acknowledge his presence. He stormed off sputtering that he worked hard and deserved peace and quiet. I skipped dinner, ignored both my parents’ requests to come downstairs to eat. Worn out, I fell asleep in my jeans.
Retelling the story to Dr. Salima, my cheeks warmed with mortification. Even in her cool office, a sweat broke out around my hairline.
Dr. Salima listened and took notes. She placed her clipboard on to her desk and leaned forward to explain: one third of people who developed schizophrenia would improve, one third worsened, one third stayed the same.
I couldn’t calculate. “So, my mother? Which one will she be?”
Dr. Salima brushed her hand across her lap, clearing invisible crumbs from her skirt. “From what we’ve talked about, from what you’ve told me, she’ll get worse.”
I stared at her, shaking my head. I couldn’t imagine worse.
There were events I kept from Dr. S—the visit to the palm reader who predicted I would marry young, have three kids and travel the world. The weekly habit I’d developed of pulling out the Rider-Waite Tarot deck and attempting to forecast my fate. I found the cards at a bookstore in the flashy suburban Etobicoke mall and performed multiple Celtic Cross readings for myself—a complex ten card spread that detailed past strife, present woes and the possible future.
She removed her glasses, and cleaned them with a small cloth. A suggestion: leave home, pick a university in another province, settle down and get rooted in a place far, far away from both my parents.
“I can’t. I don’t think I can leave my dad.”
“I think you can. I think you’ll have to.”