Stories: True or False?
Stories are true. Stories are false. Here is my story. When I was 12 years old, my mother began complaining of physical symptoms. She fell down the hill in our backyard while trying to pull the hose up to the bushes that lined the back of our house. She became convinced that she had injured her pituitary gland and that her hormones were affected because of it. She went to specialist after specialist, and each told her the same thing: there was nothing physically wrong with her. When my mother began complaining of things that I couldn’t see—tiny dark spots on her palms, for example—the specialists told her to see a shrink, which she did for a period of time. This did not fix the problems that she continued to experience: the mysterious men in the basement who had fooled around with our telephone, the people who bugged our piano, and those who were plotting to ruin my father’s career at work. Although I believed my mother’s claims to be false, I also questioned myself. Maybe, I wondered, my poor eyesight didn’t allow me to see the palm spots. Maybe my dad really was in trouble at work. Who really knew? I was just on the cusp of trying to figure out my own powers of discernment as I grew into adolescence.
Another year went by, filled with more delusions on the part of my mother and more doctors, each of whom told her to seek mental help. I would wake up to my mother and father arguing. “You need help,” my father would say, and in no time the argument would spin out of control, my mother screaming that these things were really happening, that she was not crazy and that he was a fool to suggest it. Plates were thrown, police were called, and the whole thing concluded (for the time being) with my father—helped by his brother and my best friend’s mother—pulling my mother into our family minivan and committing her to McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA. To this day, my mother believes that my father is a criminal who worked with “cohorts” to ruin her life by institutionalizing her. In reality, he was saving his life and the lives of his children. He would drive me to school and cry on the steering wheel. I would walk into high school and try to concentrate on the tasks at hand. Miraculously, I graduated and attended a fine liberal arts college. Graduated from there, too, just by a hair. It could be said that during that crisis, and for a long time afterward, my mission was to tell the truth about what had happened to me. I shared my story with many people, but there were never enough people, because the one person I wanted to accept my story was the one who never would nor could: my mother. You see, my mother had her own story. Schizophrenia is a tricky disease, because the ones who suffer from it are never able to step away from their stories in order to see what’s truly going on. So what’s in their minds is what’s going on. The whole thing is a brick wall, and each of my sisters came up against it at different times, in different ways. We each have our own story. My mother’s story is no less important or valid than mine—it’s just different. I have spent half my life trying to prove to people that my story was the truest. I now know that no one has a monopoly on what’s true. We only have our own particular story. And if we’re lucky, we have the compassion to accept that others have their own stories as well. Katherine’s story “Beauty School Bimbo” appears in Dammit, I Learned a Lot from That Son-of-a-Gun. Click here to learn more about Katherine. |
