Mummy got sick again today. Today, again, work took a hit. “Have you been sleeping?” my boss asked. How I wish, I thought. I haven’t slept well in weeks now, nightmares or not. Sleep is fickle when you sleep next to someone to go through a heart operation in a day. Sleep is fickle for ones whose mothers have schizophrenia. I’ll figure it out and report in 30 I said.
30 minutes is brave. I held her health in my fist so tight, like a human plaster on a fractured wrist, uncomfortable. If she doesn’t get a neurotic episode, I won’t get my distressed one. 30 minutes I thought would do. Who knew a plaster takes so many blows. Plaster is a mediator. It softens words that come too harshly. A plaster is biased. It cannot protect the soft angry mind which is angry for a reason, which needs to lash.
We managed to push the breakdown to the evening, till we were safe inside our translucent walls. She got manically angry, kicked the table, and cried. She held my hand tight & decided to not say the angry words that demanded being said, because “words once said cannot be taken back. They make people love you less.” We stood strong, with arms pink from the grip, against the words. I didn’t get my post-trauma distress, so proud A was. P would have been too.
How are you, she‘d ask. Spent, I’d say. I am holding onto threads by my teeth, I’d tell her. She somehow knows how to take this, without judgment. I can’t tell anyone else, they think. I am strong enough for papa to take a break now I want to tell her. I am helping mummy build better communication. But I am spent. Carrying sadness in the baggage section of my chest. I don’t want anyone to know what she says, what he does, what we do. It is my biggest fear. R was broken up with ‘cause she cries. Papa was hated on. They hate us for our ways of dealing with things too hard, too fierce, too unknown & too scary for us, P. They hate us for our coping. But I am dealing with it, so much better than Np would expect me to. Don’t be hard on yourself she would have said. But I helped, it was okay, and if mama is right “The world breaks everyone, & afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” I am getting there.