Opinion | Son of a Neurodivergent Mother

To my brothers.

Recently, I published an article about depression and psychosis during pregnancy and postpartum here in The Observatory, where I shared very painful information about these mental health afflictions and the discrimination that surrounds them. I also spoke of the value of educating society when the women who suffer these (and those around them) bear witness to their experiences and help break the silence that weighs on the subject, the silence that is one of the leading causes of this discrimination. That’s why, in the end, I committed to narrating my own experience with my mother’s emotional fragility – a fragility that worsened with my birth – and to do so before the end of May, the month commemorating mothers almost worldwide.

So here goes.

I am the youngest of my parents’ seven children, born just one year apart, and of whom, in addition, one died as a baby, a victim of chickenpox that my mother suffered during pregnancy. Thus, it is understandable that she was already emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted when I was born, when that disorder exploded and endured chronically until her death.

The pain she suffered was long-existent: Born an only child in a very wealthy family in Cuba, she had been educated in an environment of religious excess, led by her mother and grandmother, and without the counterweight of a father figure because my grandfather left home when she was five. On top of this atmosphere of pressure and crucial loss, the whole family moved to Mexico when she was in the middle of puberty (I clarify, long before the Revolution). Her marriage to my father, a sensitive and brilliant young man but emotionally fragile, gave her moments of happiness. Still, she could not protect herself by living motherhood conventionally in a family, that is, as an obligation where neither one’s desires nor strengths mattered. Like this, at the age of twenty-six, with six children (and the memory of another dead), she gave birth to her seventh child.

If my mother’s life had been difficult, what followed my arrival was terrible.  Let me quote the verse I wrote humorously at the age of thirteen in my Modest Autobiography:

Al mes de que había nacido
el niño ya caminaba,
y a los cinco platicaba
como un hombre ya crecido.

Translation:

A month after he was born
the child was already walking,
and at five, he was talking
like a man already grown.

This description is not entirely accurate. A month after I was born, my mother went into a severe crisis that put her in a psychiatric hospital. My father, returning home from work, had found her standing in the corner of the room, her face distorted with terror and one hand raised to protect herself from the hallucination of a monster. The devil, perhaps.

Her delusions were always religious. My father told me many years later that he had decided to take her to the hospital where he worked (he was a doctor doing his residency in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I was born). There she remained hospitalized for eleven months, discharged in time to celebrate my first birthday and see me take my first steps. Eleven months, she told me, during which she suffered daily a fall into a bottomless abyss, until one day she felt she was going to stay forever. She managed to get out following her doctor’s suggestion to express what she was feeling, even if in a jarring way:

“Scream!”

That’s what she told me he recommended to her.

That remedy became her way of life. In Mexico, she spent the days sleeping or crying and devoted herself to the hobby she loved most: reading. At times, she recovered her spirit and, dressing beautifully in the style of the sixties, went out seeking a job (almost always as an English teacher). But she ended up back home, full of pain and helplessness.

Medication was her other tool – always misused, clumsily, excessively – especially psychiatric medication. She did not stop consuming them, with a tremendous lack of control. My desperate father, with few tools, tried to channel all this differently, but both were overwhelmed, and the catastrophe continued.

The first act of this horrible drama ended with their separation.

The second act begins with my mother alone. My father took all the children to live with him, and my mother stayed with my grandmother. My heart understood that her loneliness was already total. Her screams came to the fore; perhaps she remembered the remedy that had managed to get her out of the hospital – the desire to cling to life made screaming her primary resource. Lying under the fronds of your screams, I wrote many years later, in a text describing the perpetual combination of beauty and pain in her face: Your perfect teeth / in your rarely blissful smile.

Everything about her gradually faded away: her intellectual restlessness, her dreaminess, her propensity for art, her taste for singing and writing poetry, for drawing in ink in a delicate Japanese style… These were replaced by her consumption of medicines (which finally took her, at a relatively young age), reading romance novels, and going out from time to time to buy books and have a coffee, always in the same place.

I remember at this moment with a mixture of tenderness, anger, and terror, the Mother’s Day visits to her house, a climate of desolation, and her desire to get under the covers and never go out again. Finally, her suffering led her to numerous psychiatric clinics and brain lobe surgeries, which did not stop her anguish but did slow her down and took away some of her splendid lucidity – not her beauty and goodness, nor, as I say, her suffering.

The end, which I already spoiled, is that the drugs took her, apparently especially one that relieves headaches a lot, but whose abuse slowly hardens the blood vessels and ends life.

The third act is the repercussion of all this on those close to my mother. Her pain does not stop radiating even now towards her environment, in which she is no longer present. Perhaps for the first time, through this writing, it does for me, in the right direction, by sharing it with you, my readers. However, for decades, my mother’s fragility disrupted our environment without anyone effectively helping us to stop it. I say, “anyone helping us,” meaning my mother, me, my siblings, yes, and also all those who did not know how to treat her or what to do with her, from those closest to her – my father, grandparents, uncles, cousins – to those in her daily or occasional social environment: her mother, neighbors, people who passed by…

Help her? Pity her? Flee? She walked the street, carrying photos of her children and grandchildren everywhere, entered a café, a bookstore, cried as soon as she passed through the door of the house, and her screams could be heard day and night in neighboring houses and apartments.

*

One doubts that anyone will listen when one gives a testimony like this. Writing poetry has always been my attempt to overcome that doubt, and sometimes I think I have succeeded:

How much pain in you! A horse with tangled legs, that’s what you were, mother.

I wrote and published this for the first time years ago, and I received many shocked responses to these two lines, especially from women who saw themselves or their mothers in that image.

Confessing one’s pain to a community implies, at least in cases like mine, a denunciation (“Each poem is a scream,” a connoisseur told me). Sometimes, as in this article, that denunciation wants to be explicit and clear. In this case, speaking of mental “illness,” I cannot help but feel that many refer to something contagious. I am very far from considering people who psychically diverge from the typical as “sick.” I am not talking about those who suffer from an organic condition. However, I am convinced that much of the so-called “mental illness” is nothing more than a lack of opportunities for the divergent to live in society.

I believe this problem has two parts, both associated with the social obsession with productivity and performance and with human relations based on exchange.

The first part comprises those people suffering from what Freud called the Reality Principle, which, in simple terms, means being realistic: that is, assuming that to live is, to a certain degree, to survive, and to accept this within specific social canons of subsistence and coexistence. The curious thing is that being realistic quickly becomes (perhaps, faster than ever, in today’s world) a contempt for the emotional and a praise of productivity, material, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual, until it imposes the supposed realism not onlyatthe beginning but also throughout the middle and end of life.

Let us now think of deep emotional states that require our full attention and, therefore, oppose these demands of productivity; emotional states that are not necessarily negative or destructive but compete with social demands in some of their phases. This competition can be paralyzing and even maddening. For most, the decision is clear: postpone emotions and accomplish the mandate. To achieve this, they have many tools and many “motivations.” However, for a few (apparently, there are more and more of us), the decision is to attend to the emotion. Certain extreme situations have oriented us towards conceiving a world that puts what happens inside us at the forefront. We have tools to live with it, flourish, and share it, but these are not of the “motivation” type; motives, purposes, and benefits do not move us. We lack the filters that help others to dose their actions. This is how we are left in the open in the face of particular demands. These demands are of many types (not just work); for some women, they are especially evident during pregnancy and postpartum. Many never knew such demands would be a structural part of their lives. Then, suddenly, they are immersed in a whirlwind of responsibilities and pressures to perform some activities and fulfill functions that are alien to them.

One of the obligations that society demands of pregnant women or women who have given birth is to feel fully fulfilled through motherhood; that is, to be excited to pour all their interiority into their baby, to look radiant, completely externalized (contrasting with this “gift of motherhood” is the sad image of Sleeping Beauty, which, precisely, represents the woman who is within herself, threatened to remain a virgin, infertile, untouched even by a man’s kiss). In this way, women who could live to the fullest without the need to be mothers, or who are prepared to live motherhood without so many demands, must submit and violate their entire equilibrium.

The second part of the problem does not pertain to women who, suddenly, must accept that they diverge from the typical, but with the inability that we all have, as a society, to leverage our divergences. Here, I can also give my testimony. Perhaps precisely because I am the son of a psychodivergent woman, I have developed a conception of the world based on solidarity, autonomy, and difference. I have had the opportunity to testify to the presence of peculiar abilities within me that I have defended all my life with great tenacity. I believe one is my autodidacticism: accepting that it is a competency, almost a personal condition, has been a never-ending struggle, while trying to meet the paternal/social (i.e., patriarchal) expectations placed on me, especially as a male in my social environment and academics (but how hard it was for me to study for a degree!). The struggle ended when I could finally feel proud of my autodidacticism. I confess that it has not been easy: clinging to this autonomy meant plunging into deep crises, which I do not wish on anyone, and I will gladly do everything possible to spare my fellow men from these. That is partly the meaning of this testimony. The same can be said of a peculiar originality of thought and spiritual search, qualities which, with the same persecutory tenacity, I was always tempted to renounce, but which, in the end, I safeguarded by an even more tenacious desire for sanity, consisting in accepting myself.

Not everyone has this luck. My mother didn’t have it. Unfortunately, she had to live in a different time from ours, without many opportunities for awareness. She had to face more challenging battles, which I strive to value, with the gratitude that she gave me life, and putting myself as a testimony to her struggle. Indeed, I want my mother to fit into the experiences of those reading me.

It may be immodest for me to say that I represent the best part of my mother, but that’s how I like to see it. Besides, who said I’m modest?

When Andrés turned one year old
he had already read Cervantes,
and before turning two, 
the boy already spoke English…

Many thanks!

Translation by: Daniel Wetta

Andrés García Barrios Writer and communicator. His work brings together experience in numerous disciplines, almost always with an educational focus: theater, novel, short story, essay, television series and museum exhibitions. He is a contributor to the Sciences magazines of the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM; Casa del Tiempo, from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and Tierra Adentro, from the Ministry of Culture. Contact: andresgarciabarrios@gmail.com

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