Crazymom.com is born

Our mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in September of 2006. Ten days later she passed away. During much of that short period of time I stayed at her house alone with my almost one year old son. In the evenings, I sorted through her papers and journals. At first, I read these things, while she was still alive, in a frantic desperation, a fear that I would find something I needed an answer to and only she would know the answer. I did reach that point eventually and it was too late. It may have been too late all my life.  My mother had been very mentally ill. My siblings and I had figured that some form of mental illness was plaguing her, but the extent, the depths, to which her disconnect from reality reached was staggering for us all.
In the week following her death, before her memorial service, in a stress filled fatigued processing of the initial shock of grief and the vertigo of learning so much of everything we had believed about our mother, ourselves, and the way the world worked was in some way fictional and wrong, we conceived of this sight. What, we asked ourselves, would we do with a lifetimes worth of journals? Would others appreciate or benefit from the insight we gathered during this bizarre time?

As a unit and individually, my siblings and I have survived a bewildering, painful, and abusive childhood. I suspect what carried us through, the branch over the quicksand, was and is our sense of humor. We had need of a place to explore what it means to grow up as a child with mentally ill parenting. With a great deal of compassion for others facing these same issues , with a better understanding of why it was hard to find our own places in the world, and with our indelible, irreverent sense of humor, Crazymom.com was born.

We intend this site to become a place where people can explore their own childhood experiences of parenting, comparing reality vs. crazy. Please check back soon for more features of the site. If you would like to receive an email to let you know about updates or if you have any suggestions for our site please let us know.

This entry was posted on 11. February 2009 at 15:43 and is filed under Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.