11. February 2009 by gennyfer.

What if everything your parents ever told you was a lie? Or at least so much was not true that nothing could be trusted?

When my mother was dying I stayed in her home with my one year old son.. The progression laid out to us was grim, pain, cancer spreading, it would end in her brain stealing her ability to communicate. There were reams of journals she had kept for fifty years. Alone at night while my son lay sleeping I started to read. My desperation ratcheted up and I careened from one journal to another desperate to find anything that would raise questions I’d want answered, questions only she could answer.

I started to piece together a portrait of a very lonely person. First. It seemed she had written versions of the same journal over and over. As if every decade she revisited the same spiritual crises without realizing she was repeating herself. Then I began to talk to my family about what I read, questioning what was going on with her.

I heard the story of my mother having polio at the age of three so many times I can add so many details. I guess these details would even make it easy for it to become my story but I understand it is not. That is the difference between the way my mother’s mind was and mine is.

She had polio and was paralyzed for a year before she recovered. During this time her sister would steal her bottles and when she recovered she had rickets and malnutrition. Or alternately her parents wanted her to die because she was inconvenient and were starving her.

None of this was true.

I presented the idea to my aunt that perhaps the polio virus had caused the mental instability, perhaps there was some connection between it and schizophrenia or whatever she had (she was never diagnosed so all this is parlor diagnosis). My aunt said “Gennyfer, she was never paralyzed. She had such a mild case of polio we thought it was the flu. We didn’t even know it was polio until she was recovered.” Imagine your mother telling you he same story about her childhood over and over until you could tell it word for word yourself. Imagine that this story became somehow archetypal, part of the structure of who you are and how the world works. And then suddenly it is not true.

But it wasn’t just this story. It was every story. Slowly I became more investigative than curious. I read to find the patterns in her stories. I wanted to understand some truth about my childhood to have some bedrock under me again. This is what I figured.

Someone would come in to her life. Some were impressive some mundane, I could not figure out why she chose the people she did to steal their particular stories. She met my godfather. He walked with a limp because of polio he had as a child. Suddenly, her brush with polio morphed in to a much bigger more interesting story. I wonder how long she told the story before she got enough practice to sound so sure and believable. Honestly, I don’t know what was wrong with her but I believe she didn’t realize the extent of her own lies. There were so many incidents that I began to piece together a time line in my head. The notes on a student who had been locked in a closet and traumatized by her parents were written around the same time she was “able to retrieve a repressed memory” about when her sister starved her and locked her in a closet.

There were these co-opted tale lies I’ve touched on, but we also uncovered so many other lies. The time from when she told me she was dying until a week after her death was short really. It didn’t seem that way at the time. I guess it was seventeen days. From that time two years ago the prevailing question that entered my life is this… “Who am I if everything I grew up knowing was a lie?”

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11. February 2009 by gennyfer.

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.

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