A Controlled Burn

The hardest part of negotiating a relationship with my other mother is determining whether or not she is of sound enough mind to maintain contact.

We haven't spoken to one another since before Christmas when I decided that her schizophrenia combined with drug and alcohol usage was effecting her ability to have coherent conversations with me. Also, after several phone calls that pursued the same line of questioning about my mother I felt as if her intentions for remaining in touch with me were not so much about our relationship, but with the desire maintain a thin line of contact with my mother. Just in case. And maybe that is her reason for remaining in touch with me - I am the last thread that connects her to a life she cannot recover, the one life in which she felt she really lived.

And maybe I keep in touch with her for my own reasons. She is a part of my connection to an identity: daughter of lesbians. And I keep in touch with her because I worry that she has no one, or few people, in her life that support her and love her unconditionally. Though, I am not even sure I love her unconditionally anymore. My psychological and emotional state is valuable to me and cannot afford to teeter any closer to the line where I could potentially break down and give into confusion. I've already been there and know what it takes to get out. I don't have time.

I also keep in touch with her out of guilt. I am her daughter. Her only daughter, as her biological daughter with whom she adopted out at birth, fled the relationship after meeting her in person for the first time, and has not kept in touch with her after seeing her physical and mental state several Christmases ago. Maybe she too closely saw what she could turn into and ran for her life. Sometimes I wonder if I should also run.

She called me few days ago after receiving the news that my grandfather passed through her brother whom my mother emailed to relay the message, and her voice mail plead for a phone call if it was in fact true. I considered it for days and finally called today to confirm her suspicion. Our conversation was short, she told me to give her condolences to my grandmother and my mother, and she told me that demons chased her from her apartment and I understood how that could happen, and she told me that she should write down her history so that I could write about - that there was so much to talk about, and she said that she had taken up painting again and this was a surprise to me because the only art I'd seen her do was during her times of institutionalization. But she laughed, she didn't mean she was using paint - she meant she had been smearing her own feces on the walls.

"Ew" I said instinctively and without thinking. And I had already said it when I realized there was a more appropriate response that should've come from my mouth. I could only ask about her meds, if she had been to the doctor lately, if she was ok.

She rarely tells me that she's anything but ok.
She's not ok.
She hasn't been for a long time.

Sometimes the mind snaps and the mind deteriorates before your eyes, as out of control as a brush fire in August. And sometimes the deterioration of the mind is slow and steady as a controlled burn, ever square inch of the minds land charred. Both fires have the capacity to spread flames onto the lands around them, and I often find myself fighting a fire which I allowed to ignite.

I rarely tell anyone I am anything but ok.
I'm also not ok.
I haven't been for a long time.

But I still have my mind.