Tag: schizo-affective disorder

Safety, and Malice

April 1st, 2026
When we are home together, I am still for her. I learn her thinking.

I am so good at it I become an extension of her mind, like she’s invented me.

That’s how I reach the fifth dimension — a shared space between her mind and mine.

In the fifth dimension, she and I become untethered from time, distance, events, cause and effect; we do not label hurt feelings or observe personal boundaries.

My consciousness becomes split into two timelines.
1. November –, 1985-present
2. The fifth dimension
In the fifth dimension, my mother likes me.

In the fifth dimension, I disappear.

When we are home together, the television is always on.
The morning news when she wakes up.
The evening news if she is home from work.
Primetime shows before bed.
Judge Judy in the afternoons.

Soon I have a tv in my bedroom. Before I have a calendar or a computer, I have a tv.

In the summer, I wake up to the last half hour of Martha Stewart and devour hours of Wimbledon.

After school, I watch Captain Planet and X-Men, then Family Matters and Full House, then Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson’s Creek.

On Saturday mornings, I wake up to Duck Tales and Chip n Dale.

We eat dinner in front of the tv.
If I don’t like what she’s watching, I eat dinner in front of my own tv.

The tv is my company and also my excuse. Because if she’s not watching the tv, she likes to talk to me about work and the gall of whomever provided her customer service that day. She tells me her co-workers are tapping into her landline and listening in on her conversations. She recounts rude Target employees who deny her the right to return barely used items.

I must listen to all of it.

Sometimes we laugh together at her stories. She can really tell a story.

She goes on much longer than I can bear.
I itch for her to leave me be.

I learn to turn my head back to the tv when the commercial break ends.

She teases me for some of the shows I watch.

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Star Trek.

But she takes an interest in Dawson’s Creek. We watch a few episodes together.

She complains about each of the characters, and how unrealistic it all is.

She only likes or dislikes. There is no in between.

I stop watching shows I like with her.

I begin spending more time at the public library.
It’s quiet. The air is cool and steady. The librarians smile at me.

I am dropped off alone for hours at a time.

Since I am a good, quiet kid who follows rules, I can pick out any books I want.

The promise of discovery; new ideas; verified facts. I thirst. I take home way more books than I could ever finish.

In the library, I forget about the fifth dimension.

At home, while my nose is in a book, I forget about the fifth dimension.

I am reading a case study when my phone lights up with an unknown number.

My mother is in a hospital in New Jersey.

“For up to two weeks. Maybe longer. We’ll see how she does on the medication,” the nurse on the phone tells me.

What medication? I wonder, but do not ask.

I notice as if from another body: my heart is pounding.

The drumming pulls at me until something old and forgotten happens.

It’s my heart.

I am ripped from the fifth dimension.

The four walls around me take on a clarity I have become unaccustomed to.
My body feels distinctly and uncomfortably solid.

“How did she get there?” I finally think to ask.

The nurse sounds like she is reading. “The New Jersey police found G- wandering the train tracks. G- would not open her mouth until she was forced to by the officers. G- was sucking on a rock. G- explained it was a love charm to summon her boyfriend,”

I am numb. “She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” I say.

The nurse is silent.

“What should I do now?” I ask.

“You can try to speak with her tomorrow. Take care.”

The nurse recites the hospital’s phone number and the extension to the psychiatric ward, and then hangs up.

I am unmoored.

In the weeks following my mother’s hospitalization, I reach out to many different organizations. I read a lot of websites. I find the family member support page on NAMI’s website.

I drive 8 hours to my mother’s apartment and pack her things into storage. I drive another 8 hours home and complete my finals.

All of that is easier than contending with the open tabs in my browser.

Why don’t I contact NAMI?

I am not ready to inhabit my timeline.
The End To My Family Legacy

March 19th, 2026

Suddenly “schizophrenia” is something I say.

The word and the story it tells is spilling out of me.

I tell my boss; my father in law; my neighbor; my daughter’s new primary care physician.

Each time I say it out loud, I think,
“Should I have?”

And then I am enraged.

Why shouldn’t I say it out loud?

My mom hid it her whole life.
From me most of all, and the secrecy drove us apart.

We were living in Sherman Oaks when the ‘94 Northridge earthquake struck. I was sleeping.
My mom threw a blanket over my head and dragged me out of bed.
I woke up disoriented. Not because the earth was shaking, but because I was shrouded in muffled darkness I didn’t understand.

That’s how it was.

I tried to talk about my life to friends’ parents, but I did not know how to explain her.

It all came out as complaints.
A child complaining about her parent.
A daughter complaining about her mother.

The nearly universal refrain I heard over and over from anyone I told:

“She loves you so much. You are her whole world.”

I didn’t want to be her world.

I didn’t want to hide with her.

I wanted to feel light, and alive.

In law school I befriended a Russian classmate. We chatted occasionally about being daughters of Russian mothers.

“She wants me to be a lawyer and make children in the same breath. ‘When, when will I become a grandmother??’” Maria rolled her eyes and giggled. “I’m like, ‘Mom, I just graduated, take a breath!’” She looked to me for a knowing smirk.

The last conversation I had with my mom was about the detective work she was doing to spy on rapists.

“No pressure from my mom about kids yet…” I said. “I’m sure soon though,” I laughed, uncomfortably.

“Just a matter of time!” Maria assured me. “Russian moms, right?”

My mom did not pressure me.

My mom was never her whole self with me.

She compartmentalized, and she managed.

She found she could manage parts of her life where her mind did not betray her, and I was one of those parts.

I asked my mom so many times, “Why did you want to move to the United States?”

Her answer was always the same.

“For you. To give you a better life,”

I never believed her.

She could be so mean to me.

She wouldn’t let me in.

She told me I didn’t know anything about real life, and that I never would.

Even now I am uncertain about the details of my mom’s life. She had a way of talking that made facts feel fluid.

Once she sent me an email, so I know this:
“My dad’s name was Vadim Alekseyevich M– , he passed around 1983. His mom’s name was Polina M–, I never heard or met his father, like he didn’t exist.
“Babushka’s name was Varvara M–, maiden name K–“

I have a few other facts I’ve more or less corroborated through old family photos.

My grandmother was an engineer.
My grandfather was a general in the army.
My mother was born in Kiev. She had an older brother.

My uncle also suffered from schizophrenia.
My mom told me about it during a day trip. We were walking along Pier 39.
“Babushka was taking him to all kinds of institutions when we were growing up,” she said.

That’s all she had to say about it.

There was one other story she’d tell about him.
He liked to read in the bathroom.
“Always he was in the bathroom…” she’d say, and then she’d laugh.

She talked of her brother lovingly. Alyosha.

Her brother may have been the only one who could understand her.

I asked my mom once if she wanted to contact him somehow. She was Facebook friends with his daughter. Couldn’t Alyona let us know where to find him?

“Find Alyosha?” she asked. “He probably died already.”

I snooped through my mom’s email while I was packing up her apartment in Southern California.

The notepads on her desk were scribbled over with sentences that didn’t make sense.
Her Draft folder read similarly.

I read an email she wrote about the day I was born.
She recounted holding me in her arms when several KGB agents barged into her hospital room.

“They wanted to take you,” she wrote.
Then my father, who was in the room with us, convinced them to let her keep me.

A different email draft explained more. She was a KGB agent before she got pregnant with me, she wrote. She did not want to be a KGB agent anymore but they would not let her go.

Ah.
Was this the explanation I’d been looking for?
Did my mother flee from the KGB to the United States?

I spent three years of my late twenties researching the Soviet Union.

Immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States from 1985-1991.
Life under Khrushchev; Brezhnev; Gorbachev.
Soviet cuisine.
American presence in the Soviet Union.
Russian-American immigrants in the United States.

Who am I?

I am someone who has never been good at keeping secrets.
My Body Keeps The Score

March 5th, 2026

Who am I most days?

I wake up to a mental checklist. My shoulders are already tense.
I numb out the dread I feel upon waking.
I execute my morning routine quickly and efficiently.

I walk fast wherever I go, even if it’s from my cutting board to my toaster oven.

I eat my breakfast at my desk, in front of my computer, while I work.

I am the only child of a single, mentally ill mother.
I have always been the only child of a single, mentally ill mother.
It’s been me and her, forever.
Even when I got married, had two step-kids in my home, and then two more of my own kids in my home.
It’s always been me and her.

Not because I wanted it to be.
I’ve tried to escape her so many times.

But my body keeps the goddamn score.

In the immediate moments that follow waking,
before my adult consciousness comes online,
I am the child I was,
and I am first scared,
then numb,
then resolute.

I will get through my day, even if I don’t enjoy it.
I will survive until it is time to sleep once more.
I will do what is asked of me and I will not complain.
I will disappear.

I grew up in Sherman Oaks.

I loved my elementary school.

I played, and laughed, and taught myself to read in English.

On the drive home from school one day, I taught myself to breathe quickly.

Breathing in and out distracted me from the nausea, which crept up on me at the stoplight of Kester and Ventura.

Every day, from the passenger seat of my mom’s car, I stared up at the AT&T building and inhaledexhaledinhaledexhaled.

I did it quietly so my mom would not hear.

I’ve always lived two lives.

1 — The me I cherished and hid away from her.

2 — The me that lived for her.

They had to share my body.

My body has never felt big enough for both of them.

There were times in my early twenties when I nearly blacked out.

Sitting at Andrew’s desk in the back of Diedrich Coffee with an In-N-Out burger in my hand.

Driving home from Behnam’s apartment at sunrise, the freeway mostly empty at that hour but not completely.

Reading Nietzsche in my dorm room before an afternoon class.

I thought I was just falling asleep.

When I was in the hospital recovering from the birth of my daughter, I went to the bathroom to relieve my bladder. I was escorted by two nurses who helped me sit down on the toilet. I peed, and everything went black. When I came to a few moments later I apologized.

“Sorry, I just fell asleep for a second,” I said.

“You passed out, honey,” the nurse on my left told me. She was holding me up so I wouldn’t fall over.

In my last year of college I needed birth control pills. The doctor at the clinic insisted I get labs done. It might have been the first labs I’d ever gotten. I didn’t understand why anyone would make such a bother over me.

He told me I had elevated TSH.

I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t really care. I was fine. No one needs to worry about me.

My second year of law school wasn’t as hard as the first, but I was struggling to keep up with all the reading. I kept falling asleep.

I had labs drawn for the second time in my life. My TSH came up elevated again. I was told to find an endocrinologist, which I immediately confused with an oncologist.

I was scared.

Also during my second year of law school, I got a call from a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. My mom was being treated there.

In New Jersey??

The story took awhile to piece together.

The psychiatric hospital told me what they knew. The NJ police found my mom wandering out on the train tracks. When they spoke with her, she initially refused to open her mouth. When eventually they convinced her to, she revealed a small rock that she claimed was a charm.

The hospital could hold her for two weeks. She was receiving medication.

My mom called me the following day. She said she was fine. She did not mention what was to be done with all of her belongings in Southern California. I asked her if she would be returning. She talked about needing coins for the pay phone.

I drove eight hours to Huntington Beach, to pack her apartment into storage. At a rest stop, I called the hospital to see if they had a release date. I was told they could no longer release information to me regarding my mother.

That was the first of several public psychotic episodes.

For nearly a year, my mom wandered between Northern California and Southern California, homeless, carless.

I heard from her whenever she chose to call me. She was rarely coherent. She did not ask about me. Eventually I stopped picking up the phone. She left me voicemails about the important work she was doing chasing down rapists. She visited me once for a couple of hours.

Each time she disappeared, I grieved.

I made an appointment with a therapist. Her office was dim.

I took a seat on the dark leather couch. She introduced herself.

The tears came before I even said my name.

“I feel like I don’t have a mother,” I wailed.

The therapist asked me in our third or fourth session, after I had relayed all of the NJ events to her: “Would you say you feel more stressed than usual?”

I had just told her I was having trouble concentrating on my reading and felt anxious about the upcoming finals.

“I don’t think so,” I answered.
My mom died last week

March 4th, 2026

She was 67.

She fell.

She lived alone.

The medications she took made her dizzy.

She suffered from schizoaffective disorder.

Her property manager called to let me know. The residents in the building had seen her with less regularity in the last week. She would take daily walks. She promptly brought her packages inside. In her last week, she was not around as often. Packages collected outside her door.

Her IHSS provider called the police to do a welfare check the morning of. It was already too late. They didn’t come, anyway.

Her property manager entered the apartment to check on her in the afternoon. She called me, the emergency contact, at 3:30 pm. The maintenance man called an ambulance.

I arrived with my husband at 4:30 pm. The paramedics had come and gone. They determined her expiration ordinary, and left the body in the apartment. I had to decide what to do with it.

I did not understand where she was when I walked in. Her apartment was clean, quiet, empty.

The bathroom door was closed.

Her body was in the bathroom, behind the closed door.

My husband went into the bathroom before I did. I can’t remember exactly what he said after he saw her. I braced myself and slowly opened the bathroom door.

She lay face-down on the laminate floor. One of her feet was purple. The rest of her just looked like her. She was wearing olive green joggers and a long-sleeved cotton shirt.

I touched her cropped hair. It felt coarser than I expected. When was the last time I touched it?

There was nothing of note around her really. She fell and landed face-first.

I shut the bathroom door behind me. We called a local funeral home to come pick her up. We would have to wait an hour and a half for the driver to arrive.

There were a lot of prescription pills in orange bottles on her kitchen counter. There were more inside one of her cabinets. More in her medicine cabinet.

She kept a calendar on a small writing desk near her kitchen. She had labs drawn earlier in the month. Her IHSS provider had last come in January. She had an upcoming appointment with her doctor on Thursday.

Her phone was on the counter next to her prescription bottles and her emergency contact sheet. She didn’t have a passcode so the phone just let me in. I checked her WhatsApp. The message I wrote her late the night before was unread. “Hi mom :). We miss you. Do you want to come visit sometime in March?”

I will be writing about her for the rest of my life.

Tag: schizo-affective disorder

Safety, and Malice

The End To My Family Legacy

My Body Keeps The Score

My mom died last week