How My Son’s Mental Health Struggles Reconnected Me to My Own Mother
By Tanya Frank
Aside from a fresh box of Black Magic candy, Mothering Sunday — that's Mother's Day in the U.K. — was celebrated like any other Sunday in the London council flat where I grew up. I think it was our stepdad who first suggested that my brother Dan and I cobble together our pocket money to buy a box of sweets for Mum from Woolworths on Mother’s Day. I preferred milk to plain, but still I helped eat them, picking out the almond crunch. Dan chose the fudge. When the night drew in, Mum pushed the worn green couch up to the telly as usual, even though it wasn’t good for our eyesight, and we watched old black-and-white films that made her cry. I felt her chest heave and heard the sobs catch in her throat.
“Nothing like a good weepy to get it all out,” she said.
She wept at the musicals, too—Carousel’s Billy Bigalow looking down at his daughter from heaven, or Oliver Twist singing Where Is Love? Mum had been an orphan just like him. I tried to picture her at Norwood Jewish Orphanage where she had been taken after the Second World War, malnourished and ridden with scabies. This was hard because she had grown so big in the intervening years. Some evenings after an especially full supper, she’d turn to me and say, “Can you believe that Norwood had to send me to a convalescent home? To think they had to fatten me up.” She’d push her belly out and pat the mound of flesh, and say, “Oh well, it’s all paid for.”
She always made me laugh in that tragicomic Yiddisher way, so it failed to dawn on me until I had my own children how abandoned she must have felt growing up. Perhaps that was why she held on so tightly to us all and why she needed those films to have a good cry.
By the time my sons Zach and Dale were twelve and thirteen respectively, I had done the unthinkable. I am not referring to my separation from their father, or discovering I was gay. I decided to leave Mum and emigrate to Los Angeles.
On the day we said goodbye, she stood at the threshold of her humble abode and bowed her head. “I give you my blessing,” she said. “I want you all to go and make a better life out there.” I wanted to believe her, but when she straightened her back to look at me there was an incongruence in her eyes: it was the pain of being left all over again.
Mum always made me laugh in that tragicomic Yiddisher way, so it failed to dawn on me until I had my own children how abandoned she must have felt growing up.
When we arrived in California, I found a girlfriend who became my wife and a co-parent to my boys. Now they had two mummies. Mother’s Day was in May in America (not March as in the U.K.), when the California air was as soft as organza, and it smelled of orange blossom. We formed a tradition of going for a family hike on the holiday each year. One year we trudged up Mount San Antonio, far above the treeline, onto the bald head of granite. I looked wistfully over the San Gabriel range wondering if Mum was asleep, eight hours ahead in London. Another year we climbed Montecito Peak. On the way home we stopped for tacos and the boys surfed at the palm fringed beach of Leo Carillo.
It was a charming life on the outside but, deep down, I missed Mum, and I know that Zach did too. Like her, he was stocky with thick brown hair, a distinguished nose, a squinty smile, and a passion for salt-and-vinegar chips. Sometimes when he wore his thick eyeglasses and played Moonlight Sonata on the piano, Zach not only looked like nanny Shirl, but he was performing the music she loved most, connecting her to us despite being 5,454 miles away.
From the window above the piano, I could see the flashing red beacons of the control tower at Los Angeles International Airport, the hub for British Airways and the landmark that really mattered when I felt impossibly straddled between two worlds.
I had imagined her flying in, showing her the sights, buying her some American candy, which was far better than Black Magic. I never imagined that we could lose her completely. After she passed, just two years after we emigrated, I sensed a permanent shift in Zach—my sensitive child, who was happier playing chess than football; the animal lover, Nana's boy.
I thought Mum’s passing was the worst that could happen to us, and in the early years that followed, especially on Mothering Sunday, it was. We continued to put one foot in front of the other as best we could, talking about her extensively as we bagged a range of California peaks. We all knew that talking was perhaps the healthiest means of expression. But when my beautiful boy started to withdraw, to wake up too late for high school, and to enter an altered state that psychiatry would eventually label psychosis, walking and talking was no longer the panacea I hoped for.
Zach was hardly able to get out of bed anymore, let alone hike up precipitous trails. He didn’t trust the terrain. Sometimes he didn’t even trust us. It was no secret that I needed my mum now more than ever. I wanted her to fix everything. Isn’t that what mums do?
When my beautiful boy started to withdraw, to wake up too late for high school, and to enter an altered state that psychiatry would eventually label psychosis, walking and talking was no longer the panacea I hoped for.
After his release from the psychiatric ward, Zach seemed to get even worse. His tan from a summer of surfing was fading. He was turning pale from so much time spent indoors, and he was ravenous for carbohydrates that made him put on weight.
“I want to go back to college,” he told me, his textbooks growing dusty in a pile on his bedroom floor. He tried. We both did. But the drugs blunted his cognition, sedated him, and so did all the attention on his diagnosis, one that carries the kind of stigma that can feel almost insurmountable.
“We must listen to the doctors, Zach. They know best.” I insisted. “You must take the medicine.” I spouted biomedical theories about his brain not having enough dopamine, or his neurons misfiring, causing positive symptoms of hallucinations and negative ones of depression. But all this fighting only brought me further away from my son. If I was controlling, I was not connecting. I was asking what was wrong with our family, not what had happened to us, to my forebears, how much this story may have been impacted by generational trauma.
I drove Zach to many doctors in a desperate bid to fix him. They gave him different labels, and they swapped out the drugs too. We seemed to encounter more error than trial, more art than science, until I was prompted to stop and listen to my son. Wasn’t it his brain after all? Shouldn’t he have known best?
These days I find myself considering that the biomedical model might be wrong, that there are no blood tests or brain scans to prove any of these hypothetical claims about neurons misfiring or excessive dopamine levels. There never have been. What I know is that this journey has been epic. Psychosis is a long-haul transatlantic flight in the worst turbulence. It can be terrifying. But it can also grant you permanent empathy and compassion to share with other souls who need it most.
In order to see Zach now, I must travel to a mental health rehabilitation unit an hour away by car. Last Mother’s Day, he came back home with me and together we meandered through Epping Forest. Bluebells edged the trails and magpies squawked from the oaks. We walked more slowly than we used to because he weighed more and had less stamina.
Afterwards, back at the house, we sat close to each other on the couch in front of the telly. He was especially fatigued that day, so he lolloped and placed his hefty legs up on my lap. And then like an ancient rite of passage, we watched a movie. Zach loves animation. He chose Del Torro’s Pinocchio. Talk about a tearjerker. I felt so close to him as I let myself weep. It was as if I could feel Mum too, who had taught me in all her pain and wisdom to find a release for everything that is tender and beautiful and true through movies and love and family.
Tanya Frank recently moved back to her native home town in London. Prior to her return she lived in California where she worked as a docent at an elephant seal sanctuary. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and numerous literary journals. Her debut book Zig Zag Boy: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood charts her journey with her son through the archaic mental health system after his diagnosis of psychosis.
Tanya joined Zibby on Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books to discuss her story earlier this year.