Content Warning: This column contains descriptions of physical violence and mental health issues.
by Thomas Lee
My childhood home was oddly designed, filled with doors located in illogical places. Among these puzzling structures was a door that connected my parents’ room to my bedroom.
There was really no point to this door. Both our bedrooms already had a separate entrance/exit. But my parents preferred to use this bizarre door, which meant they would walk through my room to get to theirs.
The result was a long, unobstructed hallway that stretched from the front of the house to my parent’s room in the back. My parents liked to keep the shades down in our bedrooms, so it was dark during the day. I remember standing at the front end of the hallway, gazing into what seemed like an ominous, forbidden tunnel.
One day, when I was around 5 or 6, I was peering into this tunnel, petrified with horror. On my parents’ bed was my mom on her back, wildly thrashing about. My dad and three sisters were trying to restrain her, each grabbing an arm or leg. She had refused to take her medicine that day and the effects were obvious.
“I’m going to kill you,” she seethed. “I’m going to kill all of you!”
We didn’t have the vocabulary back then to specifically describe my mom’s situation. She was “sick in the head” and needed to take her “crazy pills.” She was prone to wild mood swings, especially anger, which she frequently projected onto me. She once savagely beat me with a ruler for ripping a hole in my pants while playing during recess.
But the worst trauma she inflicted didn’t involve physical violence. She frequently heard voices and begged us to take her seriously. The voices, she claimed, were that of our next-door neighbors. They apparently owned a “machine” that could listen to our thoughts.
If that sounds pretty fucked up, imagine absorbing this information as a little boy, already on high alert for mom’s violent outbursts.
Still, I never feared for my life until that day, when she threatened to kill us all. My dad and sisters were trying to force-feed her medication. I’m not sure if they succeeded but they eventually left the room. It was at that moment that my family ultimately betrayed me.
“Go in there and talk to her,” they ordered me. “Calm her down.”
Even as a child, I could recognize the absurdity of this plan. Sending a defenseless little boy to be alone with a mentally disturbed woman who minutes earlier threatened to murder us in our sleep. I guess crazy begets crazy.
It was the longest walk of my life, down that hallway, down that ominous tunnel. I was never as sure in my young life that I was going to die. The only question was how. I gingerly approached her.
“Mom?” I whimpered. “Are you okay?”
I don’t recall what she said. Only how she looked.
The image to this day seethes into my memory. She wore a strange smirk on her face as if this had all been one giant joke. Her eyes were glassy and conflicted, suggesting I had roughly a 50/50 chance of her hugging or strangling me.
Suffice it to say, we all survived that night. But as I write this, I still feel the fear and anger of that little kid. Fear that my own mother would kill me. Anger at my family that they would put me in so much danger.
There’s no playbook on how families should deal with people suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. But one thing you must do is to protect your most vulnerable family members, i.e. your children, from harm.
No child should have to walk down that hallway, alone or otherwise.
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