My mother and her mental illness.

When I was nineteen I was hospitalised in the Blue Mountains Hospital with rheumatic fever. Really!! Fortunately, unlike Robbie Burns, I survived. While I was hospitalised my aunty Mary visited me. She put a parcel on my bed. It was the first instalment of her collection of Georgette Heyer novels. I have been hooked ever since.

How did I contract rheumatic fever, I don’t hear you asking? Let me tell you anyway. A few months before I was in hospital, my father was contacted by his mother. My grandmother told him that she had been contacted by Social Services to say that my mother was trying to get in touch with her three daughters.  At that stage we were, I think,  18, 16 and 12. She hadn’t seen us for ten years!! All those promises my father made to his young daughters to see their mother regularly after he had left her in a mental institution in Brisbane were not fulfilled.

Now she was in Austinmer in the New South Wales South Coast. My sisters and I caught the train from Katoomba to Central Station and then from there to Austinmer. I wore a thick woollen suit, I already had a sore throat and we arrived in Austinmer in the pouring rain.

We walked through the rain to her boarding house. It was a very emotional occasion but I don’t remember much about the first time we saw her a few months earlier for what seemed like the first time. I remember that she really didn’t know who we were even when we were standing right in front of her. On that first occasion my aunty Mary was with us and she assured our mother that we were her daughters.  We were nervous and anxious but not nearly as much as she was. My mother doesn’t cry often but  she cried that day.

When the three of us arrived on this particular occasion in May she was at the front door where she had obviously being watching vigilantly, very much hoping that the weather had not prevented us from coming.  Having only a room in a boarding house didn’t give her much scope to cook for us as she would have liked, to welcome us into a home, but I remember that she did have a home-made cake so she must have been allowed to use the kitchen. I  remember that her landlady was very kind to her.

My mother awakens a degree of kindness towards her in nearly everyone who meets her. I don’t think I’ve met a person who doesn’t like her.  Lord knows, as any of you who live with a mentally ill person knows, she wasn’t, isn’t, always easy to cope with.

My mother’s story, briefly, is that she and her two younger brothers were removed from their parent’s care in Broken Hill. They were taken to a foster home in Guildford, Sydney. My mother was twelve and was considered too old to be fostered while both of her brothers were taken by good families. She told me something of her anguish at losing them because she was their older sister and she felt responsible for them. It was a real wrench and , of course, she was to be left all alone.

 Mum’s schizophrenia was well and truly apparent by the time she married my father when she was 23. One of her brothers, Billy, was mentally challenged. That’s all I know. The other one, Ken,  became an accountant and lived in Melbourne. Unfortunately, he appears to have completely wiped his older sister from his life.  He knows she married my father, and our family name is rather uncommon, but he has never made the slightest attempt to find her. Perhaps there is a good reason. She has asked me to trace him and I have tried a couple of times but her family name is not all that unusual. I didn’t like to disappoint her but  I haven’t met with any success.

 

Back to the rheumatic fever. Because I was in that thick woollen suit all day, and believe me it was soaking wet , and I had a sore throat, when I returned home from Austinmer to Woodford I was already  sick. The trip took place on a Saturday. By Monday morning I felt as if I had being run over by a steam roller. I had a raging temperature and every bone in my body just ached. If it wasn’t for the pain I would have thought I was paralysed because I couldn’t move. Nor could I imagine what could possibly have happened to me overnight to occasion such pain. A trip to the doctor, a throat swap (of a throat so sore I could barely open my mouth) and a blood test and I was in hospital for the next five weeks, not allowed out of my bed, and visited by interns from Sydney to pock and prod at this patient with rheumatic fever at the ripe old age of 19 – which is apparently quite old to be contracting this illness so there is no sarcasm here.

The Elizabeth of my novel is modelled on my mother, who is at heart  kind and generous and accepting and patient. She is intelligent, well-read and she recites whole passages that interest her by heart. She is fanatical about good health, exercise, good food. I have not lived with her since I was seven years of age and anything I know of these things I learned before then.