Monday, April 26, 2010

My Mother the Beggar ... thoughts about ...

My Mother the Beggar is a post about an adult child of a mentally ill drug addict who went through multiple relapses. Very similar to another story that kind of begins

“I WAS SITTING IN a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through”

From The Glass Castle: A Memoir

The story is usually in books from the perspective of the child, blogged about from the perspective of the parent of the disabled child. The anguish that parents feel as they struggle to find a way to help their children find a semblance of a normal life, to get them past the mental illnesses and issues that afflict them, the desperate efforts to intervene in the lives of grandchildren, often so far removed from what the grandparents can do.

In my own life I think of my mother's parents, certain that she had thrown our lives away by joining the LDS Church and not seeing sense and coming home. From my perspective, that was the greatest thing she could have done for me, to bring me to Christ. From their perspective, it was the worst.

The lines between mental illness and transcendence are sometimes hard to draw. As I struggle to help my children, to find what they need to see them safely home, I feel such sympathy for everyone in these stories, and for everyone in my own story, as mild as it might be.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Papa D said...

Wonderful post, Stephen - especially for someone like me whose father saved my mother from a life like that and allowed her to raise a large family despite her condition.

"There but for the grace of God..." - and, in my case, that grace was my father.

Stephen said...

Well said PapaD

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...
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Stephen said...

I don't know what motivates Chinese soft-porn sites to post spam comments with links to their sites in this thread.

But, I wish they would stop.