Mother or Monster?
Walking down that particular damp corridor isn’t something I’m going to forget with ease. With every step, I was an inch closer to the parallel universe that was soon to be my isolated reality. Realising this, I automatically obliterated any new found courage and cowered back outside into normality, back into my comfort zone, with my same ideology that if I run away from a situation it will eventually decay. I have to admit that this is where my situation and story usually would have ended, but this time I knew it would have to be different because I had the moral obligation to do what I believed to be the right thing: and on that thought, I strode back into the blood-curdling maze, and somehow managed to ignore the gnawing mouse in my brain as I continued down that wretched corridor. At the end of what genuinely felt like a lifetime, I saw her behind the glass. She was smiling. I can’t articulate every emotion I felt the first day I visited my mother in a psychiatric ward, but I knew I couldn’t return a smile without my face trembling.
Just like every challenging teenager, I have my fair share of parent/child relationship difficulties. I hadn’t lived with my mother for around a year before she had been sectioned -we have not had a good relationship for the past four years- and now, I feel like I can only blame myself for not being the perfect child she always longed for. I can only blame myself for not doing anything I possibly could to have supported her, because maybe, just maybe things could have been different.
I have been regularly visiting this mental hospital for years, for my own issues, and I have always considered this place as a peaceful sanctuary for my reckless thoughts. But on that day, screeches of the dispossessed echoed through walls of steel. When she arose she squeezed me tightly but I felt no motherly warmth, like always. I followed her into a cage like room where she sat and extensively told me that she...