They say you can't go home again. I suppose that's true, but only in the sense of the old saying, "You can't step in the same river twice." It changes, you change. It may be home again, but it's not still home.
I've discovered a new level of this. I find myself in the awkward position of moving into the house my mother built 11 years ago and had been living in ever since, until a month or so ago. While ordinarily, this would just be, "I miss my mom. It's so weird here without her" or so I gather from listening to other people...
...this situation is entirely different.
I have known for about 30 years that my mother is paranoid schizophrenic. She wasn't diagnosed. I figured it out based on her behavior and my abnormal psychology class in school. It made her behavior make so much more sense, but didn't make it any easier to deal with her.
My father left her because of it. He had also figured it out (the man did have a degree in psychology, after all), but rather than making any real effort to get her help, or even being upfront with her (which probably would have accomplished little other than one of the usual ugly arguments), he abandoned ship. He made sure to wait until I was an adult rather than a) taking me with him or b) leaving me with her. I suppose I should thank him for that one, small favor. However, running away never really solves problems, and it left her to fester in her insanity for years.
Fast forward to about 2007. She's living in this house that she had built in the small, North Georgia town of Blue Ridge, and has been for four years. We have just moved out of Athens (read: run away screaming) and have nowhere else to go while I look for a new job in Atlanta, and a place to live. While we're there, of course, she wants to spend quality time with me, talking.
She talks about the folks at the First Baptist Church, and how they insisted she put a key in a fake rock outside in case she locks herself out, and how one of them stole that key.
She talks about how the folks from the Master Gardeners, of which she was a member, insist on coming into her yard and planting invasive weeds like dog fennel and blackberries.
She talks about how the women in the Merry Makers, a social group of women her age and older, have started to make nasty comments about her.
She talks about how a woman in her Sunday school class was claiming she never lived on McConnell Drive for all those years, because...well, that part got weird and involved.
She talks about how horrible the folks at the CVS are, and how they deliberately charged her for someone else's stuff. She's angry when I suggest that she confront them, calmly, about it.
She tells me that one of the women from Merry Makers, who is also in her Sunday School class, during the most recent Merry Makers meeting puts her thumb on a liver spot on my mother's face and presses, hard. When I ask, she admits she did nothing about it.
As you can see, this could give you a skewed viewpoint on a place. Even though I knew my mother was paranoid schizophrenic, on some level I always compartmentalized that, thought it was a "sometimes" thing. I always tread lightly around her, knowing at any time she could explode at me, but I never really took it sufficiently seriously, at least in some part because I couldn't take a diagnosis I had come to myself seriously. After all, I was 16 when I figured this out.
During our month there (yes, that's how long it took me to find a job and an apartment for our little family of three) my best friend/life partner learned the meaning of something he'd never experienced before: anxiety. He knew the feeling of uncertainty that comes with living with someone that unstable, with that little grip on reality. He understood me a lot more after that.
We couldn't move into our new apartment fast enough.
Fast forward another five years, to early 2012. After a series of catastrophic occurrences in our lives, we found ourselves, once again, moving in with my mother while we looked for a new place to live. This time, though, the scale had changed.
Now she was telling me about the neighbors across the street breaking into her house on a regular basis.
Telling me that they had broken in and stolen cheap items to make her buy more things to benefit local businesses (now how's THAT for a bizarre rationale for theft?)
Telling me that they were stealing her internet.
Telling me that they had stolen her cell phone.
Now, this time I was still employed (and commuting 85 miles to work every morning, and back to her house in the evenings), so finding a new house was an imperative, and I'll admit that I jumped at the first place that would rent to us. Maybe not the best decision, but I could not live with that much longer.
As the next two years progressed, I heard more and more about these thefts. They were happening daily, often multiple times a day. Her keys had been stolen, copied, and returned. Her cell phones had been stolen--she would buy a new one and it, too, would disappear. Her house phone was stolen. Her house phone was being tapped. Her internet was being tapped. (No, she did not have wifi.) The neighbors were bringing their cat into her house, putting it in the basement to relieve itself, and then either leaving it, in which case she had to call the Humane Society to have it removed, or taking it home with them.
Now the "red-headed lady from the bank" became an issue. She was messing up my mother's accounts, had not changed the account number when the check books had been stolen (oh, yes, I didn't mention the repeated theft of purses, which were then returned.) The lady from the bank broke into her house and mixed up her papers, mailed her taxes (which weren't ready), and took DVDs, leaving a thank you note for them.
She was so convinced that she was convincing. I started believing that she was having her house robbed regularly, and was unsafe. I shopped for security cameras, but she said she didn't want them. I suggested them later, and she was all for it. I suggested she get them from the alarm company, and she said they cost $500, then when asked later, $1,500, and on another occasion, $5,000. Being a busy head-of-household, I didn't have time to check these figures, but it was clear she didn't really want the cameras there. Then she started insisting that the son of the neighbors had worked for her cable/security company and had been fired, and was breaking in and changing her security code and vandalizing her computer.
She decided to sell her house. Since most of our belongings had been moved into her basement (and it was an awful lot, because we kept inheriting large amounts of furniture and other things from dead relatives), so we were forced to remove ALL of it from her basement as soon as physically possible.
I finally got it all done, and decided it was time to take a break from my mom. She'd been calling several times a day, had told me that she hadn't seen me, or my son, in "months" every time we went up for a load, even though we'd been there anywhere from a week to a day before, and it had become emotionally as well as physically exhausting.
She sold the house at about the same time as I finished.
She didn't go to the closing.
I got frantic calls and emails from the realtors involved, and one real estate attorney. It seems the real estate agent representing my mom went to her house and knocked on the door, trying to get her to the closing.
My mother screamed at her through the door to go away.
Fortunately for her, they decided that she was senile and merely required her to return the earnest money rather than suing her. For her part, she told me she just "decided I don't want to move. I built this house, and I'm going to die here."
I stopped talking to her at all at that point. I told myself I was going to give her three months, for my own sanity, and to hold my frazzled little family together.
That was back at the beginning of November. Unfortunately, she called over and over again to the point that we had to change the ring for her number. I didn't answer her calls for over a month. When I did, I explained that she had used me up, and I needed her to go away. That was a bit before Christmas.
I was contacted by my cousin towards the end of February that my mother had been taken by the local police (because she had been calling them multiple times a day for more than three years, and they knew, just as I did, that she was paranoid) to a mental hospital in Dalton. He gave me the number to contact them, and her, and I did. I thanked him for letting me know.
The upshot of all this is that my mother was forced to agree to go into assisted living if she wanted to be released, so she did, and I have ended up with the opportunity/necessity of moving into her house. It's been....uncomfortable. After several years of viewing Blue Ridge through her eyes (because they were the only ones I had there), I am finding that everyone in town has been nice, and understanding, and has asked after her and is concerned for her well-being. They all say she was sweet but confused. They also say she told them that her daughter and grandson have not visited her in years. When I tell them how much time I had been spending visiting her, they all shake their heads, and tell me they hope she's feeling better, and taking her medication like she should, and what a good daughter I am for looking after her affairs.
I've had to reprogram my feelings about this place. I had doubts from the beginning of the veracity of what she was saying, but if you hear the same thing long enough, some part of you will start to believe it, no matter how unlikely.
Going back to the house for the first time after I got the keys from her and my uncle at the assisted living home felt...different. It was as if a shadow had been lifted from the entire house. I don't really want to move up there, but it will perhaps not be quite so onerous as I had feared. I'm still going to be commuting 174 miles a day, round trip, but at least I'm not moving into the den of thieves I had been warned about.
I'll just be moving into a place far, far away from where I want to be.
Now I just need to re-evaluate my entire childhood, and every story she ever told me about growing up with her family.
But that's a vent for another time.
