Schizophrenia: It's All Significant

My mother's schizophrenia is still active, though supposedly she started taking her meds again.  Lots of things have significance for her--I got out the cookbook and opened it to a recipe on yeast breads, on the same date that an article about her and her cooking of bread was published maybe twenty two years ago.  She couldn't get over how strange that coincidence was.  I was non-committal. 

The other night, M. took the cross down that our landlady had mounted on the front door, because it made too much noise when he goes in and out while others are sleeping.  In the morning, my mom was overcome with how weird that was, how strange that the cross had disappeared.  I suppose if you allow extra-physical explanations of things, the world is a mighty weird place.  To me, there were only a few possibilities: M. had taken it down for some reason or it had fallen down and he had picked it up and put it away somewhere.  For my mom, some angel might have come along and transformed it into a star, because my mom had given away her crystals to my brother when she should have kept them for protection for herself, or some suchlike. 

She has a bizarre story about why her marriage ended.  There was a women who called in to the local station one morning.  This woman said she wished she could pull the plug on her husband who was suffering from some terminal disease or condition.  According to my mom, the woman was chewing gum and wearing pearls.  

Then, my mom says, my dad claimed that everyone in our town thought that the woman was my mom and that he was the man she wanted to pull the plug on.  My mom was horrified--how could anyone mistake her for that woman! Chewing gum and wearing pearls.

It was so horrifying to her that she had to leave my dad and my little brother, and drive off with just a few belongings in her truck.  That was the beginning of her homeless life.  

A week or so ago, my mom told me this story and it was very important to her that I not be one of those who thought that she was the woman who had called the radio station and who had wanted her husband to die.  I reassured her that I was not.  While the whole thing was obviously a delusion related to her disease, I could clearly see that it was really, really important to her that I not think she was the woman who called in.  That was a difficult position to be in--I felt I had to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation to her, and reassure her, but at the same time I didn't share her delusion.    I know from past experiences that trying to persuade her that it was indeed a delusion would not be effective, so I was left with telling her that I had never thought she was the woman on the radio station.  

Relatedly, she was horrified the other day when she saw I was chewing gum. "You're chewing gum!" She gasped at me.  

"Um, yes, yes I am," I answered. 

"Just like that woman!" she said.   

I have to admit that I hid my gum chewing from her for the rest of the day just to avoid having a more detailed conversation about the woman and whether or not my mom was the woman.  

A constant topic since my teenage years has been public nudity--The nude beach and nude gardening.  "You could garden in the nude, you know," she said to me the other day.  Really, though, as I told her, I have no desire to garden in the nude. 

I tend to go the opposite direction: I want clothes as protection from the sun, the dirt, and the venomous ants.  

Yesterday, out of the blue she said to me:  "I really miss the nude beach."  What do you say to that?

"Um, yeah, I miss the ocean," was my response.  And I do.  I try to be truthful in my responses and to find some way to respond that is relevant to her comments.  

Me, I don't miss the nude beaches.  My hippie parents used to take me with them and I remember their nudity as being kind of disgusting, in a typical kid-seeing-parents-nude kind of way.  Lots of floppy flesh and bare, hairy body parts with sand particles clinging to them.  They stopped going once I hit puberty.  I wished they'd stopped a few years earlier.  

It's not that I don't like nudity in public places, I do, in fact, quite a bit.  Not so much as a display to other people, really it's just a feeling of openness to the universe.  The other night I drank a bottle of wine and got naked outside on the front porch.  I've been wanting to feel the night air of New Mexico against my skin since we moved here, to have nothing between me and the air;  it's getting much colder so I knew I might not have many more chances.  While I was out there with M., my mom came out once to smoke a cigarette; she was about ten feet away down the porch.  I don't know whether she knew I was nude or not, I didn't really care.  

I'm not sure why she brings up nudity as a recurring topic.  What does it signify to her when she talks about it to me?  It feels confrontational, like she's trying to make me uncomfortable, but that may just be me reading into it.  I have no idea what her train of reasoning (or rather, unreasoning associations) might be about it.  I think maybe she thinks I'm uncomfortable with the idea of nudity when really, what I'm uncomfortable with is her attempt to make me uncomfortable and how to respond to irrational random interjections about nudity.

Sculpture L'Air (1939) by Aristide Maillol in KMM sculpturepark/The Netherlands