MOM WAS AN ARTIST AT HEART

Yesterday I posted a story about my Mom and how she loved the artist Norman Rockwell.  I mentioned and posted that my Mom did some drawings of Santa that looked like Norman Rockwell drawings of Santa.  I now ponder the idea that my Mom’s love and attraction to Norman Rockwell was because she was an artist at heart.

When my Mom was in high school, I have been told that she was able to write extremely well and that she was at the top of her high school class.  I did not know that my Mom was able to draw, as well.  I always thought that I had been given my talent genes from my Dad who was a fabulous and brilliant toy designer, however, I now have to rethink the notion that I may have inherited my gift from my Mom or maybe both.  Wouldn’t that be something?  All these years I never knew how much my Mom was able to create.  She went to a day program called The Guild after she left the hospital and there she would make all the decorations for every season and holiday. I have posted some pictures of them.  I particularly love the wreath with the holly berries and leaves.  I think it shows my Mom’s ingenuity and cleverness on how she put the wreath together.  I show a back photo to illustrate the way she attached the leaves and berries.  Being an artist myself. I can tell that this is a creative construction and a solution to the problem.  My Mom figured out how to attack the problem of how to put the wreath together in a certain way.  It is simple yet effective. 

I’d love to know where my creative talent came from because I would be just smitten with the idea that I got it from my Mom.  It is something I cherish about myself so profoundly and to know that my Mom and I shared the same artistic genes would be awesome.  That’s not to say that I don’t love the possibility that it may be because of my Dad’s genes because I adore this idea as well, however, at this point either way I know it is a gift that I have been given.  It has helped me through many a hard time and it has been the anchor in my life.  I could not survive without creating or making artistic things. In it’s extreme I think I would probably wilt over and die if I could no longer create.  What’s interesting about this point is how it may relate to my Mom since she had stopped making the decorations at The Guild say some 6 or 8 years ago and after her friend had passed away. She seemed to have lost her interest in making things. It’s not certain how long my Mom had Liver Cancer and I now see a correlation between her getting sick and not doing creative things anymore.  What’s not clear is if she stopped creating things from being ill with Liver Cancer or if it was because of a depression that she suffered after she lost her friend.  Possibly, it could be both or maybe neither.  As I have expressed my own compelling need to create to survive that is just like breathing, I have to wonder if this was also true for my Mom?  Believe me, I now go to all these places in my mind with questions since my Mom passed away.  Could her loss of desire to create have been a marker for how she was feeling psychologically and physically and even more signaled the beginning of her Liver Cancer?  I do not know the answer to this question and I have to wonder if all this makes any sense?  Basically, I’m trying to make sense out of nonsense!  In the end, I am left with the sadness of knowing that my Mom lost her desire at a certain point in her life which never came back. I am also left with the thoughts and sorrow of how my Mom could never be all she could have been had she not become mentally ill?  I wonder what she might have done with her life and her brilliance? I can only ponder what might have been.  So, at the same time, I try to find the joy of knowing that when my Mom was feeling well, she liked to make things just as I do and inside of her mind and soul was her spirit, which continues to live on through me.  I hope I do right by her.


Thank you so much for reading this post and sharing in my Mom's truth.


As my Mom could have been,
Loren  

MOM'S NORMAN ROCKWELL CHRISTMAS

NORMAN ROCKWELL
Tonight I am thinking of my Mom and how much she loved Norman Rockwell as an artist. Liking Norman Rockwell was important because my Mom did not often express interest in things like art or culture. I think I began thinking about this since Christmas is so near.  I live by the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania and right now, this holiday season they are having an exhibit of Norman Rockwell's art at the mall.  How awesome is that?  It is as if my Mom is still stirring around and letting me know in little ways that she is telling me that she is still with me. Seeing that there is this exhibition is reminding me of a story I would like to share with you about my Mom and a Norman Rockwell book.

NORMAN ROCKWELL EXHIBIT AT KING OF PRUSSIA MALL

Last year when my Mom was at my house for the holidays, I had decided I wanted to get her a book of Norman Rockwell's art.  I didn't want to get a book that was too large because Mom did not have the ability to focus too long on reading or looking at the pictures.  It was possibly because of her illness.  Well, anyway I went into the book store Borders (I loved Borders) and I saw that there was no books that fit the features I was looking for, so I decided that I would not get a book after all.  Nevertheless, all day this idea of getting this book was in my mind and I could not get it out.  I wondered if it was because my Mom loved his work or just a plain ol' obsession?  I felt compelled to get this book for her.  This would be meaningful because my Mom could draw pictures of Santa Claus that looked so much like an old Norman Rockwell illustrations.  The thing that makes this so significant is that she would draw the pictures right out of her head without looking at any references. She just used her memory.  It's just awesome...  So, I was determined again that I was going to get her a book if it took all day.  I didn't tell my Mom what was on my mind because I wanted it to be a surprise.

MY MOMS DRAWING OF SANTA

Mom and I were going to go to Walmart to do some shopping and on the way I said to my Mom that I wanted to stop in this thrift shop to see what they had.  We had been there before and both loved it, so we decided to stop and take a peek inside.  We walked in and moved around the store in different directions.  I was walking toward the wall to see what they had in the way of books, specifically Norman Rockwell's book.   I felt drawn to this specific wall. As I approached the wall, I grazed over the books.  From the corner of my eye what did I see?   I looked down on to the shelf and staring at me, bright and bold as can be  and perched up on a easel was this book, CHRISTMAS WITH NORMAN ROCKWELL!   It had a big illustration image of Santa on the cover just like my Mom's drawings.  I thought I was imagining it.  Not only was it a Norman Rockwell book, but it was a Christmas edition!  What are the chances of this happening?  It was almost in mint condition with the dust jacket still on it.   It was a thin book with only 80 pages too!  I knew at that moment that this was suppose to happen exactly as it had.  I purchased the book and hid it in my bag.

On Christmas Eve I gave the Norman Rockwell book to my Mom.  When she saw it she seemed mildly excited and interested.  It now in retrospect was a very poignant moment because she was very sick with Cancer and we did not know it.  So, she looked at the book, however she did not show the enthusiasm that she normally would have had if she was not ill.  This, however, does not take away from this intense story of the book and how I stumbled on it.  It was meant to be and there was some message to be told.  Now when ever I see anything Norman Rockwell, I think so deeply about my Mom.  I see her spirit in his illustrations.   I believe that the exhibit that they are having at the mall is my Mom's way of letting me know she is still with me in spirit and that she is giving me ways to see her nature in ways that she could not do when she was living.  I also believe that the book was right where I found it to help me know more about my Mom as a woman and maybe as an artist?   So, tonight my heart is sad as I think about missing my Mom and the story of how I found the Norman Rockwell book for her.   I am approaching the holidays with a heavy heart and trying to think of all the positive things about my Mom and remembering her when she was happy.  Tonight, I will think about my Mom and know that she is right in step with me, as I live on.

I love you, Mom

Loren

ABOUT THANKSGIVING AND HAVING CHOICES IN LIFE

It's very late and the night before Thanksgiving and I've been thinking a lot about my Mom and how much  I miss having her here at my house.  I was also thinking about yesterday evening and how I had a Bologna sandwich.  What's odd is I hate Bologna and I never eat it however, I had a sandwich with Mayo last night.  I bought the Bologna to use for a photograph I wanted to take for a post about how my Mom loved and ate Bologna sandwiches.


My Mom loved Bologna sandwiches and she would go to the corner store and get one for dinner instead of eating the meal at the group home where she lived.  Most of the time my Mom would get sandwiches to eat there since the home would often have boiled chicken and my Mom hated boiled chicken.  It makes me sad to think of how my Mom had to eat the same thing so often and really had no choice but to go to the corner store.  What is of greater sadness and is much more significant and meaningful is about how she had so little choices and options in her life.  It's about how even though she was no longer in the hospital, she still had to live like she was.  When I think of my Mom and having no choices I am reminded of how I have them in my life and how I would feel if I did not.  My Mom had no control over her circumstances.  Research has been done on stress and it found that being in situations were you have no control is what causes the most stress.  This is how my Mom lived from day to day.  So, even though I am sad and lonely for my Mom's companionship, I am happy that she no longer has to tolerate eating boiled chicken.  I am sad that she will miss eating Thanksgiving Turkey and all the other fixings.  I know she would have loved to go to Old Country Buffet and eat as much as she liked and what she liked.   At OCB she had choices and control.  She ate almost everything she could and now I realize it's because she never knew when she was going to be able to eat like that again.  So, I brace myself for tomorrow and all the hoopla around the holidays.  When I eat I will be thankful for all the joy in my life and the fact that I have choices and options in my life. I will be thankful for the simple fact that I have control over most things in my life.  I will think of my Mom and the time I shared with her and I will be thankful.


Cheers,
Loren

ABOUT BEING THANKFUL & OLD COUNTRY BUFFET

Today I am thinking about my Mom and how much she liked Thanksgiving because my Mom, me and my husband Paul would all go to Old Country Buffet to eat and to celebrate.  My Mom loved to eat and she loved ‘Ol Country’ as she called it.  She would go up to the food bars and fill her plate to the edges with fried chicken and beef ribs, which were her favorite thing to eat.  I would watch her as she was walking up to fill her plate and I would see how happy she was.  She could barely contain herself. When Mom was walking back to the table with her full plate I was afraid she might trip or bump into to someone since Mom had trouble walking straight.  Fortunately, she always made it back to the table without spilling a thing. While my Mom was eating she would not say a word.  She was in her glory and enjoying herself so much, that she could barely notice our presence.  But Paul and I didn’t care. We were happy she was enjoying herself and experiencing pleasure, which was something she rarely experienced in her adult life.  After, dinner she would go up for dessert and again her plate was full of cake and especially vanilla soft ice cream.  We would feel so sick after we ate so much and my Mom would say that “we are never going to do that again!”

Sometimes, way back in the day,  I would have trouble going out to eat with my Mom.  I would feel so embarrassed to go in the dining room at Ol Country” and sit in the middle of the room because my Mom would be pretty messy when she ate.  Unfortunately, and tragically when my Mom was in the hospital, she lost all of her teeth.  I don’t know whether it was from lack of good dental treatment or if she had a gum disease..  Anyway, she tried dentures, however they hurt her gums, so she decided not to wear any.  This made it difficult for her to eat and she would sometimes get a mess on her shirt.  Some times because of this, I would feel so embarrassed that people were staring at us when we were eating and my anxiety antennae” went up.  I would want to hide all of us away so no one would be able to see us.  To help with this, we would sit in the back in the corner.  I never knew if my Mom knew that this was the reason that we always sat in the back in a booth.  I’m telling this story because now that I think about it, it really seems so trivial and seems to be so insignificant.  As I mentioned in About This Blog, I struggled with sorrow, fear and embarrassment because my Mom did look so disheveled at times.  I would want to fix her up so neatly so people would not stare at us.  Now that I think about all the times I was more concerned about our appearance than enjoying ourselves, I realize how sad it was for me and my Mom.  In the last years I had been overcoming my sorrow, embarrassment and social anxiety relating to my Mom, and it was feeling so good to just enjoy our selves.  In the end, I did not care what people did or how they stared, so much that I hardly noticed it.  I was so happy to be with my Mom however she was and I was so proud of her.  I was proud of how strong she was and how she had overcome so much in her life that any bad feelings were just fading away.

Now when I realize that my Mom will not be here to enjoy ‘Ol Country” and the beef ribs she loved so much, I feel so sad that it fills my heart with the sorrow that I had been trying to overcome.  I think about how silly it was to care about what other people thought.  What I am learning from this experience is that it doesn’t really matter what other people's opinions are if they are not significant or meaningful in your life.  All of us have struggles and oddities and now when I think of my Mom, I don’t ever think about how she had no teeth or that she was a messy eater.  I think of the joy on her face when she was happy, eating.  I think of the anticipation she had just waiting to get to the resturaunt. I think about Thanksgiving and the meaning of this holiday. It’s about being thankful and grateful for the people you love and those who love you.  It’s about having my Mom who I loved so much and being thankful for the time I had with her.  So, as we approach Thanksgiving I am reminded to be thankful for all of those I love and for the life I have.

HONORING MY MOM MARILYN FIDALGO

MARILYN FIDALGO     HONORING HER LIFE   AUGUST 23rd, 1937-  MAY 6th, 2011

Thank you for stopping by and sharing in the story of my beloved Mom Marilyn.  On May 6^th, 2011, my Mom passed away from Liver Cancer.  I am starting this blog to honor her because she was such an incredible person and woman.  My Mom endured so much suffering because she had a severe mental illness called Schizophrenia.   After the birth of my youngest brother my Mom became very sick and had to be hospitalized.  I think that she was 24 or 25 years old when she was hospitalized in the early 1960’s. Back in the 60’s, psychiatry was still new in terms of treatments, i.e. medications, and they were still experimenting with different treatments and using patients as guinea pigs.  Unfortunately, one of their victims was my lovely Mom. Tragically, she remained in the hospital for approximately 25 years and it is no where near certain what kind of trauma and abuse she suffered and had to endure with no one to come to her rescue.

The hospital my Mom stayed in was called Essex County Hospital or Overbrook located in Newark, New Jersey.   There, Electric Convulsive Shock Treatment was being done without proper precautions and it was being done way too much on patients. The hospital that my Mom was in, experimented with Insulin Shock Treatment which was done to help destroy a patient’s memory.   This barbaric treatment was done to my Mom and her stories about the needles in her head, have since been found out to be accurate and confirmed by a psychiatrist years after I began a relationship with my Mom.  According to what my Mom could remember, this Insulin Shock treatment was painful, frightening, abusive and done to her with tragic consequences.  As a result of these treatments, my Mom could not remember important aspects of her life and she was forever in an anxious and stressful state trying to piece together parts of her memories.  I was never sure if it was from the Insulin Shock Treatment or Electric Convulsive Shock Treatment and now, I will never know.  Most of her hospital records were lost or mysteriously disappeared.   The hospital now has been torn down.  Essex County Hospital or ‘Overbrook’ is considered by most to be one of the wierdest hospitals in New Jersey.  People would go to the hospital after it was abandoned and report that they saw ghosts there.  Recently, my husband and I were searching on the computer for the archways I remembered in my childhood and found out about these extremely bizarre stories at the Essex County or also known as ‘Overbrook” Hosiptal when it was opened and after it closed.   The confirmation of my own memories and curiousities that I have from childhood are something I could never look at while my Mom was alive. It’s only been since she passed away that I have found the strength and courage to look so closely into her past.  Now, I can only think about how my Mom had to live this awful nightmare!   I knew a lot about my Mom’s history, and that it was bad, however now I am learning just how bad it was for her This totally haunting and uncomfortable topic will be a post some where in the future.

Since my Mom was in the hospital, during my childhood and teenage years, I was unable to live with her.  I hardly knew who she was and I knew very little about her. My siblings and myself were raised by a host of family members and some strangers along the way until I was seven and my Dad took us to live at my Grandmother’s house, where I lived the rest of my childhood.  During this time, I only remember seeing my Mom approximately, 3 or 4 times until I was 16 years old. What I do have a clear memory about is that I was afraid of my Mom when I was a little girl.  But I longed for a mother and I hoped and believed she was going to leave the hospital and come back to live with us in the new home my Dad had purchased.  Unfortunately, my Dad remarried and that dream was gone.  Tragically, 6 months after we moved into our new house, my Dad passed away at the age of 40. I was 14 years old and very confused. After my Dad’s painful passing, we moved back to Gram’s and I only saw my Mom once between the ages of 14 and 24 years old. It was not until I was 24 years old that I finally did see her again.  She had been discharged from the hospital to live in a group home, but she was still very sick, since the medications were still horrendously toxic and they were not very humane.  Drugs like Thorazine and Mellarill were the standard treatments for Mom’s illness, but they came at a cost.  They had severe side effects and secondary disorders like Tardive Dyskinesa which can be a severe movement disorder. They made my Mom drugged out so much that she did not make any sense when she talked. But it wasn’t clear what was the result of all the drugs and what was the result of her illness?  It was so painful for me to see her and experiencing the shock of how sick she was, that I left that visit so distraught and I could not emotionally see her again for 10 years.

It was not until I was 33 years old that I finally felt able to search again for my Mom.  I found her again living in a boarding home in Newark, New Jersey.  She had been in and out of the hospital since I first saw her, but this time I saw her, something was different.  She was more lucid and could carry a conversation.  She smiled if only for a few moments and she could make a funny or quirky joke.  I found out that she had been put on a super new medication just released on the market, called Clozaril or Clozapine and this drug single handedly made a world of difference for her.  She was nowhere near cured or fully functional, but she was a lot better.  Things were looking up after my Mom, Marilyn spent more than half her life in an institution.  This is where the next part of our journey begins.

MY MOM'S MEMORIAL AT HER REFLECTION GATHERING

Now experiencing the pain, since my Mom passed away, it has been hard for me emotionally.  I miss her terribly and I wish I had one more day with her, so I could say all the things I have wanted to say to her literally, all my life.  Although, I was able to say some of what I needed to, I still wish I could tell her again, how much I loved her and how much she mattered to me. This is one of my wishes to begin this blog. I want it to be a place for me to write about my thoughts, feelings and memories I have about my Mom and to share stories with others.  I have so many experiences about my Mom and my relationship with her, as well as the things she did, that I am busting at the seams.  I want people to know who my Mom was and why she was here if for however, painful it was for her to survive.  She had a purpose to come and go in my life and I will search to find the meaning and reasons.  I also know there are a lot of people out there that have experienced similar things with their family members.  These stories need to be told.  We need to honor our loved ones that have become sick with different mental and neurological illnesses and we need to let people know they existed. We can’t let them fade in to the darkness because of shame or fear.  We can’t again, lock them away. We need to let people know, they mattered. I know my Mom mattered and I believe she was an extraordinary woman.  She suffered all her life and it was in silence.  Even though she had a severe illness Schizophrenia, she never complained about the handicaps, obstacles and symptoms she suffered with.  She never expressed the despair or sadness she felt, however, I could see it in her eyes.  Up until her last days in the hospital with Liver Cancer, it was only the last 4 or 5 days before she passed away, that she mouthed the word “yes”, letting us know that she was in pain.  My Mom never wanted to be a bother to anyone including me.  She was honest, good, brilliantly smart , strong and she had the character that can be compared  to the best of people I’ve ever known.  She was my friend.

I want this blog to be for memories, reflections and feelings about my Mom and for experiencing the loss of her and how it has impacted my life to have first found her and then to loose her again.  I want it to be a place for people to come to share their own stories of mental illness, love and loss. I will share the range of emotions and experiences I went through with my Mom as well as with her illness.  Sometimes, it was hard for me and sometimes I wanted to give up, but I kept hanging in there and grew to develop this extraordinary bond of love and caring for my Mom. To most people, my Mom was a throw away patient.  She didn’t matter to many people who came in contact with her, but she mattered to me and this is why I am beginning this blog. MY MOM MATTERS and your loved one matters, too.  Share and let go of sadness and shame.  Open your hearts to be free.

I Love You, Mom,

Loren