Category Archives: My Schizophrenic Mother
ramen
There are so many ways to eat ramen. Ramen wet, ramen dry. Ramen that got stepped on, straight from the package, crumbled up. Ramen in a bowl with hot tap water. Put another bowl on top, if you have … Continue reading
Filed under My Schizophrenic Mother
snow cave
I’m nine years old and our apartment is filled with smoke. Yellow, heavy, cloying smoke, the cumulative exhaust of thousands and thousands of cigarettes. It’s been a long winter- cold, dark, blustery, trees popping in the night-time, bitter stars, snow … Continue reading
Filed under Alaska, My Schizophrenic Mother
fish soup
My mother rarely ate anything other than cigarettes, mountain dew and strong black tea. Occasionally, when she was feeling generous, she would buy a bag of fritos and a tub of cottage cheese and we would eat them together, sitting … Continue reading
Filed under My Schizophrenic Mother
Light box
As an adult, I look back and I see the paranoid schizophrenic woman who raised me, and I see the woman who raised me- and it is impossible, sometimes, to separate the two, to know what would have been different … Continue reading
Filed under Funny in a sad way, My Schizophrenic Mother
OCD
Barbara is out of cigarettes again. It’s wintertime, and she can’t remember a time when it was anything other than wintertime. She takes her long, puffy pink coat with the toggle buttons from the ladder-backed kitchen chair where it lives … Continue reading
Filed under My Schizophrenic Mother
The Virgin Mary
Imagine you’re my mother. Imagine you’re the virgin Mary. The virgin Mary has been reincarnated into this tall, thin body, this black hair and green eyes. She’s been reincarnated into a woman who chain smokes capris and drinks mountain dew … Continue reading
Filed under My Schizophrenic Mother
Where darkness lives
I woke up this morning thinking about my mother. I invoked her, yesterday, by talking about her, and when I woke up this morning she was there, in the room. Her spirit, her energy. My mother exists. It’s hard to … Continue reading
Filed under Alaska, beauty, important, My Schizophrenic Mother, pain, Privilege, Reality, The Apocalypse
A Fate Worse Than Death
(this is the piece I read at my reading on tuesday. the theme was “what we are afraid of”, so I wrote about my schizophrenic mother.) (also- I use the word “crazy” alot in this piece, and I realized, last … Continue reading
The Grotto
. There’s a big hunk of rock on 82nd and Sandy covered all over with douglas-firs and yellow cedars, right next to highway 205. It’s the Grotto. A chunk of old-growth forest that never got cut down all the way, … Continue reading
Filed under My Schizophrenic Mother, Pictures, Portland
It’s like this
.A few days ago I read Davka’s post on class anger, and it got me thinking about my own experience growing up, and how it differs from that of most of my friends, and how it makes me different- if … Continue reading
