Adina’s RJN-Chapter 5 “I Really Thought It Was Normal”

During my high school years I noticed that my mother drank and took a lot of pills each day. I didn’t think anything about it, I thought it was a adult thing; once you become a adult you start drinking, taking pills for everything from blood pressure to depression. During high school I made more friends and when I visited them, I noticed the same thing, everybody seemed to struggle with depression and was on medication for everything, so I really thought it was normal. 

At some point my mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital where she stayed for two weeks. During that time, she received electroshock therapy or ECT. Apparently, they use this kind of therapy for severe depression or bipolar depression when the patient does not react favourably to medication. At that stage, I thought if it helps, then its probably not a bad thing. We went to visit her a few times and she seemed to be doing very well.

After my mother was released, she functioned normally, or at least it looked like it: she cooked every day, she went to visit her friends, she went for creative sewing classes, she saw to it that we had everything that we needed and she even started to go to gym—so nothing seemed off in the way she went about her normal day-to-day life. Unfortunately underneath the depression was still there, a very real part of her life, so she needed all the pills to function. 

Things went okay for a year or two, my dad didn’t drink anymore, my mother went about her daily life, but there was clearly a rift between my parents. My mother didn’t want anything to do with my dad, or so it seemed. They treated each other very business like, there was no affection between them. My relationship with my mother also became very strained, she blamed me for everything, or that’s how it  felt. I remember she stormed into my room one evening, after I asked my dad for something that I needed, and she started yelling and hurling insults at me, but it was the hatred in her eyes that stuck with me for a long time. 

After a while I reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore and I unfortunately started to fight back. The two of us couldn’t be in the same room for long without fighting and yelling about something. That was our relationship for many years and later, I just avoided her as much as possible.

After a while my mother met another couple and they decided to start a small business from our house. My dad was not happy about it, but my mom made up her mind and they continued with this crazy idea they had. This couple  would come over once or twice a week in the evenings and then they would drink wine while they worked. During those times my brother, my dad and I would just go to the living room and say nothing. Luckily it didn’t last very long, but drinking wine in the evenings rubbed off on her and it became a habit. During the day she functioned normally, but in the evenings, she would drink a few glasses of wine, go to bed and sleep until late the next morning. I think the mixture of the wine and all the medication caused her to sleep a lot and she would go into a incredibly deep sleep, nothing could wake her, and it was best to just leave her to wake up naturally. 

During my second to last year of high school, my dad got retrenched because the factory he worked for closed down. After he was laid off, he didn’t struggle to find another job, and so to help we had to move to another town. I was busy with my record exams, which is very important exams before your final school year, so I had to stay behind and go to boarding school to finish the year and also matric to enter a university. I quite enjoyed my time at boarding school. I only went home once a month and school holidays; I didn’t really miss my parents during that time, because I didn’t miss the drama. But my mom took moving to another town very hard, and she missed me a lot. I think despite the fact that we didn’t get along, she loved me very much, but due to her own struggles she didn’t know how to express her love for us. The time apart did help our relationship a bit, but it only healed completely later on.

My mother really struggled to adapt to the new town, although she was closer to the family. The depression medication she was on for years, were suddenly discontinued. After that, they prescribed many different medications, but nothing seemed to work and she fell deeper and deeper into depression, drinking more to kill the pain inside of her. After I completed school, I moved back home to study at a tertiary, geology institution. There were universities and colleges in that town, so I was able to study from home, but it came with a lot of drama. 

My mother had to go for a hysterectomy and afterwards she just gave up, she didn’t take her hormone replacement medication, or her depression medication. She just drank from the time she woke up, stayed in bed and didn’t want to live anymore. We all tried in our own way to reach out to her, only to be met with hatred and anger. It continued like that for years. She went to a psychiatric hospital again, but it didn’t help. She stopped doing anything in and around the house like she always did. I took over the cooking and everything else in the household. During all of this my dad just kept quiet. He tried whatever he could to help my mother, but nothing helped because she didn’t want anything to do with him, or with me and my brother.

After I found the job I shared about in chapter 1, I went to visit my parents at least one weekend per month. During those weekends, I could see that my mother tried to be normal for me, but the relationship between my brother and mother took a turn for the worst at this stage and was never restored. Then things took a weird turn. My mother asked my dad for a new car, and when he got her one, she started to get up, dress nicely and went to town to buy herself new clothes. She went to visit friends and family, phoned me regularly to tell me how proud she was of me—she even looked for godparents for me, although I took care of myself. That Christmas she really tried to make it enjoyable for us as a family and cooked and sat with us to eat. 

That following January my world shattered. It happened on a Friday afternoon. I was going to visit my parents for the weekend, and I was looking forward to it since my mother had changed so much. I had to wait for a colleague to pick something up before I could leave and while he was there, my dad phoned me. He told me my mother passed away, she was not feeling well during the day, and when he went to the room to take her to a hospital, she was lying on the floor. We discovered she had heart failure. I couldn’t believe it, I phoned my aunt because they didn’t know yet and they came to pick me up because I was in no state to drive. I just cried and cried for more than a week non-stop. I couldn’t believe that I just lost my mother after I’d just gotten her back. On the day of her funeral, all my work colleagues, including Kevin, came through to support me, so I tried to put up a brave face, but I was broken. 

After a while I just buried the pain and I continued my life as I mentioned before. Looking back, I think my mother knew she didn’t have much time left and she tried to make the most of the time she had, and why she tried to fix our relationship. I also believe the way I was  being held up due to waiting for my colleague on the day of my mother’s passing, was the Lord’s way of protecting me, otherwise I would have been home when she died, and He knew I would not have been able to handle it. My brother got into a fight with her earlier that day because he was discouraged with the situation and he left, never to see her alive again.