Sandra's Story
I am the daughter of a Mexican mother and Portuguese, Chinese father. I was born in Mexico City and raised in Sydney, Australia. I am a professional vocalist and songwriter based in Mexico City. My career in the music industry spans two decades. In the year 1989 my life pivoted dramatically. I was nine years old when my mother developed schizophrenia. In that moment, life as I had known it, crumbled. My mother’s warmth, love, kindness, joy, guidance and protection vanished. The stability every child so desperately needs, was eradicated from our home. Though mum was still with us physically, we were now practically strangers. On good days mum acknowledged my presence as her daughter, on devastating days, I was accused of being an imposter, pretending to be her daughter. Each day brought a new crushing blow, a new traumatic experience that had my nerves completely frayed.
Because of this, I have categorized my life in two parts; pre-schizophrenia and post-schizophrenia. I was a care-free child prior to my mother’s health development. Afterwards I became an anxious, worrisome kid, that struggled in every facet of my life. I could no longer concentrate at school. I had always excelled academically, but I rapidly spiraled and found it very difficult to keep up my grades. This in turn affected my self-esteem. I was a complete mess at school and at home. It was virtually impossible to continue thriving in school after my mother became ill, because my energy was consumed worrying about her and her bizarre behavior. My every thought was channelled toward her, and surviving the blows schizophrenia brought on a daily basis.
How does a child assimilate this reality? Children are not prepared to deal with such difficult, traumatic realities. How can a child understand hallucinations, delusions, violent outbreaks, or incoherent, bizarre behavior? How does a child work through the trauma of seeing their mum taken away to a mental hospital, handcuffed by the police? How do you not take personally the most hateful, hurtful comments when it is after all, your mother directing these nasty words at you? I certainly couldn’t understand why my mother said the most hurtful things to me and cut me down. I couldn’t understand her embarrassing outbursts in public, or her incessant solitary conversations. As a child I became traumatized and felt fear and sadness in its rawest form. I felt isolated and was convinced that only our family was going through this devastation.
The following ten years were hell with no escape. The voices in mum’s head turned her against the entire family. We were imposters, we were the enemy. Each day we were thrashed on an intense, emotional roller coaster ride, that inevitably led to the depletion of our family unit. My mother is currently stable. Medication has controlled many of the symptoms, but it’s been thirty years of tough, heartbreaking experiences that have left profound emotional scars. For many years I felt alone in my experience and felt I had been robbed of a mother. To this day I find it difficult to reconcile the fact that schizophrenia took my mother, leaving a cold, hostile stranger in her place.
I know children of schizophrenic mother’s feel isolated. It is not easy to open up about such painful experiences, that most people cannot understand. Most find their way, somehow managing to survive. I channeled my pain through the writing of my memoir, I Hear You. I also created a page on Facebook called I Hear You - Children of Schizophrenics.
Suzanne, searching for resources for pain she experiencied from Maternal schizophrenia in her own family, found my Facebook page, and introcuded me to author Margaret Brown and her book "growing up with a schizophrenic mother". Being able to connect and share resources brought relief to both of us, and we decided that more centralized resources should be availble to the unique challenges daughters of schizophrenic mothers share. With that in mind, we began collaborating on Daughter2Daughter.org. Our hope is to reach as many children of schizophrenics, offer a support network, resources, create awareness about the effects of schizophrenia on family members, and offer a safe space in which children of schizophrenics know they are not alone.
View my "I Hear You" youtube channel interviews here: