I can't answer this question as I'm bloody lucky...
But I’ll answer on behalf of my mother as she’s not a b3tard and despite the shit she’s had to put up with would be hard pressed to say a bad word against anyone. See that’s the thing with my mum, she had a pretty bad childhood; her mother ran off with her father’s best friend, the shock of which killed her dad. Prior to that, her mum was repeatedly violent and aggressive to both her and her father, as well as manipulative, devious and spiteful. However, my mum grew up to be so cool and has spent her adult life working with kids on a psychiatric ward who go through stuff that, in her words, make her childhood seem like an episode of the Brady Bunch. Her mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after we discovered she’d got a file on her at the police station detailing complaints she made about my grandfather (the man she ran off with) saying he was stealing from her. This had been going on for years and he was too scared of her violence to say anything.

Things came to a head when, after he died, my mum offered to take her in to live with her as it was clear she couldn’t cope on her own – she set the kitchen on fire boiling a kettle and have never once had to handle money. I guess years ago, people just did stuff for her, to avoid her rage and to cover up that anything was wrong. After two weeks with my mum she was sectioned; she tried to kill my mum one morning by grabbing her round the neck and throwing her down the stairs as she was convinced that men had come to get her so she would give them my mum instead.

My mum still visits her every day, without complaint and even now I find it hard to reconcile that the frail old lady I see when I go home is responsible for so much wreckage – when I was born, when my dad died, it was always about her. Even my mum admits that.

But lest you think this is a tale of “yay for Rak’s super mum”, I have to finish with a punchline. As my gran is so unstable, she’s heavily medicated and under the care of a psychiatrist, who my mum sees on her behalf on a monthly basis. A couple of months ago she went to see him to say that she was concerned as my gran appeared to be having trouble word finding and was getting very confused, had she had a TIA or a stroke? The doctor said;

“Actually Mummy Rakky, we think she’s probably just developing senile dementia that may have been masked before due to the strength of the antipsychotics she’s been on.”

“Really doctor? So she’s a paranoid schizophrenic and she has senile dementia?”

“Yes, we think so.”

“Oh well, I supposed the next time the voices tell her to kill me she’ll have probably forgotten what they told her by the time she gets round to it…”

I love my mum.
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Tue 21 Aug 2007, 23:36, Reply)