My reaction to "Mother of a Violent Schizophrenic Son-Linda"

On bad moms and empty villages

I’m a huge fan of Soft White Underbelly. Recently, there was a video posted that really got to me. It was an interview with a mother of a young man with schizophrenia. I watched it with my heart breaking a little, hearing the guilt in her voice, the way she was turning every moment of her son’s childhood over in her mind, trying to zero in on the things she did wrong.

Schizophrenia is genetic. It’s not something she caused. And yet, here she was, blaming herself anyway — because that’s what mothers do. And of course, the comment section was full of people lining up to do it for her, too, like she hasn’t already been doing it to herself every day.

I know that kind of guilt. I lived in it. I wrote a whole book about being a drunk mom, about the ways I messed up, about the deep, shameful fear that I will ruin my kid forever. I wrote about the way I tried to fix it with no real help outside of what my loved ones tried — while they too were very much in the dark — and without much of a safety net, sometimes nothing but my own determination not to be the disaster I believed I was doomed to be. And after the book came out, I also wrote about the way people — strangers, mostly— felt entitled to tell me what kind of mother I was, what kind of person I was, without knowing a single thing about my life beyond the parts I chose laid bare.

Parenting is already hard, even when you’re doing it under the best circumstances. And so many of us aren’t. So many of us are just barely hanging on, trying to raise our kids while dragging around our own trauma, our own pain, our own unmet needs. And what support do we get? None. There is no village. We don’t take care of each other anymore.

You have a baby, and instead of people stepping in to help, they step back. They expect you to figure it out on your own. They expect you to be perfect, even if you’re drowning. And God forbid you actually struggle — because then you’re not just a struggling mom, you’re a bad mom. One wrong move, and you’re the villain.

This is the thing about mental health. Schizophrenia, addiction, depression — all these things still come with so much stigma, even though we know they aren’t a choice. Even though we know they’re illnesses. And yet, the first thing people do when a mom struggles is find a way to blame her for it: She should’ve been a better mother. She should’ve been stronger. She should’ve known better, done better, been better.

But what about everyone else? I read the comments under the video with all these people judging her — are they looking out for the struggling parents in their own lives? Do they check in on their neighbours? Do they offer help to the single mom at the grocery store trying to keep her kid from having a meltdown? Do they show up for people in crisis, or are they just here to watch the train wreck and then feel superior about it?

This woman sounds like a good mother. Not a perfect one by any measure, but who the hell is? She’s self-aware. She’s trying. And honestly, that’s more than a lot of people can say. My heart breaks for her because I know what it’s like to live with that kind of regret. To look at your kid and wonder if they’d be better off if someone else had raised them. Or to wish you could go back in time and do everything right, even though you did the best you could with what you had.

I don’t know her, but I know that feeling. And I know how much it sucks to carry it alone.