My Mom

Linda Anne McRae Morton had many defining identities - loving mom, avid reader, faithful Christian, diligent employee, good friend...and paranoid schizophrenic. 

I've wanted to write about her for many years, but anger, shame, fear and sadness have always frozen my fingers.  Not sure why this Mother's Day is any different than the last 49 of them, but somehow it is.

My memories are just that - MY memories - and I don't pretend that they are 100% reflective of objective truths.  They are my images and perceptions from life as her elder daughter, and they comprise a wealth of excuses for living a broken and angry life.  It is only as I get older that I have begun to tease out the facts from the fiction, and I still don't think I've got it completely right.  But here is what it is today.

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In her youth, Linda was absolutely gorgeous.  A petite blonde with a huge bust and a tiny waist, Linda hailed from rural east Tennessee and moved to Knoxville with her divorced mother during junior high.  She attended Tyson Junior, West High School and then the University of Tennessee, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree.  Smart, beautiful and funny as hell - basically the total package, despite being from the "other side of the tracks".

Along with her looks, I suspect it was the absence of pedigree which drew my blue-blood father to her.  Always the rebel, he dashed off to Blount County with her on a cold night in January 1963, where they were secretly married by the local justice of the peace.  I imagine my paternal grandparents must have been distraught over their son's willful pursuit of his own desires - he has never been one to follow someone else's script.

I also imagine a lot of suspicion around the elopement;  why the hush and rush?  Was there a bun in the oven?  Well, eventually, yes...but since I didn't arrive until November of '63, I wasn't the reason for hurry.  I think they were both just sneaky and horny and not particularly susceptible to good sense.  (eww, it is weird to write about them being, you know, ...eww, I can't write it again.)

My sister arrived in 1966, and our perfect family settled into a perfectly beautiful white house with perfect iron trellises on a large and perfect corner lot in the bluest-blood neighborhood in Knoxville.

I'm told by relatives and friends that my mom did some pretty bizarre things as a young mother.  I don't know anything about any of that - all I know is that my mom and dad were beautiful together.  They went to parties and Nine o' Clock Cotillion and to the Old Time Fiddler's Convention in Union Grove, NC and to church every single Sunday morning, where she taught children's Sunday School.

I know that she smelled like Jungle Gardenia perfume and he smelled like leather, and they both smelled like Marlboro Reds.

I know that she had a piano and a mink stole, and he had a Harley and a banjo.

And I know that sometimes they were very happy.

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Then in the late 60s, things changed - a lot.  Here is where it gets very fuzzy for me, so apologies to those who possess more facts than I...but my mother's first suicide attempt was in 1968 or '69.  A true beehive aficionado, my mother frequented a popular chi-chi hair salon where various illicit pills were available if you knew the right person to ask.  I think she was miserable and growing sicker by the day...having had my own forays in to self-medication, I understand why she did what she did in pursuit of relief.  But I can't say I understand why ending her life seemed like a reasonable solution to the shrieking in her head.

I pause here.  Did she have auditory or visual hallucinations, the hallmark symptoms of schizophrenia?  I don't think so, at least not then, but I know for certain they came later.  But back then, her illness was manifested in a thousand unreasonable fictions turned into fact by her disease.

This attempted overdose prompted the first of her institutionalizations.  Again I am fuzzy on dates and durations - I know that she spent time at two of the South's finest psychiatric institutions - Duke Psychiatric Hospital and Vanderbilt's Parthenon Pavilion.  I remember flying to Raleigh/Durham with Daddy and my little sister in a very small plane, when my ears felt like they would explode and I cried from the pressure.  We had Easter baskets with Mommy in a hotel next to the hospital - they let her out to come visit us for an afternoon.

I know she had electric shock therapy on multiple occasions.  It wasn't until 2001, when I saw Russell Crowe's "A Beautiful Mind" that I understood the violence of EST.  There is some bitter irony in the term "shock" therapy, for I remain shocked that this was a widely-accepted therapeutic intervention for an array of psychiatric diagnoses.  After EST, she was prone to seizures - therefore, the epilepsy medication Dilantin was added to her psychopharmacologic cocktail of Thorazine and Elavil.

All of my life, she had migraines, though they seemed to worsen in her mid-30s.  As my parents' marriage failed, she took to her bed more and more often, full of pain and pills and fury. 

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By 1974, she was a divorced mother of two girls, ages 11 and 8. Oh, how she loved us!  She forced herself into functionality, obtaining a clerical certificate from Draughon's Business College and accepting a job her mother arranged for her in the county clerk's office.  She went to work nearly every day, except when depression and migraines forced her under the covers and under her little bag of anesthetics.

She let us have Captain Crunch for dinner and bought us all manner of books and music - a voracious reader herself, she easily put the bookstore tab before the phone bill.  Yet the lights stayed on, and the fridge stayed full, and our threesome moved through time.

There are dozens of sad vignettes I could share at this juncture in the story, but to what end?  All of us who've been through or near divorce can tell stories of agony and destruction - ours were just seasoned with the special extremes reserved for the mentally ill.  I will leave it at that.


Lest you think it was all tragic and dark, let me assure you that we had all kinds of fun.  Her acerbic wit, sharpened by heartbreak, created an atmosphere of intellectual hilarity.  We wrote stories for each other, brutal and funny stories about a hapless unloved orphan named Mok who was raised by nuns and suffered from bad luck and insults.  Lord, how I wish I'd kept a Mok story.  You really can't make this stuff up.

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As my sister and I grew into teenagers, Mom's illness became more evident in her lack of hygiene and in our living conditions.  Always suckers for a stray, our house became home to several cats and dogs - I can't remember maximum count at the moment but suffice to say that what we didn't spend on Cokes, cigarettes, prescriptions and books, we spent on pet food and vet bills.

Teenagers are, by definition, lazy as all get-out, and since nobody else seemed particularly interested in housecleaning, neither was I.  The cats peed down the air vents and the dogs ate the furniture and things generally went to hell in a handbasket.

But still we had fun - we watched movies and worked jigsaws and ate Funyuns; we read books, lots of books, and I listened to records in my room with headphones for hours on end.

And she loved us fiercely - always fearful that we would leave her.  So we swore we never would.

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I was terrible to her on many occasions, too many to count or recount here.  I was mad at her for being sick, for not being like other mothers...sometimes I doubted whether she was really sick at all, maybe just mean and lazy.  But I knew in my heart that she didn't want to be the way she was - she just didn't know how to be any other way.

And so I found my own relief in drugs and drinking and boys.  And books - always books.

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Fast forward to 1981 - I graduated high school and entered UT.  Despite a hundred assurances to the
contrary, I left my mother and sister out of cowardice and self-preservation and moved into an apartment a few miles away with my stepsister.  I have this particular memory cross-filed under "shame" as well as "accomplishment".  It took the next twelve years of self-degradation before I could begin healing the wounds I'd wrought in her life and mine.

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Fast forwarding again, as this post is meant to be about her, not me.  She became beautiful to me again, the day I gave her the first of her four grandchildren.  She arm-wrestled our pastor, barely giving him enough time for the "amen" after blessing my newborn son a few hours after his birth.  It was then I realized that all she really wanted was to love and be loved - ceaselessly and intensely and without rules or conditions.  What better recipient for such affection than a grandbaby?

Now in her early 60s, her physical and mental health deteriorating, she looked forward to Saturday visits with her grandchildren with the anticipation of a small child in the weeks before Christmas.  Saturdays at Grammy's were awesome - my son and his cousin would make piles out of the couch cushions, then add every pillow in the house until there was a big cushy mountain in the middle of the living room, perfect for jumping into and yelling at the top of their lungs.  She would clap her hands and laugh and yell right along with them.

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In the fall of 2006, Mom developed a fever and horrible cough which turned into pneumonia.  X-rays found lung cancer, and radiation therapy was initiated.  But by the turn of the New Year, there wasn't any point in that, and in mid-January we moved her to St. Mary's Residential Hospice, which is staffed by angels.

She could no longer take her psych meds, and so in her final weeks, her illness was in full flora.  There were episodes of screaming and tears, visions of long-dead relatives in the corners of the room, and a torturously long moment of lucidity where she repeatedly begged me to help her.  I can't write this without decades of shame cramping my hands.

And on February 2, 2007,  with my sister holding her left hand and me holding her right, she exhaled for the last time and left all that sickness behind her.

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Mother's Day.  There aren't any cards that can capture how I feel about Mother's Day - how I loved and loathed and miss my mother.

Today I'm a mother.  But that's another story.