Coming to Terms With My Mother’s Mental Illness

My mother looked her doctor straight in the eye. “You’ve got to let me out of here,” she said. “I’m building 36 luxury condos in Malibu.” The doctor nodded his head, excused himself, and called me. “Is it true?” he asked. It wasn’t. It sounded convincing—my mother is a formidable woman—but can also be deeply delusional, which is how she ended up in a closed ward at UCLA’s hospital. Her mental state was no news to my sister and me: when we were children, she claimed that she’d been impregnated by an extraterrestrial and that California would soon be falling into the ocean. By the time I started the eighth grade, we moved in with my father as she took off to join a cult in Virginia, giving them a large chunk of her divorce settlement as the price of admission. Mom, my sister and I eventually learned, was schizotypal, a relatively rare personality disorder characterized by ingratiating first impressions, supernatural thinking, and an unshakable belief that they know best how the world is ordered. Early on, whenever my mother was being oversensitive—whenever she claimed insight into the workings of the universe, whenever she leapt into some fit of anxiety bursting with tears—my sister and I would shrug our shoulders and tell ourselves that all Jewish mothers, as the stereotype goes, were probably like that; that she drove us crazy because that was her innate modus operandi; that all of her irrational behaviors were forgivable, even endearing; that they were explicable parts of a long tradition of mothering we’d seen in movies and television shows and read in books by Philip Roth.