By Carmen Baca
When did my father start sleeping with one eye open?
When did my mother stop loving him?
“I hate you!” her voice echoed off the pastel walls of Nazareth House,
An orderly restrained her not-too-gently as I stood by confused.
Three months, they said. She’ll be herself again, you’ll see.
“But what’s wrong with her?” I asked. Their answers, sympathetic smiles.
On the Greyhound bus traveling home, my dad answered the first question.
She had been walking the streets in her night clothes, a neighbor told him.
Her diet of cigarettes and coffee had made her ill. Hadn’t I noticed?
“She’s not my mother anymore,” I said, “not like before.”
He turned away, hiding a tear. “She’s not well,” he whispered.
Her mind had shattered and broke us all, our little family of three.
“She’s not my mother anymore,” I said again, remembering her eyes.
At the local hospital, she’d barricaded herself in a room.
“Talk to her,” a nurse nudged me toward her. I pushed the door open.
She shoved the bed against it, slamming it closed against me. But,
I’d seen the wild panic in her face right before she yelled, “Run!”
Straight-jacketed, she begged us with her eyes from the ambulance.
Three months of electroshock treatments and cocktails of many pills later,
She came home again, declared healthy by the professionals.
I expected her whole, fixed, well again, the mother I’d known all my life.
Instead, a somnambulist, a chain smoker, a quiet, cowering stranger returned.
Her eyes, like an animal’s, haunted by abuse in the name of medicine.
“She’s not my mother,” I whispered.
“She will be,” my father said.
But she never was, not completely.
And neither were we, our little family of three.
Torn asunder by a new housemate none of us wanted.
Schizophrenia, the often volatile and sometimes introspective
Unwelcome addition to the house on First Street.
*Previously published in Poética 8 anthology by Grant Hudson, Clarendon House Publishing.
Carmen Baca taught high school and college English for thirty-six years before retiring in 2014. A regionalistic author, she incorporates her regional Spanish culture into most of what she writes. She is the author of 6 books and over 70 short publications to date.
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