and yet, it passes

a short essay i wrote for my creative writing class - on grief, mental health, and feeling your feelings

“You need to believe me, Delaney. These people, they’re evil – and they’re tracking me everywhere I go,” Mom exclaims, glancing over at me while I shift uncomfortably in my seat.

I start to break down.

“And dad is probably going to lose custody of your brother, unfortunately,” she continues.

What should have been a nice movie outing had, once again, turned into this. We drive down the highway, the windshield wiper screeching almost loud enough to wash out my muffled sobs. She is silent the rest of the ride.

Back in June, I’d made my way home for the first time in six months. I am twenty, but upon arriving, I am fourteen. Always reluctant to leave behind my queen bed and return to a twin, I am surprised to find that dad has actually moved out this year. I accept my reward for withstanding his marriage with mom and inherit his king bed. Fourteen-year-old me is relieved.

“I’m so happy you’re here – I’ve been waiting to tell you everything that’s been going on! It’s all so crazy. These two,” Mom sighs, “They don’t believe me.”

Reaching the top of the stairs, I look over to dad and Thalia sitting at the table, observing their blank expressions. (Dad still comes over almost daily to see my siblings. I must applaud the co-parenting.) I had so much I wanted to tell mom, but she spoke with an urgency that told me I would have to wait. Minutes into her story, I notice dad with his head in his hands.

“Mom – I was with you, but now this sounds really weird. I don’t think it’s possible for them to be tracking your phone – I mean, to be honest, why would they even care to? You don’t work there anymore.”

Mom was on sick leave after having lost her own mum, but for the past while she had been all-consumed in this work drama, as if to give her mind a less daunting task to handle. In her words, she’d been targeted and harassed by a co-worker and was forced to leave – and now, she was being stalked.

“It’s so much more complicated, you don’t even understand. You’ll be sorry you don’t believe me one day.”

Weeks went by, and the stories continued. First, it was her phone being tracked. Next, it was evidence that my step-mom had poisoned our dog. Then, she was speaking to a man online who knew of our address and had installed video cameras outside our house to “keep us safe”. I responded to each of her confessions with anger and confusion before trying my absolute best to unravel the stories she was telling herself. But no amount of reason would sway her thoughts or persuade her to seek help. I’ve already been through enough, I thought. I don’t deserve to come home to a new set of traumas after having worked so hard to heal what lingered from my childhood. Why can’t mom help herself? If not for her, then for me? My outrage began to gnaw away at any shreds of hope that I carried – hope for the strength of our relationship now, or worse, for one in the future. One July afternoon, it bubbled over.

“Mom… I HATE YOU!!!”

Tears stream down my lightly freckled cheeks as mom comes running over.

“W-what? Why? Are you okay? Come here, no, no, no.”

“I’m really scared– you need to stop talking to the man online, mom. I can’t do this.”

I quickly become fragile as my anger turns to despair. We stand together and embrace for a long moment, and for once, I let her hold my pain. Her, the source.

Upon returning from the movie, I go straight to my room as mom greets our dog with a forced sense of enthusiasm. Dad had warned me of this. In late November, he had sent me a text expressing his concerns on my return for the holidays.

“Mom’s mental health hasn’t seemed to improve, so it’s up to you if you’d like to come home for the break.”

He meant well, but every mention of my mother’s state set me back to the same hopeless fourteen-year-old girl; the one who longed for an escape from her dread. But soon later, I had learned she’d been given a diagnosis of Delusional Disorder. She was not deliberately conspiring against everyone in her life, she was actually struggling with delusions: “fixed false beliefs based on an inaccurate interpretation of an external reality despite evidence to the contrary” (Joseph and Siddiqui). I felt a twinge of guilt as I realized my anger all this time had been misguided. All these things my mother was saying were not really her, but her illness; a brain desperately trying to survive a world where it does not feel safe. A wave of relief temporarily washed over my grief, and I desperately tried to latch on to this feeling – this glimpse of hope, of understanding. But when the water retracted, as it always does, my sorrow remained.

It is February now, and I have just gotten off the phone with mom. Another offhand text about one of her delusions had prompted me to call her, and her response has once again brought me to the verge of a meltdown. This time, as I hang up the call, I sit with the lingering remnants of sadness, until soon, it passes. Sitting up on my bed, I observe the Phoebe Bridgers poster on the wall, and my dusty lamp in the corner of my desk. Mom is still sick, and yet, it passes. It is then that I realize, the stories are not real – neither my mother’s, nor the ones I had created in my head to try and justify the depths of my own grief. What if I continued to sit with my sorrow as it arrived, and allowed it not to consume me, but to simply coexist; to be felt, as an experience that needs no defining? After all, the weight of the baggage that I had been so diligently holding was never really mine, but a long lineage of hers, and her mother’s, and her mother’s. And while I may never be able to create a future for my mom that is free of her agony, mine awaits.

I really do believe it now. I am no longer fourteen.

---

Works Cited

Joseph, Shawn M., and Waquar Siddiqui. “Delusional Disorder.” U.S. National Library of Medicine, StatPearls, 27 Mar. 2023, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539855/.