Madness of Childhood and ‘Mad to be Normal’

 David Tennant always is an interesting actor.  He takes challenging roles, including that of R. D. Laing in ‘Mad to be Normal.’

This is not a film review, but I look back on my childhood in the Sixties and the way my mother behaved almost in a schizophrenic fashion throughout my life.  There was the ‘liberal’ woman who was a party girl, some one who actually smoked pot on at least one occasion, knew Timothy Leary, was quite happy to embrace the philosophy of Aldous Huxley, and yet coldly declared that any one who took drugs ‘should be lined up against a wall and shot.’  What sort of statement is that?  What is more terrufying was the constant threat that, if I failed to behave properly, or ceossed some invisible psychological line, she would send me for electric shock therapy.  

I kid you not, as a friend of mine used to say.  She did use that as a threat frequently.  I have tried to suppress many of these facts since her death.  I truly did love her deeply.  She gave birth to me, and she was my mother, and she gave me many beautiful traditions, and an appreciation of elegance and beauty, but...   BUT... if I cannot tell the truth now, I will go to my grave with the impossible weight of a childhood and adolescence that was overshadowed by her almost careless sadism.  

I look at my sister, and she has become the monster my mother created and supported through six decades.  I fled in order to avoid that fate.  

My sister, like the very emotionally damaged childhood sweetheart, became the recipient of my mother’s determination to brand some one with the taint of lunacy.  Omce I moved on, she would say to all and sundry: ‘Well, V. Is mentally ill, of course.’ I never told my sister this.  It would have been rather cruel.