Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Maureen Murdock/@murdockmaureen

 

“There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.”  John Stuart Mill

 

I am thrilled to kick the New Year off with a guest post by Maureen Murdock about hope while dealing with an imprisoned son who has also been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder. Maureen is a clinical psychologist as well as a leading figure in the memoir community and the author of several memoir writing books. Her current memoir, Hooked on Hope is pending publication. Her recently published Kindle short, The Emergence of Bipolar Disorder addresses why she chose to write about mental illness in the family.

I had the pleasure of meeting Maureen when I attended her memoir writing workshop at the International Women Writers Guild  (IWWG) Annual Convention this summer at Drew University in Madison, NJ.

My reviews of her Kindle short can be found on Amazon and Goodreads.

This is Part 1 of an excerpt from a spoken word piece Maureen did for SPARK theater in Pacific Palisades, CA.

 

 

Welcome , Maureen!

 

 

Hooked on Hope: A Mother’s Story About Bipolar Disorder and Prison

 

Ten years ago I taught a week-long memoir course at Skidmore College. One of the writers, a middle-aged woman from Queens, wrote about being the mother of a son in prison.

“People don’t realize,” she wrote, “When a child is in prison, his mother is there too.  I see the fear and disgust in people’s eyes when I say my son is in prison. I imagine they’re thinking, ‘she must have been a terrible mother for her son to be incarcerated.’”

 

I was deeply moved by her statement about being imprisoned too. I had never thought about that. Up until then, like many people, I thought prison was primarily populated by low-level drug dealers, thieves, and murderers, mostly black. I grew up in New Jersey and the only white people I knew who went to prison were Italian mobsters. This well-dressed white woman was the first woman I had met who was the mother of a convicted felon.

 

Six years later I am too.

 

Every other month I drive 6 hours to visit my son, Matt, at San Quentin. Female visitors are forbidden to wear underwire bras so I make sure I have my sports bra on. I put my car key, ID, and single dollar bills for the vending machines in the clear plastic purse I am permitted to bring into prison. The contents will be inspected. Nothing else can be brought into or out of prison.

After being searched and passed through the metal detector I go through a series of metal gates–surrounded by barbed wire. I hand my identification to the officer who sits in a platform on high—like some olive green khaki god– looking down at me.  I take a seat and wait as the guard calls for my son. After he is strip searched, Matt is given a pass to enter the Visitors room.  He walks toward me with a big grin, hands his ID to the platformed guard, and gives me a big bear hug.

It feels good to embrace his thin muscular body. I look into his eyes. Yes, he’s still there. They haven’t beaten him down–yet.

 

We sit across each other in plastic chairs eighteen inches from the next inmate and his visitor. Any attempt to find out how my son is really doing will be overheard.  He tells me he just received a letter from the gallery owner who offered him an internship upon his release from prison next February. At the time of his offer a year ago the gallery owner told me, “Nobody should be judged by his last mistake.”

 

I thought what a humane person, what a good egg. The gallery is not far from my home in Santa Barbara so it meant my son would have a safe place to live with me and my partner, a roof over his head, a job, a new start. I could relax a bit about what he was going to do upon release.

 

But, Matt said, “He changed his mind. He rescinded his offer. He wrote that it was too risky to have me ‘handle’ millions of dollars of artwork.”

The gallery owner knew that my son was qualified—that he had done installation work at the Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica– so rescinding his offer didn’t have anything to do with skill. It had to do with stigmatization.

 

Losing that job meant that upon release Matt would be paroled to San Francisco where he was arrested, with nothing but a clear plastic bag for his clothes and $200.

 

I wanted to reach out to my son and hold him and tell him it would be okay.  That something else would come along. But I had to sit on my hands and look at him as he put his head down, his hair covering his eyes so that neither I, nor the people sitting next to us on either side could see his tears. . .

to be continued, 01/09/14 with Part 2. . .

***

Maureen, this story leaves me spellbound.  I could feel your mother’s love and anguish. Thank you for your bravery in sharing such a deeply personal and heart-wrenching story. I join you in hoping that getting your story out there will help to increase awareness and create changes in our judicial system.

Author’s Bio and Contact Information (from Amazon):

 Maureen Murdock is the best-selling author of The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, a ground-breaking work which revealed a broader understanding of the female psyche on both a personal and cultural level and was Murdock’s response to Joseph Campbell’s A Hero with a Thousand Faces. When Murdock showed Campbell her book, he said, “Women don’t need to make the journey.” Murdock’s readers around the world have shown that he’s wrong! A Jungian psychotherapist and creative writing teacher, Murdock is also the author of Fathers Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind, The Heroine’s Journey Workbook, Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children, and Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory, a seminal work about memoir and what’s involved in writing a memoir. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages and she lectures internationally.

Follow her blog, Hooked on Hope

Twitter@murdockmaureen

 

Book Description (from Amazon):

The Emergence of a Bipolar Disorder: A Mother’s Perspective by Maureen Murdock informs the reader about the early signs of bipolar disorder in an adolescent or young adult from a mother who has been through this journey with her son. The book describes what’s involved in a mental health crisis, the trauma of a first hospitalization and facts and figures about bipolar disorder, the fastest growing brain illness in children today. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, four million children and adolescents in America suffer from a serious mental disorder. Through early diagnosis and treatment these young people can live productive lives.

As a mother and a psychotherapist, it was difficult for me to find adequate resources when my son was first diagnosed so I offer tools to navigate these turbulent waters. Included are suggestions about Mental Health First Aid, personal recommendations for links to TED Talks by two young people talking about living with bipolar disorder and community resources a family can access for support before, during, and after a mental health crisis. Like the award-winning movie “Silver Linings Playbook,” The Emergence of Bipolar Disorder: A Mother’s Perspective gives the reader a glimpse into the challenges a family experiences when a child is struck with a mood disorder.

Amazon ordering link

 

How about you? Have you ever encountered stigmatization related to mental illness issues ? 

Maureen has graciously agreed to give away a free copy of her Kindle short to a commenter whose name will be selected in a random drawing.

We’d love to hear from you. Please share your comments below~

 

Thursday, 1/09/14: “Hooked on Hope, Part 2: A Mother’s Story About Bipolar Disorder and Prison.”