My father was Jonathan on paper, but Jack to everyone who knew him. My mother's name was Margaret. They had many things in common. They were both high school dropouts, though Margaret eventually got her GED. They were both working class, having never known a wealthier life. They were both Catholic, making at least a passing effort at following the rules and respecting the ritual. They wed four months after my conception, a fact which was likely the subject of some neighborhood gossip despite its regularity. My mother died when I was an infant.
As I grew, my father explained to me why our family seemed smaller than the families I saw on television. "KOed by cancer," he would say. I had a vague sense that her absence was a lonely sort of thing, but I had everything I needed in my father. Mothers were mere abstractions. Once, when I was very young, I told him that I wanted my mother. I said this because advertisements had taught me that mothers were less strict than fathers and far more likely to buy sugar cereal for their sons. It made him sad, so I never said it again.
The sole time I truly missed my mother was in the days following the accident that blinded me. I was terrified of the dark and I didn't want my father to leave my side. At the same time, I was overwhelmed by my newly heightened senses and I wanted to be as far away as from people as possible. Obviously, no real person could meet both needs, but the mother that I imagined for myself was perfect. She could guide me through a room without the pressure and pain of touching. I always knew where she was because she had a distinct and mild scent. Her voice was quiet and gentle on my ears, but somehow drowned out the chaos of the hospital. When she sang to me, the sheets didn't itch and the antiseptic smells didn't leave me nauseous. She didn't need to sleep or work. She could stay by my side, her steady, soothing heartbeat giving me security and direction in the world.
Of course no one like that has ever existed. And I was lucky to have all the comfort and guidance my very real father could provide, not to mention the assistance I received in the form of occupational therapy, mobility and orientation training, Braille instruction, and mentoring from other blind people. I soon let go of the mother I imagined for myself.
Some might expect that I wished for her when my father died. Perhaps I did, occasionally. But of my two missing parents, only one had been a real, memorable, tangible part of my life. So my father was the parent I mourned for, the parent I strove to commemorate, the parent I imagined at my Christmases and my school award ceremonies. The idea of a mother wasn't fully gone from my life, but her memory existed only in the background, like a creaky stair I had long since learned to skip.
I was thirty-two years old when I met my mother.
I had been prowling the city as Daredevil and sought sanctuary in a convent. One of the nuns took care of me, lifting my mask to treat my wounds. She recognized me instantly. I believe that I recognized her as well, though I know rationally that I could not have formed any memories of her as a newborn. Still, I could feel her reaction – the tension, the shock. There was something deeply familiar in her scent and her heartbeat. We rediscovered each other, Sister Maggie and I.
My mother was alive. She never left New York City. She was living as a nun of the Carmelite order.
It would be natural to assume that I was angry. Maybe I was. Maybe I was too shocked to react. She didn't explain at first, didn't say why she had chosen to leave my father and me. She wasn't very maternal in her manner. She was cordial and distant. After all, she hadn't expected to meet me either. I kept her existence a secret from my friends because I knew what they would say and I wasn't ready to decide whether or not I agreed. We arranged to meet monthly and I visited her many times after that. We sometimes sat in silence, or did the work of the convent. She never explained why she left and she found it hard to acknowledge me as her son. Although she had followed my life from a distance, she had lived a full life of her own. She had devoted herself to her religion, to prayer and service to the homeless and nuclear disarmament. She had given her life to making the world a better place.
Four months after I found my mother, I introduced my friend Foggy to her. I didn't prepare him for the meeting. I don't scare easily, but I couldn't find the words to explain that I wasn't an orphan - that all along I'd had a mother who (I feared) simply had no interest in mothering me.
Their meeting went as expected:
"Matt, why the hell didn't you tell me-"
"Matt, why is she ignoring you?"
"Matt, why are you putting up with-"
And then, inevitably, "What is wrong with you, Maggie! This is your son standing here! How dare you treat him this way! How dare you! He needed you and you-"
My mother choked, audibly. According to Foggy, she looked as though she had been slapped. Her breath unknotted itself and she fled the room.
Foggy's heart was racing, stunned by his own behavior. "Matt, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to-"
"It's okay, Foggy." I pulled him to me and hugged him. "I think I brought you here because someone was going to say it, and I couldn't stand for it to be me."
I don't remember leaving the convent that day. I skipped our next two meetings. Then, for the first time, my mother reached out to me. She sent me a letter in painstaking Braille, inviting me to meet her in Hell's Kitchen Park at 2pm the following Tuesday. Foggy offered to go with me. He also reminded me that I was free to not go at all. But I wasn't free, not really.
So I walked to the park. I recognized her heartbeat from ten yards away. She was wearing regular clothes; I couldn't hear her habit shift in the breeze.
"I'm sitting on a bench," she said, "fifteen steps away, at your ten o'clock." Those words were important. She'd obviously looked up information on how to guide the blind. She knew that I could 'see' more than most blind people, but she'd never asked for the details and I had never volunteered.
I sat down next to her and rested my cane between my knees so I could grip it if I felt my hands tensing. She told me her story, slowly and in pieces.
My father was Jonathan on paper, but Jack to everyone who knew him. My mother's name was Margaret. They had many things in common. They were both high school dropouts, though Margaret eventually got her GED. They were both working class, having never known a wealthier life. They were both Catholic, making at least a passing effort at following the rules and respecting the ritual.
My father's Catholicism was a patchwork faith. He knew his Bible stories, at least in a general way, and he always remembered to genuflect when he passed the altar, but he rarely worried himself with existential questions of theology. (Which isn't to say that he was not devout. When I was eight days old, I apparently developed a respiratory infection that was, in retrospect, not particularly severe, but my father was so frightened he christened me himself, rather than risk my dying unbaptized.) My mother's Catholicism was different. She always held within herself a hard and unyielding sense of both the divine and the profane. She worried herself with the details of religion – with whether a fast was supposed to begin at midnight or sundown, with the need to confess jealous or vicious thoughts, with the fear that she was sinful and unclean. Neither of us will ever know whether her religious beliefs caused her illness or merely influenced the form it took.
I was conceived four months before my parents were wed. This concerned my father only insofar as he wanted to protect me from the social disadvantage of illegitimacy. My mother, however, believed that premarital sex was a sin, and had difficulty viewing her pregnancy as anything other than punishment for their indiscretion. Still, their marriage ceremony was a happy affair. (I knew this. I can still conjure the image of their wedding photo in my mind, beautiful, smiling and strong.) They loved each other.
The real problems began soon after my birth. Nowadays, most people have heard of postpartum depression, though when I was young, there was far more stigma around the condition. It's common, occurring after more than 10% of live births. In most cases, it can be treated effectively with counseling, medication, or both. Even untreated, most cases of postpartum depression will subside given adequate community support. My mother did not have postpartum depression.
There is a rarer, more serious condition known as postpartum psychosis. This disorder affects only 1 – 2 per 1,000 women. Untreated, it can be devastating. Psychologists use the term 'psychosis' to refer to a state in which an individual loses touch with reality, suffering from delusions or hallucinations. Although I was only an infant, my mother began to believe that I was possessed by the devil, that I was actively trying to destroy her marriage, and that I meant her harm. She would place me in my highchair and retreat to the far corner of the apartment, as far from me as possible. She refused to bring me to church. She became deeply withdrawn, rarely speaking or making eye contact. In her darkest moments, she would hallucinate that I had devil's horns.
On hearing this, I wondered why my father did not intervene. According to my mother, he tried. He cashed in favors and brought her to a clinic, where the physician diagnosed her with 'difficulty adjusting to motherhood' and prescribed no treatment. My father was deeply worried by my mother's increasingly strange behavior, but he had no idea what it might mean or what could be done about it.
Things came to a head shortly before my first birthday. I was sitting on my father's lap, eating pasta one mushy noodle at a time, when my mother attacked me. My father repelled her easily. I was upset, but unharmed. She, however, was devastated, deeply ashamed of her own actions. She fled the apartment, never to return.
She lived on the streets, pursued by hallucinated demons and her own feelings of guilt. She often slept in churches, both for warmth and for protection from the evil forces she felt closing in around her. She felt close to death, whether by exposure or suicide. It's unclear how long she lived like this. Her memory for the time is hazy. She described it only as, "More than weeks, less than years." Her period of homelessness ended when she was taken in by the Carmelite sisters. They offered her both physical and spiritual solace, shelter from her own mind. They arranged for her to see a psychiatrist who prescribed her five milligrams of pimozide.
"It's an antipsychotic," she said softly. "It doesn't fix everything, but it helps."
Most people who suffer from postpartum mental illness recover fully and resume their normal functioning, but there are some, like my mother, who do not. The medication quieted her delusions, but not her fear, her sadness, or her guilt. With her five milligrams of pimozide, she was able to live a structured life with the other sisters. She took her vows. With her five milligrams of pimozide, she was able to confess her sins and ask God for forgiveness. With her five milligrams of pimozide, she gradually learned to handle emotion and stress. But she still couldn't bring herself to return to me.
She knew she was hiding. Every day she stayed away, returning became harder. She tried to make the world a better place for me, even if she couldn't bring herself to say my name. She visited me in the hospital after I lost my sight, never revealing her identity, but offering what solace she could. She watched over me, waiting. But still, decades later, she finds it hard to think of me without feeling overwhelmed.
I know that blaming someone for their mental illness is unreasonable, hurtful, and wrong. I know that I would be completely unjustified in expecting her to simply "shake off" the effects of her condition. I know that there's no point in dwelling on the past. But sometimes, when my thoughts are heavy, I think about how both of our lives might have been different if she'd been treated sooner, before her delusions forced her to do something she couldn't forgive herself for. I think of the clinic doctor who offered no assistance and of my father, who couldn't have paid for medication anyway. I think about five milligrams of pimozide.