Reviewed by Paula Shaffer Robertson
Posted on: November 10, 2022
“My mother went missing before I was born.” With that simple statement, author Janice Airhart introduces her mother, Barbara Jean Henke, as the subject of her book, Mother of My Invention: A Motherless Daughter Memoir. What follows is a touching, heartbreaking, and poignant account of the author’s longing for the mother who could have been as opposed to her mother’s stark and painful reality: confined in psychiatric hospitals from 1952 until her death in 1966. Diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia. “She disappeared into her own reality in pieces, neuron by neuron. Delusion heaped upon delusion until her thoughts were so fractured they resembled a stranger’s.”
It is in this context that the author is forced to adapt and grow up as a daughter of a mentally ill mother in Louisiana in the 1950s. A well-kept family secret that was not discussed even among themselves at home. From the outside, Airhart’s home life seemed normal enough. She had her father, Fred Henke, devoted to raising his family of three small children. Fred managed to keep “motherly” influential women circulating throughout the family dynamics. Church ladies. Teachers. Mothers of Airhart’s friends. Women who consistently stepped up and stepped in, knowingly and unknowingly, providing some tangible form of maternal care.
Yet even as a young child, Airhart was keenly aware of her mother’s absence. She studiously—at times, enviously—observes all the little nuisances between her young friends and their own mothers. Gentle fingers brushed against a cheek. Warm words of endearment. Private jokes shared. A look that says “I love you most.” These formed an insatiable longing within Airhart for her own mother’s everyday presence.
“Until I witnessed these small acts demonstrated by other mothers, I didn’t know my heart would someday yearn for them with such intense sorrow. I didn’t understand the burden of shame that loss would carry,” says Airhart.
Sporadically interspersed throughout Airhart’s memoir are hospital notes from medical supervisors documenting the deteriorating mental condition of her mother. It is through these reports that one slowly witnesses the gradual mental decline of Airhart’s mother as she loses her connection with reality, entering a world of catatonia, extreme disorganization and/or violent eruptions.
Airhart wanted a normal mother, one easily blending in with all the other mothers. What she got was a complicated woman, who at one time was a young, intelligent, creative, and promising journalist—a young woman with hopes and dreams, talents and aspirations, whose future was hijacked by mental illness in the peak of life’s promises. There are memories of her mother’s weekend passes home and the stares of curious neighbors. Screaming rages and public outbursts. Always an opportunity to be publicly humiliated by a deranged mother no one understood but everyone knew was somewhat off. The tension was unbearable for young Airhart. She suffered constant bouts of nausea and diarrhea, secretly washing out soiled underwear in the school’s lavatory so no one would know the shame she shared at home.
Through her memoir, Airhart transforms herself from a “motherless” daughter, constantly trying to negate her everyday reality of having a mentally ill mother, to nourishing the promise of the mother who could have been. In the company of women Airhart finds herself surrounded by while growing up, she finds her own humanity in the compassion she feels for her mother—a mother who would have loved her properly if circumstances had permitted such.
Fortunately, Airhart has not been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia herself. How blessed we are that she bravely shared her memoir so openly on a topic that so greatly affects the world we live in—as women, alone, unprotected from ourselves.
