Four Stories
If you have raised a child with behavioral disturbances, if you have shared your life with a psychotic young man, you know. If you have not lived through this, you cannot know. Nothing can replace lived experience. With that said, Ombre e Luci offers these four accounts, told by the people who lived them, without ornament or stylistic flourish. With some emotional openness and a little imagination, you can read between the plain and ordinary words to grasp the reality that lies behind them. This seems to us the necessary starting point for the journey through the problems surrounding and within childhood psychosis that this issue of Ombre e Luci explores.
My son, I don't think I can take you to church like this anymore. I can't do it.
This happened about three years ago. I am the mother of a young man living through what I can only call a psychotic adolescence.
My son Michele refuses ordinary clothes. He wears filthy rags—the same ones he wore a year earlier, when the crisis began. He cannot understand why he cannot go out dressed this way.
"Who am I hurting?"
I find it hard to answer.
I try talking to him about modesty. He says: "But everyone's body is made the same way. What should we be ashamed of?"
I have no easy argument back.
He goes out into the street and challenges everyone—their mockery, their contempt, sometimes their threats. Yes, he suffers from this world around him, to which in his own way he wants to communicate a message of authenticity. But all he receives is scorn and exclusion. I suffer with him. He knows this and puts me to the test. "Come with me. You come too." With a knot in my throat, when things aren't too dire, I go with him. For me it is profound suffering.
On Sundays with my four children, I usually go to Mass. Michele continues to come, but he refuses to dress decently. It is his challenge. I take him anyway. The other children, a few years younger than him, share with me in their silence what I believe is composed sorrow. We are aware of being watched, of curious glances and clear disapproval all around us. My strength comes from knowing and demonstrating in concrete terms that, as far as I am able, this son of mine belongs to our family, ready to share everything with him. At church I will even be asked by a nun: "Madam, if you need clothes for your son, just tell me—no need for courtesy." I thank her politely, but I feel my pain more acutely. Michele understands. He asks me with an ironic smile: "What did she say?" I answer: "She didn't understand anything."
One day I tell Michele: "My son, I don't think I can take you to church like this anymore. I can't do it." Michele understands. Perhaps he grasps that I am also expressing the feelings of his siblings, especially his little sister, whom I sometimes catch crying silently and who lately refuses outright to go out with us. This boy seems to know the material limits that even love can have. This makes me glad. In fact, he says: "I can go to Mass by myself." Now he goes alone, facing the others in his challenge. The Sunday after, he goes to Mass after we do.
One time a priest who happens to be passing escorts him home and spends time talking with him about various things. Another time the parish priest calls me. I explain the situation and go to pick Michele up. But the following Sunday, he comes back to Mass in the same tattered clothes.
In the Sundays that follow, I learn bit by bit what happens. Every so often a parishioner takes him from the church and brings him to the sacristy. There the priest or others dress him in clothes they keep for such occasions. After attending Mass dressed decently, Michele comes home, shows himself to me dressed nicely and smiling, but I see he has jealously brought back his rags, which he immediately puts on again. After a few Sundays I find many parish clothes tucked away in Michele's wardrobe, but he still goes out in his rags. I tell him: "Michele, usually it's we who give clothes to the parish for the poor, not the other way around. At least wear them now." He acts as if I haven't spoken. He returns to church half-naked but carries decent clothes from the parish with him, so he can change once he reaches the sacristy. The priest asks him this time to leave those rags at the parish permanently, but he puts up fierce resistance.
"A group of parishioners came to complain. I cannot create conflict among the faithful. They find this very inappropriate."
"A group of parishioners came to complain. I cannot create conflict among the faithful. They find this very inappropriate."
The priest tries to hide them. This triggers a fit of rage in Michele. His trust has been betrayed.After that the priest is in crisis. I go to him and point out that Michele has never accepted decent clothes from me or anyone else. What he has done for the church is still something remarkable. Perhaps we need to have faith, to wait, to try something else. And besides, I think to myself, the most important thing is that Michele encounters the Lord. The Lord is waiting there for my son and surely loves him, no matter how disheveled he is. But the priest has put a stop to it. (Can you put a stop to love?) He tells me: "A group of parishioners came to complain. I cannot create conflict among the faithful. They find this very inappropriate, because Michele arrives half-naked in the sacristy, even though he gets dressed to come to church." For a moment I thought about how oddly my son was imitating him—the priest who puts on sacred vestments in the sacristy.
From then on Michele has not returned to Mass; and no one from the parish has come looking for him either.
I continued to go to Mass with three children, but soon we became four again, because by God's will a young man joined us—someone I met in particular circumstances at a psychiatric clinic—who became deeply attached to me.
Today, now that my son is doing better after all those trials, looking back at what happened three years ago with the parish, I think that God's Presence in the Church, from whose power I hoped for help for my son (who in his own way sought it), could not act then because it did not find in the human heart the channel made of trust and courage through which to pour out his Love.
- Delia Mitolo, 1984
Four Stories
My Son, I Don't Think I Can Take You to Church Like This by Delia Mitolo
He Was Always Rejected by Lina Cusimano
The Integration Law by Vincenzo and Irene Ruisi
Rehabilitation by L.N