It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one
ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking
something was wrong with me. For most of my life I have felt as
though I wasn’t wanted, wasn’t welcome, and that something was
wrong with me. I could never quite put my finger on it, but I didn’t
quite belong. Can any of you relate to that?
In order for you to understand me and my story, I think I should tell
you a little bit about where I am from. I was born and raised on the
Caribbean island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. That’s
about thirty minutes away from Puerto Rico, if you need a better
frame of reference. The Virgin Islands is a territory of the United
States so we are U.S. citizens by birth, operate under the U.S.
governmental laws and systems, but we are a part of the Caribbean
with a heritage that goes back to being once owned by Denmark as
the Danish West Indies until 1917. The U.S. Virgin Islands consists
of St. Thomas, St. John, St. Croix, and Water Island, along with
hundreds of other inlets and cays.
St. Thomas is tiny; just thirty-two square miles and the entire
population is about 50,000-55,000 people. So if you can imagine my
childhood, it was a very small community where everyone knew your
parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on. That said, when
you have a member of your family with mental illness, it’s a bit hard
to hide, especially when everyone knows that the affected person is
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JOURNEY UNTOLD: TWISTED LOVE –
MY MOTHER’S STRUGGLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS
related to you. In this setting, it would prove difficult to come to
terms with the life that had haunted me and left me feeling like I was
stained and unworthy of love.
It was early in my childhood when I realized that my mom wasn’t like
the other parents. I didn’t have a close relationship with my father,
Victor Hall, at the time, but I spent a lot of time growing up with my
mother’s parents. My mom, Vernice, was rather quiet; more of an
introvert. Well…that was all before our world started to unravel. My
parents were high school sweethearts who courted in secret from
ninth to twelve grade. Their courtship continued into college and I
was the end result of their young romance. Sounds sweet, huh? Well I
thought so too, however, as I’ve started to put all the pieces together
in the past few years, it’s becoming much clearer that there was
trouble brewing in paradise.
My mother and father had an on again, off again relationship after
high school, but during their courtship, marriage was on both of their
minds – at least for a little while. My father even proposed to her, but
she surprised him and everyone else by telling him she would not
marry him. My grandmother wasn’t even aware that they had been
dating so seriously. I guess they did a great job of convincing her and
everyone else that they had met in their first year of college at the
University of the Virgin Islands (UVI).
The real story is that they were sneaking around to avoid dealing with
their parents’ opinions and my mother would hop on the boat to St.
John a few times a year to see my dad outside of the school day. They
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Author: Yassin S. Hall | Co-Author: Loán C. Sewer
were both twenty or twenty-one years of age when I was born and
whatever was going on in their relationship, my father was missing in
action for my mother’s pregnancy. How awful for her. She was
pregnant with her first child for the man who was supposed to be the
love of her life, and then when she needed him the most he just up
and left. I’m shaking my damn head at how conveniently he just disappeared
from the scene, but I’m not going to be bitter. Now back to the story.
My father must have come to his senses that day and went to ask my
mom to come back to him. How ironic that while he was standing on
my grandmother’s doorstep, Mommy was in the hospital preparing to
bring me into the world. Given that I too was a young mother, I can
only imagine how scary that must have been. The long and short of
the story is that after my birth, things were never quite the same.
Looking back now, I think my mother knew that she would not be
able to care for me in an adequate manner, so she went about making
provisions to ensure that I would be in good hands. In a secret
conversation with her aunt and uncle, she arranged for them to take
me in as an infant. I’m not sure why she didn’t have this talk with her
own parents but that was her decision…no lawyers or fancy talk, just
a verbal agreement that they would raise me.
She had worked everything out unofficially for them to become my
guardians and then just like that, my dad came back on the scene and
said he was taking me to St. John to go live with his parents. As I said
my parents had discussed getting married so this was during their on-
again period and they were going to be together.
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JOURNEY UNTOLD: TWISTED LOVE –
MY MOTHER’S STRUGGLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS
However, something triggered in her mind, and she immediately
changed her mind and returned to St. Thomas to once again place me
with my great-aunt and great-uncle. Had folks been connecting the
dots they would have realized that something was a bit off with my
mother, but at the time no one could piece together that something
was very wrong. I mean, who just hands over their newborn without any
hesitation?
By the time I was five years old, I had been bounced around between
my relatives on St. Thomas and St. John – my great-aunt and uncle;
my mom’s parents; and my father’s mother. All the while, my dad
was not really in the picture. No wonder I would later feel like a
freak. I mean, what was so bad about me that my own parents didn’t
want me around? Was I stained with something unforgiveable? These
were just some of the questions that I would later ask myself, and I
now see how this shaped the majority of the first half of my life.
Ultimately, I wound up back with my maternal grandparents, Mama
and Eric – that’s what I called my grandparents – and I found a little
piece of normalcy until the other telltale signs of my mother’s illness
began to spring forth. After having me, Mommy found her own
places to live and was living off of Section 8 benefits. At the time,
this was not something you wanted other people to know but she
had her own apartment in different parts of the island so she
appeared capable of being on her own – or so we thought.
There were little signs here and there – at least that’s what Mama has
told me; however, if I can go back a bit, you’ll see that my mother
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Author: Yassin S. Hall | Co-Author: Loán C. Sewer
once was what the world calls “normal.” She was rather intelligent,
and was working with the local health department and social welfare
agency right out of high school before she attended college.
Everyone who worked with her knew she was an excellent typist, a
skill that earned her rave reviews from the head of the agencies
during her brief tenure with each department.
What’s most interesting is that my mother was working for agencies
that helped others to get their health and their livelihood together, yet
unbeknownst to all of us, her sanity and welfare were gradually
slipping away. How ironic, given the way our lives would turn out,
that she got her start helping others with their social welfare. I guess
God has a strange sense of humor. Though Mommy lived on a
different part of the island, she would come and get me from my
grandmother’s house each morning to take me to school after Mama
got me ready; and then things changed. I noticed it one day out of
the blue when we were both in the house and later on, when I was
coming home from school. I thought, “Why is my mom speaking a funny
language that no one could understand? And why for God's sake, did she have to
use it in front of everyone?”
It never failed that there would be days when she seemed to have
slipped into her own little world, and would sit on the stairs by J.
Antonio Jarvis School - the elementary school near our house - and
mumble to nobody in particular.
Those mean bullies would wait until I got off the school bus and
torment me. They would laugh at me and gang up on me just calling
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JOURNEY UNTOLD: TWISTED LOVE –
MY MOTHER’S STRUGGLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS
me names like “Crazy Mary’s daughter” or they would stupidly act as
though mental illness was something you could catch, like a cold, and
shun me like I was contagious. It also didn’t help that my mother
referred to me as “that child or that girl” on a regular basis. Those
types of experiences at any age do something to you on the inside;
but I was in elementary school, so it was very traumatic to say the
least to feel like I would never fit in. I felt tormented and started to
find solace internally.
Take it from me, that kind of torment causes you to retreat to a place
in your mind where you are so strong that nothing and no one can
bother you. Or so you think! What you don't realize is that each time
an incident occurs, you retreat inside of yourself a little bit at a time,
until one day you might not recognize who YOU are.
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Author: Yassin S. Hall | Co-Author: Loán C. Sewer
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JOURNEY UNTOLD: TWISTED LOVE –
MY MOTHER’S STRUGGLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS