March Madness
When we think of “Irish Madness,” it’s usually a happy phenomenon — the wild celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day. A new book tells a darker story.
Irish Catholics have long been known for taking pride in their large broods. But fear of passing on genetically inherited schizophrenia stopped this author from carrying on that tradition.
“I very much wanted to have lots of children,” says Patrick Tracey, author of Stalking Irish Madness, Searching for the Roots of my Family’s Schizophrenia. “But fear of passing on my family’s disease made it impossible.”
His haunting memoir, published by Bantam last August, was named one of Slate Magazine’s Best Books of 2008, awarded the 2009 KEN book award by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and most recently, recognized with a prestigious PEN award.
After an idyllic childhood as the youngest of five siblings, the first of Tracey’s two sisters succumbed to rapid-onset schizophrenia when he was just eighteen. “One after the other. I realized that like my mother, I could be a carrier. Or worse, might go schizophrenic myself.”
Schizophrenia generally manifests by 30, and when Tracey cleared that bar, he began to think earnestly about marriage, and worry “fervently” about paternity.
“Marriage would’ve suited me fine,” says Tracey, still single at 50. “But every woman I met was frantically running out of eggs, and couldn’t seem to understand that parenthood was off the table for me.”
He tried to tell them he was not Daddy material, given his questionable gene bank. His progressively heavy drinking was another obstacle. “I was hit hard by my family’s collapse,” he says.
Before he graduated college, his mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, he thinks, spurred by “grief and loss” soon after her youngest daughter was diagnosed with the hereditary illness. Having grown up with a mother and brother in the insane asylum, she’d known she was at risk to pass on the disease, but was persuaded otherwise by well-meaning doctors.
Says Tracey, “I felt there was not much point to life if something like schizophrenia–or a similar life-shattering tragedy–could just come along and take someone out.”
He became a serial monogamist: “an outgrowth of my commitment-phobia, itself an outgrowth of my fear of passing on this severe hereditary mental illness. I tried to disguise myself as a noble alcoholic savage. Truly I was all over the place.”
It wasn’t until he hit bottom, alone, that he straightened out. Traveling to Ireland, he found the roots of schizophrenia in maternal malnutrition due to famine. While doing his research, he lived on a campsite where he observed families at close hand, with a raging storm of feelings.
A Fascination with Families
“I am endlessly fascinated by families,” Tracey admits. “The way they interact, their dynamics, what makes them tick, why some find a measure of happiness where others do not, how some play a bad hand well and others with the best cards toss them away. My family was torn asunder, schizophrenia cast a shadow over us all, the sane obsessed that we might be carriers.”
Why didn’t he just find a nice girl and adopt?
“The ugly truth is that I was not fit to parent. Drinking was a form of self-laceration — survivor’s guilt, a way of going crazy myself every night — a mixed-up man’s way of crying.”
Though eight years have passed since his last drink, at this stage of his life he’d rather help his ill sisters and his nephew – the sole offspring among his four siblings — than start his own family.
But he feels he’s paid a big price for his choice.
“I could’ve been a good father and family man if I hadn’t got lost in despair. I’ve had some great relationships, and vent my paternal spleen through my nephew. The care of him fell to me from the late 1980s through the 1990s, but I never dared spread my own seed.”
When he’s around a particularly well-adjusted family, he can’t help but feel like an outsider: “Families gather with other families, and in Ireland they were out in force.”
A Special Role
He felt less the odd man out when he saw himself reflected in the community. Every other village, he found, has a Bachelor Walk or some bachelor legend. “Ireland has a rich tradition of bachelorhood,” he discovered.
Only the oldest sons were financially eligible for marriage, and they had to wait until they inherited the tiny potato patch. The younger brothers were either sent to the seminary, abroad or became bachelors.
Men’s Biological Clocks
Ironically, Tracey learned, this primogeniture of oldest sons – who only inherited the family property at 50, when their own fathers died – is one of the major contributing factors to schizophrenia itself. Recent studies have linked the schizophrenia gene to a mutation in elderly sperm, detailed in the memoir. www.stalkingirishmadness.com.
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Blogs & Bits
Mommy Oldest: Watch out Octomom: Septo-Mom is here!
For forty years, Rajo Devi Lohan and her husband Baba Ram Lohan were gossip-fodder in their Indian village because of the shame of childlessness. “Everyone kept telling Baba to leave me, to get someone who could have children,” says Rajo Devi.
That situation ended two months ago, when the elderly couple had a daughter, thanks to IVF. Doctors overlooked the questionable wisdom of making such elderly people parents, due to the overwhelming “social stigma” of childlessness in Indian culture. While the proud parents are grateful for the high-technology that enabled them to become parents, they don’t seem to understand it. The fact that the baby girl, Naveen, is the product of Baba Ram’s sperm and an anonymous donor’s egg is something they’d rather not acknowledge.
“Look, she has Baba’s face. And she has my feet and hands. There was no one else involved,” Rajo Devi snaps.
As for the future, the couple wants to try for more children. Next, they are hoping for a boy. For the full story of the world’s oldest known first-time Mom, visit: http://www.guardian.co uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/06/fertility-problems-india.
Meanwhile, German women are up in arms over a recent decision that denies government funding for women over 40 seeking fertility treatments: http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/International/Blow-for-German-women-over-40-3527.html
While India is virtually free of any legislation governing the administration of fertility treatments, new parents the Lohans, above, had to be enterprising in drumming up funds to pay for IVF, selling two buffalos, obtaining a government loan and mortgaging their rice, wheat and sugar-cane crops.
It Takes an Aunt
Popular New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin has been writing on aspects of parenthood for decades – currently in her daily Motherlode blog. This month she wrote of being surprised to find that so many non-parents are avid fans.
Melanie Notkin, a single childless woman who authors her own blog, www.savvyauntie.com, recently guest-blogged for Motherlode on the need to build bridges between parents and non-parents:
“But then, there is the “ugly side” of it all; there are the moms who regard “motherhoodlessness” as less-than-ness — as if all non-moms are irresponsible, indulgent, dysfunctional and, yes, I’ve even heard “pathetic.” These are moms who look down on childless women (and child-free women) as women with little purpose. I’ve read it, seen it and it’s destructive.
“So on behalf of many of the non-moms (and not-yet-moms) out there, please quit asking when we are going to have children because, whether it’s our choice or not, it’s hurtful, often out of our control, and we know, we know, if we want them, we’d better hurry up. And even if we’ve chosen not to have kids of our own, please don’t conclude that we dislike children because at the very least, we love your kids. Don’t assume we can’t possibly understand what you’re going through. While our struggles may differ, we strive to learn how to be the best women — and the best aunts — we can be. We’re not perfect. We’re not moms. But with a little more support (and dare I ask a little less judgment?) we’ll go far together.”
I say Amen to that!
Check out the full story at:
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/it-takes-an-aunt-to-raise-a-child/?hp.