My mother’s mittens have remained a comfort, each time I place my hands where hers had once found warmth. As I reminisced over the first 18 years of my life, I was unaware of the comfort the mittens brought.

I wanted a reminder of my mother’s love, as well as the daughter’s love, as she placed each stitch in a pattern to keep her mother’s hands warm. All of her children were grown, and she resided in an apartment while her daughter created this token of love.

This story unfolds, showing how a family adjusts to a mother with paranoid schizophrenia, the resultant struggles and how the separate family members learn to cope with circumstances—a “no talk” about the elephant in the room developed.

Much of the first five years of Sarah’s life are of events, as told by her father become more real to her, many she was too young to recall. My hope is that in the telling of the story, other survivors will be able to release the hurt of their circumstance and see how their Heavenly Father was right with them through all their formative years. It is through these events that my character was grown to become a compassionate caring person, who could be used as an encouragement to others.

Another desire is for this story of Hope and her family to bring a greater awareness of the disease of schizophrenia and the family's need for support and counseling.

There are three aspects of schizophrenia: paranoid, catatonic, and manic depressive or bipolar. Sometimes they overlap, or one aspect is more prominent.

The paranoid schizophrenic may display fears of being poisoned or that someone is out to get them in other ways. My mother displayed this when she had a “nervous breakdown” when I was in the 10th grade. She previously had an episode of paranoid schizophrenia shortly after I was born. She was away in treatment for the first three months of my life. The normal parental bonding did not occur, as well as the mother may have suffered short-term memory loss from numerous electric shock treatments. Hallucinations may occur. These individuals are uncomfortable in crowds. They do not have the ability to hold onto one conversation, as the group of people tends to sound like a beehive.

Later in life, I saw my mother present a catatonic state, when she was totally unresponsive to her children or any other stimuli around her. An individual in this state may hold the same position for hours. They are totally uncommunicative. This was the most disturbing state to see my mother in.

The manic depressive or bi-polar is when the individual goes from extreme lows to extreme highs of mood. This is severe depression vs. high elevation of moods.

When you are talking of mental disease, it is essentially the mind not being at ease with itself. It is the same as with a physical disease with the body not being at ease.

At some point, we all are not at ease with our minds. Many times, we could say, but for the grace of God I could be in a similar circumstance. It is the grace of God that is revealed in those afflicted with this disease. People are possibly uncomfortable around this illness as they have their own fears of becoming in such a state. Also, they do not know how to relate to these individuals. You relate to them the same as any other person. They are more normal than not.

Most of these individuals lead relatively normal lives and have episodes at times of the disease being more unsettling. This is a time when they may possibly need more aggressive forms of treatment. This is a time when they need greater love and understanding. Most people in the midst of an episode, commonly called a nervous breakdown are not a danger to others as so often exhibited on the TV screen.