Mother of my Invention
by Janice Airhart
$15.00
2021 Memoir Contest Winner
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When Janice Airhart was an infant, her mother was committed to a Louisiana mental hospital, and she spent most of the next 13 years institutionalized until her death in 1966. That no one in the family would speak about her schizophrenic mother convinced Airhart it was shameful to ask questions and that fears of inheriting her mother’s illness were justified.
Long after her mother’s death and after the deaths of everyone who’d known her before, Airhart obtained her mother’s hospital records, detailing everyday interactions and psychiatric treatments of the 1950s. These documents and a handful of photos and mementos brought to life the mother Airhart could only imagine in theory. At the same time, she discovered her true inheritance was the many contributions of women who’d enriched her life. Mother of My Invention explores the unique challenges faced by motherless daughters and suggests that mothers can sometimes be found in unexpected places, if we’re open to finding them.
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- About the author, Janice Airhart :
Mother of My Invention: A Motherless Daughter Memoir:
When we think of an American Fifties home, we may think of TV shows like Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, and Ozzie and Harriet, where home life revolves around the kids and Dad’s harmless antics. And the Mom is the rock that makes it work, that gives the Fifties such a safe, secure, and stable feeling.
In Mother of My Invention, Janice Airhart describes what it was like to grow up amidst this comfortable, if ironclad, social conformity with a mother who is likened to a historical, deadly storm. Eventually, her schizophrenia forces her husband to institutionalize her.
This stigma in the rigidly wholesome and healthy Fifties causes Airhart as a young child severe anxiety and shame that results in humiliating physical and emotional problems that she details with candor. The same unflinching eye is turned on the horrifying, mad-science treatments her mother receives in order to “fix” her. But every return home is more traumatic than the last for the whole family.
Airhart, as an adult, has very little to go on to piece together who her mother was before her mental decline. As she follows up on every clue, she discovers that as a child, when she thought she’d been busy inventing a mother for herself, she’d actually invented a persona for herself: a pretend, “normal” Fifties girl.
This memoir touches every emotion, but it’s also an important story that doesn’t just educate us on the trauma we can cause by using “crazy” as a witticism; it is also a piece of our collective history that tells the other side of the Golden Era of the 1950s. Most of all, it’s a testament to what children can survive.
—Tara Neilson, 2021 Memoir Contest Judge and author of Raised in Ruins, a memoir about growing up in the ruins of a remote Alaskan cannery.
Parents cannot help but have a profound impact on the lives of their children. Janice Airhart’s book, MOTHER OF MY INVENTION: A MOTHERLESS DAUGHTER MEMOIR, seeks with skill and compassion to understand her missing schizophrenic mother, and by successfully doing so, heals her own heart and provides hope to others on a similar journey.
—Mimi Baird, author of He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter’s Quest to Know Him
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In her memoir, Mother of My Invention, Janice Airhart describes the secrecy, shame, and stigma that haunted her as a child, growing up with a mother who was institutionalized with schizophrenia. She compares her life to a puzzle with missing pieces. After her mother dies, Airhart embarks on a lifelong quest to understand who her mother was, whom she herself would be if her mother had not been ill, and what a mother even is, or should be. “The real puzzle,” she says, “is you don’t know which pieces are missing.”
Fortunately, Airhart finds strong and nurturing mother figures along the way, and this is the real theme of this book. What might have been a heartbreaking tale ends up an inspirational one as she recounts her experiences with women, and some men, who help her become the loving, resourceful, and successful woman she is today, proving that you don’t have to be a blood relative to love and mentor a child, or an adult. Ultimately the book’s uplifting message is one of self-invention and triumph.
—Margaret Hawkins is the author of After Schizophrenia: The Story of My Sister’s Reawakening After 30 Years, the novel, Lydia’s Party, and other books.
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This exquisite memoir is the product of a lifetime of investigation, careful thought, and research into understanding how individual journeys unfold as mental illness invades family life. Particularly relevant now, at a time when more people are coping with more mental challenges than we’ve seen in a long time, this book brings together the past and present resulting in hopeful conclusions. Each person’s life holds lessons gleaned from all experiences including those that seem on the surface to be the most damaging. The many thousands of descendants of institutionalized family members will identify with the stories in this memoir. Many more thousands whose parent suffered at home from mental illness will find relief in the author’s stories of resilience.
—Jan Hogle, author of Risking Wreckage: a memoir of adventuring out and settling in
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A beautiful, intimate account of a quest for more than just a shadow of a mother, Airhart ultimately places the pieces of her own puzzle together as well. Her path takes us through the realities of living with a mother suffering from Schizophrenia, living without her, and trying to hide, from herself and others, the fact that her mother was, as some called her, “crazy.” This is the story of a growing child experiencing hurt, anger, fear, and yet being inspired to spend the rest of her life in service to mothers and daughters. I especially appreciated the inclusion of actual hospital notes from her mother’s institutions. The last note to her husband (family,) just before her death, brought the entire book together, and broke my heart.
—Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson, ACSW, LCSW
Educator, Lecturer, and Author of “In-Versing Your Life” series
Janice Airhart takes seriously what her father once told her: “You can be anything you want to be.” As a result, she’s been a medical technologist, biomedical research tech, freelance writer and editor, science teacher to pregnant teens, bioscience program representative, and adjunct English professor. She now devotes her time to her first passion, writing that makes a difference, particularly in the lives of children and youth. An avid volunteer, Airhart reads with elementary children at an underperforming school, works with community nonprofits such as Jail to Jobs for youthful offenders, and participates in programs presented by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Central Texas.
Her essays and articles have appeared in The Sun, The Science Teacher, Lutheran Woman Today, Story Circle Network’s Real Women Write 2019 and 2021 anthologies, and One Woman’s Day blog. Her essay, “Migration” about the plight of displaced Afghan women and girls will appear in the Spring, 2022 issue of the Concho River Review. Devoted to encouraging women to tell their unique stories, she will present a session entitled “Journaling Your Story” at an upcoming Presbyterian women’s gathering. Airhart recently moved with her husband Tim, their dog Bella and cat Ollie to Leander, Texas, a stone’s throw from family in Austin and Round Rock.
