Damodara

December 8, 1971
7:00 pm
Enloe Hospital
Chico, California

Brandyn is 36 years old today. He is my eldest child. I gave birth to him when I was 17 years old. When he was a baby I called him My Little Froggly and Brandyn Pie Landyn. Later I gave him the spiritual name of Damodara. Damodara is one of Krsna's many names (Krsna is the blue colored God of the Hindu religion.) The story of how Krsna obtained this particular name goes something like this: He was the son a cow herder and his wife, and being a little rascal he would often steal the freshly churned butter. Once, after breaking the butter crock with a rock and feeding the butter to the monkeys, his mother, Yasoda took some rope and tied him up to keep him out of mischief--thus he was called Damodara, which means He who is bound by the ropes of love.

Brandyn was jaundiced when he was born with an extremely high bilirubin count (that's what makes a jaundiced person's skin turn yellow) so they wouldn't let us leave the hospital at what was the normal 3 days back then. They did allow us to go home (we went to my mother's for a week) when he was 5 days old but we had to bring him back to the hospital every morning for them to prick his heel for a blood sample. He would scream loudly and flail his little arms and legs. It made me very sad subjecting him to this torture.

I breastfed him while we were in the hospital but they still insisted on giving him bottles of formula to supplement his nourishment. They also fed him sugar water and refused to wake me for his nightly feedings as they insisted that I needed my rest. The babies were watched over in the nursery back then so you had to rely on the goodwill of the the nurses to bring them to you for a visit. Once we left the hospital I stopped giving him the bottles.

At two weeks old we dutifully took him in to be circumcised. The nurse took him from me and disappeared into doctor's office while me and my husband sat in the waiting room. I cried and got sick to my stomach when I heard him screaming as they mutilated his little lingham. I didn't know any better to even question whether there was another option than to sacrifice my little one to this unnecessary and barbaric procedure.

He was the only one of my 6 children to be born in a hospital but back then, I though natural childbirth meant using the breathing technique of the Lamaze method. He was also the only one of my four sons, that I had circumcised.

Children are resilient, at least that's what they say. And truthfully, I did him far worse in his life than what he went through as a newborn. I'm still tender around the issues of him. It's difficult for me to be transparent here. I am challenged with lots of guilt, shame, regret, remorse, sadness. I'm embarrassed at my lack of mothering skills and the ways I failed to protect him.

Brandyn had a hard life but he was an intelligent young man and a spiritual seeker. I thought he would become a monk, leave home and join a monastery or some such thing. But that was not to be his path. Instead he started suffering from paranoid delusions that grew worst as he grew older. Voices haunted and taunted him. Medication never controlled his symptoms, only lessened them and he perceived the side effects as worse that the symptoms themselves. The medications, although allowing for his sweet and caring nature to shine through, made him stupid and clumsy. He hated that.

Brandyn suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. He is among the 1 in 100 adults in the United States that are afflicted with this mental illness. He is off his medications right now and has been for several years. It's not a pretty picture. My heart aches for him.

I'm a trained psychotherapist, I have professional knowledge about schizophrenia. But this is one of my personal demons. I don't take much stock in anything I've learned that could lessen my burden about this not being my fault. The sometimes tender, sometimes intense emotions that I experience related to him don't cripple me but they do pierce my heart and I suppose they will be with me until the day I die.

Happy birthday baby, my son, my eldest. I love you.