Mammy! In the Psych Ward Courtyard.

I was tired. I had never visited a psychiatric ward before. I had ended up in a bizarre relationship where I was taking care of someone who had assaulted me.

I was led around by them and they would ‘propose’ to me, telling me as they went that “if I ever propose to you, I need to go to hospital.”

Would that mean he was telling me ‘anyone would have to be crazy to want to marry you? Or was he giving me a clue as to his mania and how to help him?

In his eyes, it may have been both. Who would marry the person they assaulted? How hopeless I must have felt to have been there at all. I did not know how to escape. That is a different part of the same story though.

I am here to tell you about Mammy. Mammy was an older woman, a neighbour, who also had some psychiatric problems.

Mammy was about 75, she did not really walk anywhere but sort of glided sideways when I saw her around the building we lived in. Her tummy was a bit large or distended depending on how perceived it to be.

Mammy was usually quite vocal and could have some bizarre arguments with the woman upstairs.

But Mammys story? Mammy would float past and tell you that she was two months pregnant to Elvis you know. This was in the year 2008, not Elvis’ era. I would just not quite understand this fully, but let it be. I understood it was her way of surviving her life experience.

Her life experience must have been something more complicated than I had ever experienced so I felt no right to judge her world.

My assaulter was off to hospital. He had kicked me across a floor and I had been told by one of his friends that they and his family would get rid of me. By another of his friends, not to leave, that he did not mean it, he was “not well.”

I was wanting to leave. Yet I felt somehow still bound to this situation. I did not understand why he was like this. Again, I am on a tangent for we are not here to chat about Maddy, we are telling the story of Mammy.

Maddy had gone manic and was finally admitted to the local psychiatric ward. It was a bit of a scary place. It smelt like that normal hospital smell but the patients were usually slumped on couches around a tv in the general ward. Or moving in an almost trance like state, many of them, dosed up on god knows what medication.

There were courtyards on either side of the general day ward area. Patients would get a little exercise and daylight in the courtyard. Families and friends would visit and you could sit outside in the courtyards, fenced in courtyards.

So, during this ‘admission’ of Maddy’s, I went to visit. I was exhausted from being harmed, yelled at, threatened and thrown around. No-one seemed to think anything of it, but it lead me to visit this odd ward.

Early on in this admission, I went out to the courtyard and there was Mammy. She was standing at the other end of the Courtyard, she was swinging her arms and hips, she had a loose dress and her belly was a bit large. But Mammy was dancing, swaying like you would if in Hawaii, she was wearing a lay. A plastic flower lei and swinging her hips and moving her arms gently to one side then the other. You could almost here the Hawaiian music play. She was calling out to me.

“Come join us, come join us…”

I was at once frightened and intrigued. In a fun and gentle way. It was on the side of fun ‘crazy’. It was funny, exceedingly funny and fun!

Yet that element of fear was present. What type of life would it be having such Kayotic life experiences that you would have to endure being in such places? They are not easy wards to survive.

I did not wish to join Mammy in the life she had to survive. I did wish her well and found her dance so funny. I still have no idea what created her playful story of being two months pregnant to Elvis.

I made a kind of assumption, as I was not wanting to ask, that this was Mammy using humour to disguise her discomfort as to how her tummy presented. As she did, a woman of way over 70, look somewhat as if she was indeed pregnant.

Mammy, during that admission, when we sat with her in the dining area reached out and wanted to give me the key to her flat. IMammy lived next door to us. She told me to go to her flat, to go into her bedroom and look under the bed.

I returned home and had dinner, went to bed, but the next day I went to Mammy’s door and turned the key in the lock. I did not really want to enter her world. The door opened onto the lounge room, with an open kitchen area. Her bedroom was to the left of the front door. There was nothing strange or odd, but nothing expensive in her home. I went to her bedroom and followed her instructions to look under the bed. From under her bed, I pulled the photo album.

She had just wanted me to see her. The pictures were of her from what looked like either the late 1960s or early 1970s. The pictures were of a very attractive blonde female, Mammy when she was young. She was beautiful, slim and attractively posing for the photographs. I was surprised it was not a great deal like the Mammy I saw going up and down the stairs having emotional moments with the other female neighbour she fought with over men whose lives were coming to the end of their active days.

But Mammy, gave me a glimpse of her life when she was ‘one of us’, normal, healthy and happy.

I can still see Mammy dancing by herself, not looking at all out of place, in the courtyard of the psychiatric ward with her plastic flower lay, swaying gently and calling to me.

I was not going to join, but I think of her in that moment and smile, swaying gently, moving her arms, a lay around her neck, as if on holiday in Hawaii. She probably knew far more about life than I ever will.

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