Mother of My Invention: A Motherless Daughter Memoir
Winner of the 2021 Minerva Rising Press Memoir Contest
Now available at MRP, Amazon, B&N, and Bookshop.org
My mother was diagnosed shortly after my birth with schizophrenia and institutionalized until her death 13 years later. When I began to put in words what it meant to grow up without a mother, I felt only loss. Eventually, I discovered I’d been surrounded by amazing mothers (sometimes in unlikely places) and rich experiences all along. I just needed to be open to what they could teach me. See About Me to learn more.
“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.’”
Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson, ACSW, LCSW
Educator, Lecturer, and Author of “In-Versing Your Life” series
Mother of My Invention: A Motherless Daughter Memoir
Now Available from Minerva Rising Press
“I wonder how it felt to be confined within these walls, within one of these small rooms…My heart aches for the loneliness she must have felt at being separated from everyone and everything she knew. Who was this woman? What did she endure? Regardless of the anger and confusion she must have known when she was admitted, and regardless of the paranoid delusions she was subject to once her brain malfunctioned, complete isolation from the familiar could itself incite madness. These walls had witnessed heartbreaking misery of countless souls who hid behind them for safety or pounded them in fury—the stories they might tell unbearable to those left behind.”
“Migration”
from Concho River Review (Spring/Summer 2022)
It took eleven days for Afghan women to become objects, totems in black burqas. Taliban fighters captured fringe cities like Herat and Kunduz one day and streamed with little opposition toward Kabul. . . . U.S. military, who’d injected themselves into a civil war a couple of decades earlier to institute democratic principles and inspire hope, now stripped barracks of the implements of war and Afghan citizens of their hope. In little more than the time it takes to flip off a light switch, one half of the country’s residents ceased to exist as fully human. Read more here.
Janice Airhart 