Miriam Feldman: Once one of your kids get schizophrenia, the sliding scale really changes. It's like you get over all these stupid expectations and the only thing that matters, the only thing that matters is that they know how much you love them. It's all that matters. That's good parenting right there.
Jennifer Tracy: Hey guys, welcome back to the show. This is MILF podcast, the show where we talk about motherhood, entrepreneurship, sexuality, and everything in between. I'm Jennifer Tracy, your host. Today, I'm so excited about this episode. I mean, I feel like I do say that every time because I am excited about every episode, but... Well, first of all, welcome to 2020. I know I already welcomed you last week, but it's pretty epic. This is a big year for a lot of reasons. How are you guys feeling so far? How's it going? This is kind of the first real week because last week, we were all still in that haze of post-holiday bloat. Right?
Jennifer Tracy: I'm laughing because it's so true. Yeah. I always say I just kind of count on gaining, I don't know, six or seven... I don't weight myself, so I really actually don't know, but I don't know, six or seven pounds between October and January 1st because it's just all so good. The weather gets a little colder. Even here in LA, it's been actually quite cold in LA for LA. So I crave that heavier carbier, savorier, and sweeter stuff. I'm not going to not eat it. Sorry, not sorry.
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Jennifer Tracy: Okay. Now, I'm going to introduce today's guest. Today's guest is Mimi. Her name is Miriam Feldman. She came to me through the worldwide web. She found out about my podcast and she reached out to me and said, "Hey, I would really like to be on your podcast." We talked on the phone. Within 30 seconds, I knew I had to meet this woman. She just wrote a book. It's coming out. It's called He Came In With It: A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness. It's about her son and his diagnosis with schizophrenia and how that affected her family. This woman blew me away when I got to know her on the phone and then when I met her in person. Now, the interview speaks for itself, but I will warn you that when I went to visit her... So she lives between Washington State and she comes down to LA where she lived for years and years and years. She grew up here.
Jennifer Tracy: When she's here, she's in a guest house. When we had set this time for the interview, the gardeners for the main house were there. There was nothing we could do about it. So we kind of paused sometimes, but sometimes, you're going to hear the buzzing and I'm certain that Christian, my amazingly talented editor, did the best he could. But at the same time, I don't record in a sound studio. I'm a one woman show with a little recording kit who travels. I wanted to forewarn you about that. However, she's just remarkable. The way that she talks about her story... She's funny and witty and bright. I'm just so honored that I got the chance to interview Mimi. Please, please, please pre-order her book. There'll be a link to that in the bio. Enjoy my conversation with Mimi Feldman.
Jennifer Tracy: Hi Mimi.
Miriam Feldman: Hi there.
Jennifer Tracy: I'm so happy to be here.
Miriam Feldman: I'm happy to meet you.
Jennifer Tracy: Thank you so much for being on the show. So I just want to back up because before we hit record, you were telling me this funny story about how you had to self-tape a 90-second pitch for your book.
Miriam Feldman: Yes. My publisher told me after I had been in LA for two weeks and had all kinds of people who could have helped me do this that I had to have this thing for her within a certain period of time. So I had to sit down and do it myself. At first, I was going to have my husband do it, but that ran out of patience very quickly. So I spent one night sitting in front of my computer by myself, looking at myself in the computer and trying to do this 90-second pitch. I almost went into psychosis. When you get to be my age, you're okay with the fact that you're aging, but you don't spend a lot of time really looking at your face. I've talked to a lot of friends of mine. It's kind of thing you just avert your eyes and it's all gone.
Miriam Feldman: So all of a sudden, I'm sitting there looking at, and it's not particularly flattering light. I'm sitting there and I'm saying my little pitch about the book. In my mind, I'm saying, "I've jowls. I have fucking jowls. How did that happen?" While I'm reading this other thing. By the end of that night, I just gave up. Then the next day, I did an elaborate lighting thing on my window with scarves and different colors to warm this part and dull that part. I'll show you a picture. I have it on my phone. It actually came out very well. The lighting was good. I finally got it. But it was not a fun experience.
Jennifer Tracy: Lighting is everything. I mean, truly, truly, truly. But I know. I'm on Instagram as part of my business and engaging with my listeners. So I'm doing these selfie videos often. There's nothing like that to go... Or it's like that thing that happens when you turn your camera on and it's on you and you go, "Oh." Especially because it's usually in your hands where it's looking up.
Miriam Feldman: It's just awful. I really don't do that. So it was interesting.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. So you have this book coming out, which is so exciting. Congratulations.
Miriam Feldman: Thank you.
Jennifer Tracy: It's incredible. You wrote it because of your son, Nick. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came to be and the unfolding of that story? Start wherever you want.
Miriam Feldman: The book itself?
Jennifer Tracy: Well, of Nick. Let's start with Nick.
Miriam Feldman: Okay. Of Nick. So I have four kids, three girls and a boy. He has two younger sisters and an older sister. So when all of this started, his older sister was already out of the house. She's a bit older than him. So when he was 15 or 16, he started having anxiety issues and just weird behavior. But the thing is you don't know what's happening until much later because if you made the list of red flags for serious mental illness and you made the list of normal teenage behavior-
Jennifer Tracy: They're very close.
Miriam Feldman: ... virtually the same list. So you go along. They're all crazy. They all act crazy. So he's just one of another crazy boy. But then it started getting worse and worse. He was doing drugs. Again, all of them were. They all smoked pot. Now they're doctors and lawyers and married and fathers. But for Nick, I think he was starting to self-medicate 16, 17, 18. I look back on it now and now I know absolutely he was. I know absolutely he was having auditory hallucinations. He was hearing voices. Now that I'd done this intricate, intense forensic excavation of his entire life pretty much every night before we go to bed, I can identify everything. But then you don't know. You just don't know what's happening at the time.
Jennifer Tracy: You're in it. My son suffers from... I say suffers, but I don't... Well, he does suffer because he has severe anxiety, separation anxiety from me. He was just diagnosed with ADHD. Compared to what you're talking about, it's milder and yet it's just... When your child is suffering and you can't fix it in the moment, and the experts are like, "Well, it could be this and it could be that. We don't know. Let's try this." It's excruciatingly painful.
Miriam Feldman: Let me just say something about the word suffer. I think it's fine to use that word. I think that this comes back around to that whole issue of stigma. It's like it is suffering. Mental illness is a disease and your kid is suffering. I was at a symposium. This is what I came down for. There was a symposium day before yesterday at USC. Elyn Saks, who's a friend of mine who wrote The Center Cannot Hold. She's the law professor at USC. This was a New York Times bestseller, I don't know, 10 or 12 years ago. She has schizophrenia. She's a law professor and she's founded and runs the Saks Institute for Law and Mental Health at USC. She did a symposium with Esmé Wang who wrote a book that just came out called The Collected Schizophrenias who's another woman who has schizophrenia.
Miriam Feldman: It was very interesting to listen to her. One of the things that came up during the question and answer, there was a girl who raised her hand and said something about re-approaching schizophrenia and maybe people with schizophrenia are special and it's wonderful and it's an extraordinary thing. Believe me, I visited that kind of magical thinking many times too. But both Elyn and Esmé and especially Elyn said in no uncertain terms, she says, "That's fine and do whatever you need to do to make your life work. My experience with schizophrenia is there is absolutely nothing wonderful about it. It's just a matter of mitigating it and living with it. I mean, I think it's okay to say... You have to be able to say suffer. I think trying to whitewash it, it doesn't serve.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. Thank you for that. No, it's true. I think sometimes... What happened in that moment was I was like, "Well, don't put your son's ADHD on the same level as her son's schizophrenia."
Miriam Feldman: Oh God. I do have to say something about that too. Okay. I'm sorry, but I have to say something about that because for the last... It's been 14 years now. My son's 34. I hear this all the time from friends and people I'm talking to. Oh, well, I hate to even talk about this. You know what? We all go through stuff. We all have stuff. There are kids dying of cancer. It's all relative and I really have to beat my friends over the head with it. It's okay to complain that your car broke down. Everything isn't measured by Nick's schizophrenia because it's just important. You have to have a life too. I don't want everybody on eggshells all the time because a terrible thing happened in my life, which really it is in my life. I mean, it happened to Nick. It didn't happen to me. It's his life that got ruined by it really.
Jennifer Tracy: Right. So let's go back. So he's 15, 16. He's self-medicating. At what point did you and your husband sort of say, "There's something going on here? What do we need to do?"
Miriam Feldman: Well, it's all really spelled out in lots of detail in the book. But basically, what happened was there was a suicide attempt. He was out. He was high on mushrooms. When I think now, they're those kind of drugs because I didn't know that then. But those kinds of drugs, those psychotropic drugs are just the worst thing somebody who is developing something like this can do. He cut his wrist. That was when we realized, "Okay, this is something."
Miriam Feldman: So he started going to therapists. Then you go through this arc of diagnosis, of his anxiety, his depression. We'll try this. We'll try that. Different medication. I think when he was about 19... He managed by the skin of his teeth to graduate high school. Then he was sort of messing around going to junior college a bit. When he was around 19, they said bipolar. Then later that year, about a year later, they said it's schizophrenia.
Jennifer Tracy: Through all this, how were you coping with this and raising your other children and working?
Miriam Feldman: I like to say I'm pathologically functional. You know what I mean? The house can be burning down and I can still function. But it didn't serve me. I'm less functional now than I was 10, 15 years ago because it's healthier to allow yourself... Your behavior and your feelings should be relative to what was going on. But back in those days, I had little girls at home. I had an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old when this all started. So basically, what I did is I just danced as fast as I could. You know what I mean? I ran a business. I'm a painter. I'm an artist, but I had a business for 30 years doing decorative art in houses and restaurants and things. We traveled all over and I had eight guys working for me. So I had a whole business I was running. So I was running my business, going to construction sites, dealing with all of that stuff. I had three kids still in school, two little girls at home. I just pretended like everything was fine.
Miriam Feldman: As it was all unraveling, I just pretended like everything was fine. Then I would drink a lot of red wine and I would cry in the bathroom with the shower on and then do it all again the next day. Now that my daughters are grown and we have a different kind of relationship because they're adults. I've since learned from my daughters because they talked to me about it now is it was completely the wrong thing to do, especially my youngest daughter because they know what's going on. They know something is terribly wrong. There I was acting like everything was fine and pretending and pretending and pretending. She had such a sense of insecurity and not knowing which side was up. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was protecting them. I was making, especially my youngest one, crazy.
Miriam Feldman: For example, one night, I was doing my... I really would cry in the bathroom with the shower running. Then I would come out. I came out and I thought they were in bed and one of them was up and caught me and there I was busted. I was clearly crying. She said, "Mommy, what's going on? What's wrong? Why are you crying?" I figured, "No way to go with the truth." I said, "I'm crying because I miss your brother." She said, "What do you mean you miss Nick? Nick's not gone. Nick's here." I said, "Yeah, but he's not who he was supposed to be." She looked at me and she said, "Yeah, he is. It's just not what you thought."
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my gosh from the mouths of kids.
Miriam Feldman: Yeah, no kidding. You know what? That has informed my-
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, I've just got chills all over my body.
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. That has informed my processing of this ever since and it still does.
Jennifer Tracy: How old was she?
Miriam Feldman: She's 11, 12, something like that. The name of the book is he came in with it. It had a different working title all along. It was the night before we sent it out that I got my title. It's, to me, very important part of the whole story is that you have these children and you have... We all have our hopes and dreams and our ideas of how things are going to be. With schizophrenia in particular and probably other things too, but schizophrenia is... It has kind of a cruel joke aspect to it because they're right there in front of you all in one piece looking the way they always look, but they're gone. There's a part where you just can't process that. You know what I mean? Because it's not a disease like cancer or something where you know the science of what's happening. The doctors don't even know really what's going on. It's like it's your kid but it's not your kid anymore.
Miriam Feldman: It's very hard to process and it's very hard even now to let go of how you thought it was supposed to be. This is my constant struggle or my constant discipline to accept how it is, to accept this change in circumstance. Because my husband, he gets on me a lot too because there's a part of me where I can't. I just can't. I just think somehow I'm going to be able to fix this. That's the other thing too. As a mother, I think we feel the drive to fix it in a different way than anyone else on the planet. We grew him. We brought him into this world. He came out of my body and it's my job to fix this. There's a part of me that won't let go of that.
Jennifer Tracy: I mean, I know I feel this way with my son with a lot of things. I had postpartum depression after he was born. I basically carried this guilt with me that he has the anxiety and that he has the separation anxiety because I had the depression, because of something that I did wrong. I've worked through a lot of it and I'm in therapy. I've been in therapy for seven years now, but it does lay with me. That's why I am the one... I mean, I'm a single parent. My ex-husband is very involved with our child and he's a good dad. But I'm the one that does all the doctor's appointments. I'm the one that sets up all the things. I'm the one that follows up. I'm the one that takes him to the energy healer and the acupuncturist and the... I mean, I've tried literally everything, hypnotherapy in addition to the Western medicine stuff.
Jennifer Tracy: But I do carry this sort of guilt and almost... Like you said, we grew them. We birthed them. We raised them. There's just this responsibility and it's like at some point... I guess it's just ongoing, kind of like you say. I have to just continue to let go and know that...
Miriam Feldman: I think it's continue to accept.
Jennifer Tracy: Accept. Continue to accept.
Miriam Feldman: Because the thing is I don't think that we're wrong, "wrong," in feeling this way. We're their mothers. This is how we're supposed to feel. This is why we're on this planet. I know that's not the thing to say, but that's what we were built for. Making babies and raising them. So of course, we're going to feel that way. So I don't think it's something that we need to get over. I think it's something that we need to say, "Yeah, that's how I am and that's how I'm..." I mean, that's what I say to my husband because he's like, "Mimi, he's an adult. He's grown. Let it go. It's not going to change. It is what it is." It's like, "I am not going to stop trying. I just started him with a new therapist that I was scouring the earth to find and I'm not going to ever give up."
Miriam Feldman: I think it's correct that we should feel this way and believe me, I do the same thing. I'm fixated on two things. When I was pregnant with him and I didn't know I was pregnant yet, I took melatonin to sleep. There's absolutely nothing to indicate anything. But I'm positive when I'm laying in bed at night and in the middle of the night, I know that melatonin did this. Then there's also another time he fell and bumped his head when I was sitting right next to him. I'm also sure that was it. So, It's like, "I'm never going to let go of that." You can't. So then, okay, accept it. But back to the title.
Miriam Feldman: So He Came In With It was... The original title for the book all the couple of years I was writing, it was The Bad 10 Years, which was about this decade in my family's life because, hold onto your hat, during these 10 years that Nick developed schizophrenia, I had a brain tumor. I had major neck surgery. My husband had a heart attack. Not one but two of my daughters had cancer. I mean, it was insane. You couldn't believe what was happening was happening. When Lucy, my middle born, got this thyroid cancer, I almost went off the deep end. It was just, "Really universe? This is happening?" But we got through it also.
Miriam Feldman: Originally, the book was about this wild and crazy [inaudible 00:24:55] 10 years. But as I wrote the book, it became what it was supposed to be. The book really is about Nick and me. All the other stuff is part of it, but it's about Nick and me. It has kind of a through-line back to my mother. It's about making art and it's about our family because we're all art makers. None of that was even in there when it first wrote the book. So at one point like we were just saying how you were saying you go to all these people and you... I have a thing that happens to me. There's a frenzy I go into every few months where it's like, "I've missed something. There's got to be an answer out there. I can't believe there's not an answer out there." I just start scouring the world for that hidden solution that I haven't found yet.
Miriam Feldman: During one of these frenzies, I remembered that I have a friend who does these really precise and scientific astrological charts, the ones that are very involved. She's a wonderful friend and she's very interested and sympathetic to Nick's situation. She had asked me at one point if I wanted her to do his chart. I'm not into astrology. I never followed through on it. Then during one of my frenzies, I was like, "Shannon, the astrological chart. Maybe it's there." Until I called her up and I asked her to do it. She called me back within a day or two. I remember this so clearly now. Hello. She said, "Mimi, he came in with it." She said every single sign, every single signifier for mental illness for his life is right there from the second he was born." Then she proceeds to describe to me all these things that I didn't really understand even the terminology. So I'm madly taking notes.
Miriam Feldman: As we're talking, I just kept doodling, "He came in with it. He came in with it." Then at the end of the conversation, she just said sadly, she said, "He came in with it." So I took those notes and I put them away. But I didn't really think that much about it again because astrology is not my thing. Then later, a year maybe, later when we were searching desperately for the correct title for the book, I was talking to my agent and we were just spitballing. I said, "I have this one thing. I pulled it out and I read it to her. She said, "Oh my God. That's it." It's so much it because it goes back to the thing of, "Yeah, yes mom, it's just not what you thought." Nick was delivered to us. And yes, I will spend the rest of my life picking apart the circumstance and trying to figure out what caused it and what I could have done to avoid it.
Miriam Feldman: There is scientific information that lends itself to the idea that it could have been avoided. That's the thing that is most difficult to live with. But the fact is when I can be most at peace is when I just accept he came in with it. This is how he was delivered to us. The Nick that I thought I was going to have and the life that I thought he was going to have wasn't real. This is who he is and I have to meet him where he is. It's very hard. I mean, it makes me cry to talk about this.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, of course. Of course.
Miriam Feldman: Because we're moms. We have this dream of their lives from the second you know they're in there. You realize. If you've ever lost a baby, I don't know if you have, but-
Jennifer Tracy: I have not.
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. You know what? I didn't have a miscarriage till I was in my 40s. I had a miscarriage. All of a sudden, I wanted to go back... Now, this is getting very serious. I wanted to go back to every woman I've ever known who' had a miscarriage and just hold them in my arms because all of a sudden, I realized, "Oh my God. It's a baby. You've lost a baby from the second you know you're pregnant. You have their whole life in your mind, in your heart." Losing that one, really... I thought about how I'd said to women, "Oh, you can get pregnant again." It's like, "Oh my God, how could I have said that?" Because yeah, you can get pregnant again but you still lost a baby. You know? That was an interesting thing to learn.
Miriam Feldman: It's the thing. It's all about acceptance because there I was like this crazy type A personality running a business and making art and a million friends in this big family and all this stuff. I never stopped for a minute. You know? During the whole nascent period with Nick, I never stopped to feel it. I never stopped to process it. It wasn't until a few years in when I couldn't... I used to go to Pilates out in Santa Monica. That was my exercise. Then I couldn't do it anymore because all this stuff with Nick's schizophrenia, there was no way I was driving to Santa Monica three days a week to go to Pilates and also the money because everything changed with that too.
Miriam Feldman: So over here on Larchmont, there's the Larchmont Center for Yoga that's been there for like 40 years. I'd done some yoga when I was younger. I just said, "Okay, fine. I'll just go in there and do yoga. At least I'll get some exercise." That's what started this chain of events that changed everything inside of me. I started going to this yoga for the exercise and that was great. Then here were all these girls talking about... These young women. I thought, "Okay, I can't save Nick, but I can do this. I can stand in here with my leg up and do this." There was just this really simple power to that that started to sustain me. It's like I can do what I can do. The yoga became really important to me. I started listening to the pretty young girls who hadn't had any tragedy in their lives yet because they were delivering wisdom that comes from thousands of years ago.
Miriam Feldman: They were the delivery system. It didn't matter that they hadn't had my circumstance. I started listening and I started learning. All of a sudden, this thing that... I used to be in the yoga class and I would... I had this monologue going in my head of making fun of everybody and making jokes in my head and all that. Then that quieted and I started listening. I started changing. I was able to start to just sit in what was happening and just allow it and not just stay so busy that I didn't feel it. Another friend dragged me to meditation. I'm like, "I haven't sat still for five minutes in my life. There's no way I'm going to sit and do nothing for 20 minutes twice a day."
Miriam Feldman: But I went and I think because I was so devastated, I was so broken because this was a few years in and this was when, okay, the girls were growing up. I think Lucy had gone to college by then. It was sort of this phase where it's like, "Okay, this happened. I'm not going to undo it or change. This is my life now." Also coming to terms with the fact that I'm going to be his caregiver for the rest of my life.
Jennifer Tracy: How old was he at this point?
Miriam Feldman: He was about in his early 20s. At that point, he lived in an apartment down the street from us. I would go twice a day to his apartment and give him his meds and make sure he took his meds and wrangle his whole life. I was just like this empty shell of a person. So there was a lot of room for new ideas in there. So I actually let her drag me to meditation. I was taught by this guy who's about my age in his 60s and he was one of the original teachers who were taught by the Maharishi who came here and taught The Beatles and everything. So it's classic TM, transcendental meditation. He was the real deal. I was open to it. I've been a meditator ever since. I meditate every day and turns out sitting and doing nothing for 20 minutes twice a day changes who you are. I'm the biggest skeptic in the world. My friends still can't believe. My husband can't believe that I meditate. I'm the last person you would think would be a meditator.
Jennifer Tracy: I love that.
Miriam Feldman: But I needed to just stop and allow. Just allow things to be what they were and accept it.
Jennifer Tracy: Mimi, I want to talk to you about bringing art in as therapy and how you integrated those things in. We're sitting in your friend's guest house looking at Nick's self-portrait that is going to be the book cover. So amazing. When did that come to be or was that always just part of it? Was Nick always an artist?
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. We're a big arty family. My husband's a painter. I'm a painter. My husband paints very abstract paintings. So my husband and I, we met because he had an art gallery he gave me in my first show. So I married him. We've been together almost 40 years now. We live downtown LA in the first wave of the artists that lived down there in-
Jennifer Tracy: When it was really cool.
Miriam Feldman: When it was the real deal. We were Cowboys. It was great.
Jennifer Tracy: When the brewery was pre-brewery.
Miriam Feldman: Pre-brewery. The brewery was still a brewery. We met at Al's Bar. You know Al's Bar?
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, of course. I used to hang out down there a lot.
Miriam Feldman: We met at Al's Bar.
Jennifer Tracy: Not at the bar, but down there.
Miriam Feldman: It's a funny thing because there's a mural on the wall... That's gone now. But there was a mural on the wall of Pocahontas and John Smith. It was a very funny thing because I met my husband in Al's Bar. I was a bartender. There's a long story about how we met, but a friend of mine had seen him at an art opening and thought he was cute. I was going to hook her up with him and then we ended up together. It's sort of that John Smith story with Pocahontas. Then one day, we walked in. There was this mural that Roger Herman did who's a well-known artist that teaches at UCLA now. So that was our place. Al's Bar was the heart of our relationship.
Miriam Feldman: So that was always our life. Art making was the important thing in our life. Then we had these kids and they're kind of all artists. It's not their careers, but Nick would have been. Nick was prodigious. He was going to be a famous artist. There's really no question. His history with schools and special programs and things that he got into. I have four kids. I don't think everybody's a prodigious artist, but Nick was. So now, he doesn't paint anymore. You can see in this picture. Now, he was about 16 when he did that. That's a [inaudible 00:35:38] image. You can see something's going on there. Now he colors in coloring books. He doesn't want to do original stuff. I try and talk to him about it. But one of the things with schizophrenia is it has what they call the flattening affect which just doles down motivation, interest, ability to connect with things and ideas and people.
Miriam Feldman: So he still draws because when you're a drawer or a painter, and I use that weird phrase because it's different than artists because I think artists is up in your head. Because in my business, when we do murals and things, we ended up also... I became a painting contractor. I do straight painting too. I'm as happy painting a wall wide as I am doing a painting. It's the paint. That's why I don't understand or I can't relate to all the stuff that people do on the computers now because it's not that I'm thinking it's not art, but it's not art like I know it because to me, it's the paint.
Miriam Feldman: So when you're a painter, when you're a drawer, you see people who just are constantly... They're always drawing. So he still draws but he draws in like you Ninja turtle coloring books.
Jennifer Tracy: He's 34 now, you said?
Miriam Feldman: He's 34, yeah. He's childlike in a way. He's kind of stuck in a certain phase of his life. I mean, he's not like a child, but he has definite child-like attributes.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. He lives near you and your husband now in Washington?
Miriam Feldman: Yes, he lives. We moved him up there. He lives in a HUD-subsidized housing. He gets disability because it's very hard to support a whole other life in addition to your own life. It doesn't work for him to live with us. It doesn't work for him. It doesn't work for us. I mean, I could go on and about that, but that is what it is. So he lives in his own apartment and now in Washington, it's wonderful. I don't have to go everyday to give him his meds. They have DHS. He has a caregiver who comes and gives him his meds. Now, I see him several times a week, but I'm able to come here. I'm able to travel.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. Live your life.
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. That's another thing too, back to the thing of mother because... I know. I've had relatives and people say, "Well, why don't you let him live with you?"
Jennifer Tracy: I love when people judge when they have no personal experience.
Miriam Feldman: Well, you might as well say, "Well, if you're cold, why don't you build a fire in the middle of your living room?" It's like you have to understand what's the dynamic here.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. It's not that simple.
Miriam Feldman: I don't have to defend myself with that stuff. I know the truth of it. You have to make your peace with that of like, "I'm not helping him if I give up my life and actually probably hurting him." Plus, I have three daughters and they deserve to have a mother, kind of a mitigated mother, especially my youngest one. I'll spend the rest of my life trying to make that up to her because it wasn't fair. She was so marginalized. I was such a mess. I mean, I was drunk every night and I was crazy every day for adolescence. 13, 14, 15. Then when we finally got Nick out of the house and Lucy had gone to college and Scarlet was married and we had bought the property up in Washington and Craig was spending a lot of time up there building our house, then it was just Rose and me in the house. All of a sudden, there was nothing but space around how I had let her down.
Miriam Feldman: I made up my mind that I was going to make it up to her. We had some wild years, Rose and me, in that house of me just doing anything and everything that I could do to just... "You want super expensive weird acupuncture? Sure, we'll go there. Oh you want Korean herbal drink that looks like mud and costs $700?We'll get that." Yeah. Anything she wanted. "Oh, you want to be a vegan? Okay. We'll purge the house." It went on and on. I was just-
Jennifer Tracy: This was while she was in high school?
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. I was jumping through hoops to do anything to make it okay for her. It was ridiculous.
Jennifer Tracy: How old is Rose now?
Miriam Feldman: Rose is 25 now.
Jennifer Tracy: And where does she live?
Miriam Feldman: She's 26. I'm sorry. She lives in Virginia. She's married. She lives out in the country, in a small town in Virginia on five acres with her husband. She's wonderful now. I have since learned when Rose was a thing, the high school years were... It was a nightmare. I mean, her avocation during those years was to destroy me. She almost did too. So three inch square little pastries from Erewhon that costs $47 every day didn't help at all. What ended up helping in the long run was just loving her. That was the thing, is I made up my mind. I was just going to love her. I created what I call the buckets of love method of parenting.
Miriam Feldman: So there I had this 15-year-old girl going, "I hate you. I hate you." I would just go, "I love you. I love you." "I hate you. I fucking hate you. I love you. I love you." All I did was just everything I could do to just show her and tell her I loved her. I just doused her with buckets of love until finally years later when she had already left home and gone off on some crazy traveling across the country by herself doing God knows what and then living in New Orleans with all these gutter rat kids and being drunk all the time.
Jennifer Tracy: Wait. Did you say gutter rat kids?
Miriam Feldman: Yes. There's this thing in New Orleans. I mean, New Orleans is a very cool place, but it has this underbelly.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, there's a dark side. Yeah.
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. Part of that underbelly is it attracts these aimless young kids. Kids in their late teens. They've run away from home or in their 20s or just losers. It's sort of the lifestyle of alcohol and sort of wallowing in the gutter, New Orleans.
Jennifer Tracy: There was a woman on the show, May Lindstrom, who's now very successful... She has a beauty company. She makes organic... Small batch made beauty products, facial cleansing, facial care, skincare. Anyway, she's just one of the loveliest people I've ever met. I just love her. I interviewed her and her story, it was crazy. It's such a good interview. You guys, my listeners, you should go back and listen to that if you haven't yet.
Miriam Feldman: I think I will.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my God, it's so fascinating. She lived in New Orleans and she talks about this on the show. She lived in New Orleans in this crazy house. Then they moved out of that house. They were in their 20s, she and this girl. They moved into a house of vampires. I was like, "Wait, what?" She goes, "Yeah." She's like, "I don't know. But they called themselves vampires. They only came out at night." I was like, "What?" That's New Orleans. That's totally New Orleans.
Miriam Feldman: Lucy lived there for a while too. She went to visit Rose and then didn't leave. They lived in the ninth ward. I was like, "Really guys?" I mean, it was scary where they were. Lucy got a gun held to her. I was going crazy during that time. But back to Rose, the thing that did it for Rose because Rose is still dealing with her own issues and her own trauma from her childhood. I feel tremendous amount of guilt, but I did the best I could. But the thing that healed her in terms of me was just the buckets of love. She told me about this. It's just like the most touching story. I hope she doesn't listen to this because she'll be mad at me. It's kind of private, but I'm Jewish. My husband's Catholic. One of our oldest daughter was raised by her... Our oldest daughter is my stepdaughter. She became ours when she was.... I met with Craig when she was six, so she is as much my daughter as anything. But she was also raised by her maternal grandmother.
Miriam Feldman: She's Christian. Rose has in the last few years moved into that. She said she was talking to the pastor and he was talking about Jesus and Jesus' love and all of this. He asked these people, this group of which Rose was one, "When in your life have you felt that kind of love, the kind of love that I'm teaching about?" Here I'm going to cry again. She told me that she thought about and she thought about it and she remembered a time when she was in New Orleans and she was in the gutter. She was walking around. She'd been sort of kicked to the curb by a boyfriend and was living in somebody else's place and just her life was awful.
Miriam Feldman: She was walking around the city and she was drunk. She was miserable. I called. I stayed on the phone with her and we talked. She walked through the city and I wouldn't hang up. I talked to her and I talked to her until I said, "I'm not going to hang up till you're safe and you're home. Then when she was home, I asked her if she wanted to hear a lullaby. That's kind of a very funny thing because I have the worst voice in the world. When they were little and I used to sing them lullabys, they would look up at me and they would go, "Don't sing." But she was so bereft and hurting so much. It was, "You are my sunshine," that was what I used to sing them.
Miriam Feldman: I sang her the song and I stayed on the phone until she fell asleep. She said that was the time that she realized what that kind of love was. That's what healed her. We are so good now. I mean, she hated me, but we're so good now. That's the thing about this whole mothering thing and like, "Oh, they're not ambassador or they're not living this life." Once one of your kids get schizophrenia, the sliding scale really changes. It's like you get over all these stupid expectations and the only thing that matters, the only thing that matters is that they know how much you love them. It's all that matters. That's good parenting right there.
Miriam Feldman: I mean, you can screw them up in a million ways. You can do all kinds of things, but I think the line between successful parenting and not is they just have to know that you have like Jesus caliber love for them. That was a good thing. Everybody's good now.
Jennifer Tracy: You're an amazing mom, Mimi. You are. You are. We've come to the time where I'm going to ask you three questions that I ask every guest.
Miriam Feldman: Oh, I guess I should have studied up.
Jennifer Tracy: No, no, no, no. You're great. This is easy.
Miriam Feldman: All right.
Jennifer Tracy: Then we're going to do a fun lightning round and then we're going to wrap up.
Miriam Feldman: Cool.
Jennifer Tracy: I've loved having you on the show. You're amazing.
Miriam Feldman: I love talking to you. This is fun.
Jennifer Tracy: You're amazing. I can't wait for the book to come out. All of this will be in the show notes. When is the book coming out?
Miriam Feldman: The book drops June 22nd. We're having a book launch here in LA on the 25th at Chevalier's which is the bookstore on Larchmont, which is perfect because the whole book takes place here. We didn't talk that much about it but I really think that this book is going to be an open door to a room that a lot of women can use. It's not just for moms of kids with schizophrenia or mental illness. This is the thing because a lot of people have read it and friends have read it already. Anyone who is a mother, anyone anyway, but every mother will relate to this because it's all the same. It's all the same. It's just different circumstances. These issues of coming to terms with...
Jennifer Tracy: Well, and I love what you talked about and we talked about this on the phone a little bit before we met is just let's take away this ridiculous stigma of all this stuff. I think I shared with you that I have a dear friend who took her own life a year ago, bipolar. She'd gone off her meds. I mean, it's a whole long story. But part of that story was that there was a stigma around her bipolar within certain relationships. I'm deciding, "Do I want to wait for this?" These gardeners are hardcore.
Miriam Feldman: I'm so sorry.
Jennifer Tracy: No, don't worry. Listen, this is LA. It's part of the beauty of living in LA. We get trees and all that.
Miriam Feldman: I'll tell you one thing though, it's the thing I don't miss up in Washington. It's so quiet. It's so nice.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, it's sensory overload. I mean, my son, speaking of... He has all these sensitivities. So he's ADHD, dyslexic. He has central auditory processing. He had some visual stuff, but that seems to be correcting itself.
Miriam Feldman: Tell me about the central auditory processing. What does that involve?
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. So when he was originally tested in second grade, we also had... Again, I was in charge of all this. So I went to every single specialist that I was told to go to. So it was like have him auditory tested. So we went to an audiologist and she tested him. She said he absolutely has central auditory processing. So it's complex and I don't actually fully understand it, but in layman's terms, it's where if there's any kind of like that background noise for him, he couldn't be engaged in a conversation with us. For example, his second grade classroom was crazy. He went to a progressive school. The first and second grade were mixed. If two kids were talking in the corner of the room and the teacher is trying to give a lesson, he couldn't hear what the teacher was saying.
Miriam Feldman: It's interesting. That's why I asked because the same thing exists as a feature of schizophrenia. They don't have the filters.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes. It all comes in at once.
Miriam Feldman: One of the things that saved me, or at least kind of armed me to deal with this is when this first happened, somehow I managed to stumble into NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They have a 12-week educational seminar that you can go to that teaches you how to deal with mental illness as a loved one. One of the experiments that they did is we went off in pairs and everybody sat around a table and their partner stood behind them. The leader gave... Each person standing behind you had a piece of paper with stuff written on it. Each one was different and it said things like, "You are the devil." Or, "You're a horrible person." All these really awful things which are kind of the things that people with schizophrenia hear in their heads, which is heartbreaking.
Miriam Feldman: I was sitting down and I had to sit there with a pencil and paper. The leader was drawing on a board. We had to copy what she was drawing a simple geometric drawing while somebody was whispering in our ear that we were the devil and we were going to hell and going to burn. There was this cacophony of noise because everybody was talking yes. We had to try and concentrate. It was the most incredible experience. Then she said, "Okay, stop." She said, "That's what is going on inside your loved one's schizophrenias head every day. That's the same thing. Imagine everything coming at you at the same velocity. How did you deal with that with him?
Jennifer Tracy: It is treatable. He did this series of exercises with headphones on a computer for months and months and months. He hated it. He was seven at the time and it was just torture. But it did help. You can basically retrain. Part of it is developmental. Same thing with the ADHD and the way that the psychologist, the child psychologist, explained it to me. He said it's like his working memory and his processing speed have not caught up with his intellect because he's actually reading at a ninth grade level. He's 10 but his processing and working memory is like second grade level.
Miriam Feldman: You know what's a nice thing about all of this, Jennifer? Is he's going to be fine. You know what I mean? It's going to come to the point where all these things that are... It's all going to converge and he's going to be in his 20s and it will all have been just that was his childhood. Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that great?
Jennifer Tracy: It's so great. I have to tell you I'm so grateful we live in LA and I'm so grateful that my ex-husband and I have the means to send him to this specialized school. Even if he wasn't in a specialized school, it's like, "Oh yeah, I have ADHD." He can name it. It's like, "Oh, the sky is blue. I have ADHD. I have dyslexia." "Oh, you have dyslexia? Me too. I've got dyslexia."
Miriam Feldman: It's so much better, isn't it?
Jennifer Tracy: I'm so grateful for that. There's no like, "Ooh, I don't this." We got him the proper help because he couldn't read in second grade. He was not reading at all. Then we got him this amazing tutor at his old school who basically taught him how to read. Then now he's at this new school and he's killing it. It's still hard. He's tired. We're going through the process of figuring out what medication's going to help him buffer that working memory and processing speed basically to help him while he's developing so that it's not so just exhausting and anxiety provoking. Because he's like, "I know. I know how to do this stuff, but then I just can't do it." I'm like, "That must be really frustrating."
Jennifer Tracy: But yeah, you're right. He's fine. He knows he's loved. He knows he's supported. The way this kid can articulate his feelings and his discomfort and move through it, that's my proudest moment. I always say this. I don't care about his grades. I don't care about if he goes to college, where he goes to college. None of that matters to me. That my most important thing is that he feels a sort of self confidence and that he feels fulfilled in whatever it is that he's doing. Whether it's playing soccer, whether it's connecting with a friend, whether it's drawing. He loves to draw as well. Those are the things that are important to me. That he feels seen and heard by us.
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. Well, you got it. You got it wired because the thing is I didn't really get this until years into all of this with Nick until recently really when all my kids were adults. What do we all say as parents, as mothers? I just want my kid to be a decent human being and to be content. We say that and then what we really want is for them to go to Harvard and become a lawyer and make a lot of money.
Jennifer Tracy: That sounds awful to me.
Miriam Feldman: Whatever. To be a famous artist, to be a ballerina. You know what I mean.
Jennifer Tracy: Sure. Sure. Sure.
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. I mean, I never really thought any of my kids were heading to Harvard. That's true, contentedness and a good person, Nick is without a doubt one of the most intrinsically good people I've ever known. I say that because in light of this disease, which manifests itself quite often, predominantly as ugly and dark and it has violence and it has self-hatred and it has so many horrible aspects to it, his schizophrenia, other than when he's tormented and sometimes he'll punch walls and punch a hole in a wall or something like that. He wouldn't hurt a fly. He's still one of the most intrinsically good humans that walks this planet.
Miriam Feldman: So even in light of this disease that has ugliness and really evil to it, I believe there's evil in this disease because it's horrible, things that I've seen. You see the people on the street. That kind of anguish, that kind of screaming, that doesn't come from something that isn't tormenting them.
Jennifer Tracy: You mean like homeless [crosstalk 00:55:23] that are-
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. That clearly have schizophrenia.
Jennifer Tracy: Mental illness. Yeah.
Miriam Feldman: But not only that, he is actually pretty content. When he's not content, then we try and fix that. So that's again, "He came in with it." That's again coming to terms with, "This is his life." If he's happy drawing with his caregiver who he always picks the young pretty ones, in the Hello Kitty coloring book with colored pencils, that has to be good enough for me. Even though he painted that when he was 16. Even though he was going to be in museums, it has to be good enough for me. It is. It really is. I mean, I have my dark moments, but it is.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. That's so awesome. All right. I'm going to get to these questions. I have loved talking with you.
Miriam Feldman: Me too.
Jennifer Tracy: Just loved it every minute. What do you think about Mimi when you hear the word love?
Miriam Feldman: What comes right to my mind and it's so stupid and corny, but just being a mother. I mean, I don't know. I sound like I'm a 1950s housewife the way I'm talking, but I'm a bad ass. I worked in construction for 30 years. I ran a business. I had eight guys working for me. I'm not a housewife, but at the same time when it gets right down to it, the best and most important thing that I do in my life is bring children into the world and be their mother. It just is, even more than the art. I'm sure.
Jennifer Tracy: If you could live anywhere in the world other than where you're living now, where would you live?
Miriam Feldman: If I could really live anywhere right now, I think I would like to live the summers in Martha's Vineyard and the winters in Manhattan.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh yes. Where are you from originally?
Miriam Feldman: Here.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, that's right. Born and raised in LA.
Miriam Feldman: Born and raised in LA.
Jennifer Tracy: That's right. That's right. Yeah. I love that. Martha's Vineyard is one of my favorite places on earth.
Miriam Feldman: Me too. I went there every summer for years because I have a very dear friend who has a house there. I would go visit her and I fell in... Well, I used to go with the girls. Yeah. There's something magical about that place.
Jennifer Tracy: Literally magical. I brought my son when I was two. We stayed with my dear friend Marcy and her family. We were there for two weeks, I think. I was like, "What is this place where no one locks their door? The kids have this fun circus thing every Friday night." It's free. It's got a very artistry... Oh my God, I loved it.
Miriam Feldman: I mean, I know it's all people of great means.
Jennifer Tracy: Of course.
Miriam Feldman: There's no way I could afford to live there.
Jennifer Tracy: But just the landscape itself.
Miriam Feldman: You know what? There's also a whole community of people who live there who are not the summer people, but just regular people like us too. So there is that.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes. How do you define serenity?
Miriam Feldman: Well, do you mean like what is serenity for me?
Jennifer Tracy: For you. Yeah.
Miriam Feldman: My happy place. My happy place is sitting on a beach. That's it. I mean, I am in love with the beach.
Jennifer Tracy: Do you have time to go when you're here?
Miriam Feldman: I go every chance I get. I was there two days ago with my boogie board and my bikini looking ridiculous because it's just... That's it for me. It's just the beach.
Jennifer Tracy: Wait, why do you say you look ridiculous? You look bad ass. I haven't even seen [crosstalk 00:58:44].
Miriam Feldman: Well, yeah. But I'm a little old to be running around in a bikini, but I don't care.
Jennifer Tracy: There is no old. There's never too old for a bikini ever in my opinion. Okay. Lightning round of questions. Fireside or oceanside?
Miriam Feldman: Oceanside.
Jennifer Tracy: Favorite junk food.
Miriam Feldman: Chips.
Jennifer Tracy: What kind of chips?
Miriam Feldman: Any kind of chips. Yeah. I like chips.
Jennifer Tracy: Do you like theme parks?
Miriam Feldman: No, I hate theme parks. Well, I just said to somebody yesterday... It's so funny. I just said to my friend yesterday one of the happiest things in my life is I never have to go to Disneyland again. I'll die without ever going there.
Jennifer Tracy: I know.
Miriam Feldman: Yeah. I don't have to ever go there. We're all grown up.
Jennifer Tracy: Shower or bathtub?
Miriam Feldman: I've been a shower girl my whole life. It's funny that you bring this up because my husband and I are locked in this thing right now where he's supposed to be building... We don't have a bathtub up there. Now I've decided I want a bath and I love taking baths. So he needs to finish building me my bathroom. So I would take that up now.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes he does. On a scale of one to 10, how good are you at making lasagna?
Miriam Feldman: Oh, 10.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, really?
Miriam Feldman: I can cook. I don't have any false modesty about that. My mom taught me how to cook. Actually, it's funny you asked that question too because this week, my daughter Lucy texted me, "Can you send me your lasagna recipe again?" Which I keep on my computer because all the girls keep wanting my recipes. So I've written them down and then they lose them and I send them again.
Jennifer Tracy: That's so terrible.
Miriam Feldman: So it's definitely a 10.
Jennifer Tracy: Yum. What's your biggest pet peeve?
Miriam Feldman: Let me think. What is really my...? I really have a problem with chronically negative attitudes, people who are just negative all the time. I'm kind of a Pollyanna. My real pet peeve is when you go in a store and you ask somebody who works in the store a question about what's in the store and they... Where is something and they clearly don't know and they just make something up. I'm a really obnoxious woman who they'll go, "Oh, we don't have that." Then when I find it, I will find that salesperson and say, "Look, you do have this."
Jennifer Tracy: I love it. Oh my God. Super power choice, invisibility, ability to fly.
Miriam Feldman: Fly definitely. [crosstalk 01:01:05].
Jennifer Tracy: Got it. Would you rather have a cat tail or cat ears?
Miriam Feldman: I think cat ears. I don't know why.
Jennifer Tracy: What was the name of your first pet?
Miriam Feldman: Marco Polo who was a dog, a Dalmatian.
Jennifer Tracy: What was the name of the street you grew up on?
Miriam Feldman: Longwood.
Jennifer Tracy: So your porn name is-
Miriam Feldman: I know this.
Jennifer Tracy: ... Marco Polo Longwood..
Miriam Feldman: That's definitely a man's porn name though, isn't it really?
Jennifer Tracy: That's a really good one.
Miriam Feldman: Yeah, it's a good one.
Jennifer Tracy: Mimi, I love you so much. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Miriam Feldman: Oh, it's been a pleasure.
Jennifer Tracy: Thanks so much for listening, guys. I really hope you enjoyed my conversation with Mimi. Please join me next week for a fresh episode of MILF podcast. Remember to check out myteegirls.com and fluide.us. Both of those are generously giving us 20% off with the code MILF20. Have a great week and weekend and I'll talk to you next week. Bye.