Miriam Feldman > Quotes

“Mother love—it rushes through our veins, escapes sometimes in the form of salt water at the intersection of eyelids and the edge underneath, but it will never leave us. There is no real exit. It doesn’t wane, mother love. It lives in the body, the corporeal residence of grief, loss, and joy. All this commotion might reside in my heart. Or in a fingernail, or my lower back. Who knows? But this I know for sure: I hold it in my body. The same body that grew them.”
― Miriam Feldman, He Came in With It: A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness

“negative symptoms are the elements that are lost to the person with the disease, such as the ability to feel emotions, to reason logically, to empathize.”
― Miriam Feldman, He Came in With It: A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness

“When a boy is in his late teens, there is a synaptic pruning of sorts that occurs in the brain in order to mature and function in its adult form. It’s a dispensing of the connective material that has built up since birth but is no longer needed, and it is quickly replaced. But there is a brief period of vacancy, when the brain is vulnerable to any sort of disruption. The mind is somewhat unprotected, and that is the stage of life”
― Miriam Feldman, He Came in With It: A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness

“They are the behaviors that are added to the person, such as hearing voices, hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions. The medications available address these symptoms quite well, but not without cost.”
― Miriam Feldman, He Came in With It: A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness