Ordinary Girls

Lilliana Haus
College Writing
November 12, 2021
Professor Wright
The Effects of Parents with Mental Illness in Ordinary Girls
Ordinary Girls: A Memoir that tells the story of Jaquira Diaz and her family. We learn how a girl from a troubled home struggles to survive in her current situation. Jaqui is faced with toxic parents who will eventually divorce, her mother’s addiction issues, and serious mental health challenges within her family life. Ordinary Girls suggests that growing up around mental illness stunts a person’s ability to face their own mental health issues and blurs the lines between toxic and healthy relationships. People who experience toxicity early in life have a hard time differentiating between the two. For Diaz, her personal issues include drug problems, the search for love, a sexual identity crisis, and her relationships with other people. Throughout the book, we learn how Jaqui faces her demons and tries to navigate living within  a dysfunctional family.
Jaqui never had a stable life at home; she never had a place where she felt truly safe. She left her home in Puerto Rico to move to Florida. Once she moved to Florida, her parents got divorced. This resulted in Jaqui having to move around a lot. Her younger sister, Alaina, is forced to go with her mother and sister. They spent many nights sleeping in strange motels, trying to figure out where they would live next. They struggled to figure out their next meal or where their money would be coming from. Lacking a safe place with her family caused Jaqui to wander in her own life, trying to find people and places she felt comfortable calling home.
The search to find a stable family through friends and people she encounters results in Jaqui facing dangerous situations.  For example, her friendship with Chris was toxic. Chris was an older boy who used his money to get Jaqui attention. He would give her mother money. This caused Jaqui to get jealous, resulting in him and her “dating” and him raping her. Chris used Jaqui needed help getting food and needing money to use it as a way to take advantage of her.  Jaqui got married young, moved out young, and joined the military. These were the steps she took to get out of her horrible home and find a better life for herself.. Moving constantly and then eventually moving away from her family altogether were both situations that she faced. Her mother’s mental health issues and drug problems pushed Jacqui away from her family. 
After her mother became more and more ill, she was no longer capable of taking care of Jaqui and her siblings. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and developed a substance abuse problem. Her brother, Anthony, stopped living with their mother at seven and moved in with their grandma. Jaqui and her sister would eventually live with their grandma and father, but it was only temporary. Their mother would come to take them away again to go live with her. Promising them things would get better or forcing them to go with her since she was their mother. Their father never fought for them or fought to protect them. He allowed the girls to go, even knowing the conditions that they were living under. He would enable Jaqui’s mother to take the girls and do whatever she pleased. 
Jaqui resented her mother as well as her father. She demonized her mother’s illness, pushing her to ignore her own demons throughout her life. She strived not to follow in her footsteps but ended up doing just that. She got in fights, used drugs, tried to take on adult responsibilities at a young age just like her mother had done. Jaqui ended up being a “ High school dropout with a GED and some failed community college classes. All I’d done over the past year was drink and smoke and snort coke”(Diaz 211). Jaqui ended up doing coke just like her mother did. She and her mother both used drugs to self-medicate instead of facing their illness and addiction head-on.
When living with their mother, they were always on edge. Mama had convinced herself
a man was following her and trying to get into their apartment and would make the sisters help her look for him and lock up the house. For some time, Jaqui wondered if a man was stalking them. She didn’t want to accept that her mother was so unwell that she was hallucinating. Her mother would find any piece of evidence she could manipulate to fit her delusions. It was hard for the kids to see the truth. They would hear their mother laughing and talking to someone who was not physically there. Mama had envisioned a man talking to her when she was taking a shower. She would cry, laugh, yell, and scream. The girls would listen from the bathroom door, trying to figure out what was going on. 
During an episode, Mami got so paranoid that a man was trying to break in that she awoke Jaqui from her sleep. She made her check all the windows and helped her stop the man from breaking in. Mami had dragged her children into her delusions, forcing them to go through this episode with her. When Diaz stated that no one was there, her mother pulled out a knife and said, “‘Who are you?’ … ‘You are nobody’”(Diaz 158-157). Her mother was having such an episode that she could not even recognize her daughter. Jaqui was terrified. She wasn’t scared of her mother. Her mother wasn’t herself anymore; she was scared of what her mother’s mind was doing to her. She was consumed by her mental illness and dragged her whole family down with her. 
“And my mother, not even thirty and already in the snares of schizophrenia and addiction and three kids at war with each other, with themselves, Anthony pounding on me, depression already like a noose around my neck”(Diaz 32). Jaqui states that her mother’s mental health was causing her siblings to argue. The girls were jealous that Anthony never lived with his mother and got dragged around from home to home. At an early age Anthony decided that he would not live with his mother again and would stay with his grandmother. His mother in the beginning of 
his life would try to fight with him to come home and stay with her. Eventually as time passed, his mother stopped fighting for him to stay with her. Jaqui and her sister always had to take care of themselves and each other. They were constantly living in fear, and wondering what could happen next. Alana and Jaqui were always on edge because they were constantly nervous that something would set off their mother, that they would have to move, or that their mother would see the strange man again. “That afternoon, the fighting had escalated to us wanting to kill each other: during one of Anthony’s ‘roid rages, after I’d flung his T-shirts, sneakers, and duffel bag off our eighth-floor balcony, after he’d slapped me and I’d slapped him back, he landed a punch on the side of my head that knocked me face-down of the floor. When I got back up, he tried to strangle me. Somehow, Alaina got him off me. Then I went to the kitchen for the knife”(Diaz 96-97). The constant fear and anxiety had pushed the family away from each other. Jaqui was always looking for any way out and utilized every distraction she could.
Addiction had taken a toll on Mama; she was addicted to cocaine and crack. She was using them as a coping method to help with her schizophrenia. Taking all the drugs led her to get Parkinson’s later in life due to her drug addiction. As her mother got older, she was diagnosed with emphysema, hoarding disorder, and several other illnesses. Jaqui and her family were poor. Their poverty level meant that their mother never really got adequate mental health care that she needed to get better. She never got the treatment she needed to learn how to be a good mother or handle mental illnesses. The girls had to hide their money and food when her mother was looking for drug money or inviting a strange man into their place of living. This caused tension in their whole family. The family structure had been broken for many years but the girls were learning how to survive on their own without the help of their mother. Their father is absent and allows them to have to face these issues alone.

Suicide also played a role in Jaqui’s life. Her grandmother, Mercy killed herself and her mother discussed how she too had attempted to kill herself. Growing up, she constantly heard that her grandmother would kill herself because her grandfather had already done so. Her grandmother did eventually kill herself. Jaqui also had attempted to kill herself and, when she was in the process of doing so, vividly remembered what her grandmother had said. She felt that
maybe her family was right, that suicide was the natural answer to her problems. She thought that this would be the way out of her problems and fears.
Jaqui had to face her demons growing up in an unstable home whose core was made up of a mentally unstable, drug-addicted parent who was supposed to give her direction in life. Jaqui had to face time in jail, lose everything, and join the military to overcome this misery and gain her success. Everything she did was rooted around escaping the demons that followed in her shadows. Her upbringing, centered on mental illness and growing up in a toxic home, poisoned Jaqui’s view on life.