Katerina Mitrevska, author of 'Breakthrough - the reason mother didn't love me' (part 1)

‘Breakthrough - the reason mother didn't love me’ is a rare and moving insight into a childhood lost to mental illness and a young girl's personal battle in tasking society to help make her family whole again. Katerina Mitrevska's recollections through raw and unforgiving poetry, capture the pain and ignorance that surrounded her mother's undiagnosed schizophrenia during her formative years. Battling to keep house and raise a brother as her mother fought the "voices in her head", Katerina illustrates how the power of love and understanding, were key to finally changing the mental health care outcomes for her mother Snezana, many years later. Mitrevska's journey through a suspended childhood plunges the reader into her youth as we learn of her "thinking and overthinking, living in my thoughts", until her years long entanglement with the question "why", left her with the bitter realisation that ‘My childhood flew by’. The 68 poem collection carries the author’s inner child’s piercing cry for help, as she navigated the labyrinth of her mother's mental demons, searching for the nurturing parent she so desperately needed her to be.

Katerina Mitrevska, author of 'Breakthrough-the reason mother didn't love me', a 68 poem collection tracing a childhood lost to schizophrenia. Source: Supplied