rituals and rites of passage

in this journey of ours some of the hardest times for me have strangely not to be those in the middle of a crisis. The days where I have seemingly coped well have also been the worst of days, I suppose, if you were on the outside looking in. The days sitting by a hospital bed, willing and willing your child back to health. When you become more familiar than you ever imagined you would need to be in reading an ECG, watching monitors and searching faces for any trace of a flicker that might give you more data, good or bad. The upturn or downturn of a corner of a mouth, a blink or maybe a nervous swallow before somebody arranges a form of words to say to you.

In my experience, those are the days, where adrenalin kicks in, the days where despite being terrified I have also been purposeful, relentless and assertive to the point of being terrifying, I imagine, on occasion. I would not have liked to have been on the wrong side of me on one of those days. I think I’ve said it before, I can see that I might be one of the worst kind of parents to deal with in that situation. I read too much, I am educated and can and will advocate for myself and my child, and I listen to far too much radio 4. I know when I am being fobbed off. I am trying to stop short of saying I know my rights (although to an extent, that is true). In the main, I would say that none of those things has actually got me terribly far, and I have wondered at times if all it results in is the medical equivalent of someone spitting in your food before taking it out into the restaurant and putting it in front of you. As usual, I digress. I guess my point being, I don’t think I can recall any more memorable time when I have pulled myself up to my full 5ft 3.5 ( I was once 5 ft 4 but I am already shrinking) and unleashed the full power of my maternal instinct. I am most definitely my mother’s daughter. I once asked AJ’s dad why he wasn’t angry and he replied “you’re angry enough for all of us”.

Getting back to where I started, the worst of times to begin with took me by surprise, but more latterly have been comfortably predictable, to the point where you could risk twenty quid or so if Ladbroke’s would give you odds.

I would categorise those days as those of family ritual and also those linked to rites of passage – and they have been some of the hardest to bear during these last years.

I love family rituals. Every family has their rituals. When I was growing up, we lurched from one financial precipice to the next. Lack of money was a constant and pervasive backdrop, and a continual source of worry. Aside from the anxiety and the embarrassment, which I did carry heavily, ( I can still recall overheard discussions in the playground that make me hot with indignation even now) I have very fond memories of a childhood that was punctuated by family rituals. We didn’t have much, but mum did so much with what we had. A birthday party every year in the garden, with a homemade cake decorated with fresh flowers, and a handsewn birthday dress each year made my mum on her old Singer, the treadle going for days in advance. Said birthday dress always referred to as a “Birthday Suit”. A family holiday in years where there was enough cash scraped together, camping in Dorset or Devon or if it was a particularly flush year, a leaky caravan in Weymouth. Setting off in our knackered old Mini, us four girls in the back sitting atop a pile of old blankets and eiderdowns, together with the dog (an Alsation, so space was a premium!), whilst mum and dad puffed away on cigarettes ( Raffles, black packet) and cigars ( Hamlet) in the front. Stopping at the side of the road after an hour or so, with dad topping up the car radiator with the orange squash mum had made for lunch and moaning about how much he “bloody hated going on holiday”. Those were the days!

I’ve made sure that now I have my own children we have our own family rituals, and they are very important to me. I’d like to say us, but I’m not sure that you fully appreciate family rituals until you are old enough to feel nostalgia! Our year is punctuated by familiar events, the annual family trip to Brighton (22 years and counting), the Circus in the Spring, touring the town Christmas lights the first weekend in December. We have family sayings (“let’s have a lovely chat about our feelings” can clear a room in under 30 seconds), we swim at the Lido, we play scrabble on a summers evening in the garden. Christmas is particularly full of ritual, and Christmas Eve is always spent in Broadway having lunch. Christmas Eve is my absolute favourite day of the year. Or was.

There is an extent to which you have to let go of some of this stuff as your kids go grow up – people keep telling me that you let them go and then they come back. Perhaps we are just about getting into the coming back phase – I find especially if it involves food. It’s difficult at times to distinguish what is just normal teenage vile behaviour, what is excessively vile and less run-of-the-mill teenage behaviour, and what is down to being genuinely unwell ( but even then you wonder at times if you are being played). Four years down the line, I think I’ve probably got a relatively good handle on this most of the time, a bit like I now have a well developed radar for weed and other narcotics. If I ever leave my job in education I reckon I have a second career as a police sniffer dog.

Letting go of my rituals has been like parting ways with an old friend. If I was being a wise old sage I would advise others to guard against holding them so close – on the basis that it’ll all end in tears. I won’t go into the details but I spent one Christmas Eve a couple of years ago literally sobbing under the duvet from around 9am in the morning, to the extent that I emerged on Christmas Day looking like I’d done ten rounds with Mike Tyson. I learned that year – hold no expectations and do what you would have done anyway – if they come, they come, and if they don’t, then don’t take it to heart. Last year we were back on for Christmas Eve – because of course it involves food. That’s OK, we can laugh about it, I can accept it for what it is, and know that as soon as they’ve finished eating they will leg it back to their mates. It seems such a small thing, and I made it into such a big thing, it feels ridiculous now looking back on it. But I am writing about it as I know I’m not the only one. Yes, I’m looking at you!

And onto rites of passage. Truthfully, I have struggled with this. Now I don’t think I have ever really subscribed to the school of competitive parenting. I think most of us just rub along, hoping that we don’t have too many A&E visits before they get to double figures, that they take good care of their adult teeth and grow up to be upstanding individuals that are reasonably well adjusted. With one or two noteable exceptions (you know who you are!) I really found the whole NCT scene intimidating and tiresome (sorry folks, I’m sure many of you get a lot out of it) but for me, that endless raking over who was on solids first ( but then by the time I had little M, it was who was on solids last!), who was rolling over first, first steps, someone reading by the age of 18 months and taking their GCSE French at 5 ( I made that up but you know what I mean). TIRESOME. I’m the kind of person who decanted gin into a pink lemonade bottle, I just didn’t want to spend my time obsessing about that competitive milestone stuff. Maybe that’s where I went wrong?! And yet. I have taken the rites of passage, or our missing the rites of passage, very hard indeed. Those milestones that you can tick off on the way – both celebrating and perhaps slightly sad – but nevertheless marking the successful passage of one stage to the next.

Sixteenth birthday, painful, GCSE results day, possibly more painful. Prom night – snuck up and got me.

I didn’t even know it was Prom night. By then, we were so far removed from school, and from all the baggage and stuff that comes with it, that I had absolutely no idea it was Prom night. AJ had slammed out of the house around supper time, presumably to go and meet the people he now described as his friends. They weren’t his friends at all of course, and he knows that now – but at the time I guess he was looking for some kind of a tribe and he found them, or rather they found him. If you could have lined up a selection of people you really wouldn’t want your child hanging out with – I don’t think you could have planned it better. In fact, we never met or even saw most of them. They hung out in shadows, the ubiquitous hoodies. They hovered outside the house, in alleyways and in the corners of car parks. Names we had never heard of before, but somehow seemed menacing all the same. Nico was the one that really sticks in my mind. I have no idea what Nico looks like but I have a vision of him in my head. I was really worried about most of them, but Nico in particular. To this day I don’t know who he was, but I am haunted by him. One of the social services investigations was focussed on whether or not AJ had been recruited into County lines. They found no evidence of it at all, but whatever was going on it was clear that AJ had become embroiled in a group of people who preyed on vulnerable kids. It was my worst nightmare, and I could do nothing to stop it.

Anyway, that night he had disappeared off without so much as a backwards glance. Little M was playing with his friends, The Middle One was out, and I settled down in the garden with a glass of wine to process the day. I happened to click onto Facebook – which is a very rare occurrence -and a friend’s son popped up. Dressed in a DJ, he was standing in front of a car, I can’t remember what kind, with his arm around a really beautiful girl in a full length dress. In a flash I realised it was Prom night. AJ hadn’t said a word – not one. It was as if everything around me just stopped in that moment – I looked down at my phone and I couldn’t take my eyes off that image. AJ had grown up with him – they had known each other from the age of 2 or 3 – through Dad’s Club and football, rugby and beavers. They had passed every milestone together – until now. And suddenly there he was, flush with having finished his GCSEs, and heading off for the school prom. It was too much. One after the other, more and more popped up. Virtually all of them peers at Primary School, children I had known as babies through Bumps and Babes, Hockey players, an ex girlfriend. All smiling, all looking like their mums had straightened their ties, brushed down their suits, perhaps dabbed them with a tissue, just as I would have done. Before taking their proud photos, and waving them off in their chosen transport of choice, just as I would have done. Before then texting those photos to other family members and uploading them to social media, just as I would have done. Before then settling down with a glass of wine, putting their feet up and thinking – that’s it then. Job done! As I would have done.

Except I didn’t do any of that, I spent the whole night torturing myself by examining every single photo in great detail whilst weeping incontrollably and promising myself I’d only eat half a bag of kettle chips before of course, finishing the lot. Whilst they were all only 16, and some of them not quite 16, I felt as if they had all somehow passed an initiation test and emerged in a rosy glow, unscathed and into young adulthood. All except my child.

Of course I know that not to be entirely, if at all true, and I suspect I knew that back then, if I had allowed the rational part of my brain half a chance. I suspect it is a rare and lucky occurrence to get any child to 16 without having had illness, or heartache, or issues of one sort or another. I should know better than most, that as parents ( and often as children) we hold these issues close to ourselves, as talking about is too difficult, personal, shameful. So I did know that I couldn’t be the only parent feeling like that, but it felt like it that evening. Equally, I know enough to know that for many kids, the prom is probably an excrutiatingly difficult and stressful experience, where many probably spending the evening praying for it to end.

Not my AJ though, or at least, not the AJ I used to know. He really would have been the life and soul of the party. The old AJ would light up any room when he walked in, at ease with himself and the world, talking to anybody and everybody. Ever the clown and the entertainer. However, remember that phrase from way back when – surrounded by people and yet all alone. For that is how he had felt, in the two years running up to that.

I have no idea whether AJ cared that night, about not being at his prom. He possibly did, and very deeply. He possibly didn’t give it a second thought – at the time we were heading for the height of the expanse of distance between us. I didn’t know how to talk to him any more – every single exchange felt taut with tension – more unsaid than said. It was like walking a tightrope every day – the overthinking of each word, each sentence, was omnipresent.

Looking back, I think the school prom was very much my problem, not his. I equated it to such an epic failure of motherhood. I grieved for the child I had known and loved, and was at a complete loss for the child who was still there and a stranger. In truth it was an ugly, self-pitying, almost irrational wallowing in melancholy and nostalgia. I leaned into it by unearthing the old photographs I had tucked away, one by one, in the previous two years, because I hadn’t been able to look at them. I still couldn’t – and yet I did – and it made it worse, and I howled, and I drank too much, and eventually fell into a disturbed nights sleep.

Sometimes it’s OK to give yourself permission to do that. It was like a letting of blood, although I hesitate to use that phrase. These four years have changed me. Every event, every drama, every time I’ve let go of something I held to be important, has hardened me a little, sometimes a lot. Yet in other ways it has softened me. My tolerance levels for stress are far higher than I ever conceivably imagined that they could be, yet they are far lower in some circumstances. A lack of charity, if you will, for what I might consider to be the “fluff” of other peoples lives. No less important or challenging for them, and it’s not a competition in who’s the most miserable. I know that, but I am being truthful. I didn’t feel jealousy that night – I was truly glad for them – but I did feel overwhelming regret and sorrow.

What I know is that letting go of my expectations around rituals and rites of passage is the only way that I am able to feel as well as I can be. Expecting very little means that I can take very great pleasure in very small things. A kiss on the cheek, a rare agreement to walk the dog with me, a phone call to ask how I am. And for the record, he was home for his 18th birthday, he invited a small group of good friends around for supper ( and lovely friends at that) and I delighted in being able to cook for and look after them. The morning after he put his arm around me and said thankyou for such a lovely birthday, and I let my heart swell again, just a little, for I am never quite off guard.