kin

they say that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. I don’t know who “they” is (and more of that later!) but I guess “they” are right.

AJ wasn’t that long into his spiral of chronic anxiety and depression when it became apparent that most of the kids he had grown up with had one by one drifted away. I don’t know what happened – and I am not sure that he did or does, but they kind of disappeared into the ether. It was gradual, so I didn’t notice at first, and then one day I realised they had all gone. I still miss some of them now. Of course, many childhood friendships come to an end – not through any event as such, simply the passage of time, changing interests and making different choices. At that age friendship groups change so fast – we are all counselled not to choose secondary education based on friendship groups – however most of us do, only to find the groupings that mattered so much to them at the time have changed by October half term. It’s such a difficult, at times painful age. Emotions and slights become amplified, an endless search for hidden meaning and subtext where perhaps there was none. Feeling things so keenly you imagine you will never recover.

Whilst he was a very popular kid in his year group – he long had a tendency to develop just one or two very intense and close relationships – only for them to change quite suddenly and for no obvious reason, at least when you are on the outside of it looking in. By the summer of year 9 the sands had definitely shifted and by the time he went back into school at the start of year 10, a change had set in.

At the time, we put most of this down to teenage hormones. He was obsessively secretive. He went for weeks barely leaving the house other than to go to school, then weeks of barely being at home. Who know where he went on those days, you could drive yourself mad wondering. He was withdrawn, mono-syllabic even. He avoided school. There was a long line of ailments, all designed to ensure he didn’t need to get on that bus. I too, became obsessive about analysing conversations, text messages, pretty much every interaction. What was said, sometimes what was not said, the inflection of his voice. Did he or could he look at me – I felt if I could look directly into his eyes it would somehow give me more data, something to go on. I also spent a great deal of time trying anxiously to normalise his behaviour – partly for my own sake as much as his. Every interaction filed in “normal teenage behaviour” or perhaps “not”. I desperately tried to rationalise everything – conscious of over-reacting and appearing hysterical. Or making things worse, which I did, frequently.

He said he hated school, that he didn’t have a friend in the world. That every day was an ordeal, that every minute there was a torment. The school absolutely did not recognise the child that we described to them, but for certain, his version of reality was very real to him. Both his brother and his cousins, also at the school, struggled to recognise his version of reality, saying that he seemed wildly popular – the unofficial King of his year. Everybody wanted to be his friend. I’ve thought about this endlessly, and concluded that I do think it’s possible for both of these versions of the truth to be possible. I suspect it was part of the torment.

I have never doubted that he found every moment in school a terrible trial, and that he sincerely felt that nobody wanted to be his friend. Or perhaps – nobody would want to be his friend if they knew who he really was – riddled with anxiety and self doubt, feeling inadequate and totally out of place. It was as if the persona he had invented – life and soul of the party, a sports jock, a joker, a boy supremely at ease with himself – was at complete odds with who he felt he was inside. The strain of having these two characters side by side was just too much for him. Interestingly, later on, how he would refer to himself often in the third person, as if he had stepped out of one characters shoes and into the other. This would sometimes last for weeks on end.

Sometime at around the start of year 10, things really started to change. His appearance, never immaculate, but carefully and consciously thought through, went noticeably downhill. He became scruffy and unkempt. He shuffled about for days on end in the same clothes, not washing, and not seeming to notice that he needed to.

The way he talked changed. On the odd occasions where he chose, or had to talk to us, he started to talk in the language of the street. Barely audible for much of the time, when you could hear him his speech came delivered with a kind of local street twang, which at first felt terribly contrived but as time went on became the norm.

He was out most of the time. We put a tracking app on his phone, which he would deactivate the minute he left the house. We saw him hanging out in town with kids we didn’t recognise. their faces largely obscured by shadows and hoods. He would not say who they were – other than they were his new friends – and they were sound. There was definitely absolutely nothing to worry about. Any further probing would be met with a furious backlash and he would inevitably disappear into the night, sometimes not coming home for several days. We were desperate with worry. He had found a new tribe, and he was doing his damndest to fit in.

We asked around. We didn’t find out too much – as nobody in the circle of people we knew had very much to say about this new crowd – other than they were, by reputation, not the kind of kids you would want your child hanging out with. Later of course, the same applied to AJ. I’m not sure when I realised that we had become the kind of family that you warn your kids about – but the dawning realisation was another first that I never anticipated feeling when I set out so hopefully and naively into parenthood.

The tribe never, ever set foot in our house. At least not when we were there. They would lurk outside – not too near, although often near enough that I could just make them out. Looming, foreboding, they would text and within seconds he would have bounded down the stairs and out of the door, before I was able to ask where he was going. It was just about the only time that he moved quickly – the rest of the time seemed to move in slow motion. We were living in a reality that was so distorted by half-truths and omission that I came to constantly question myself, my judgement, and my reactions to things. Repeatedly being told I was over-reacting and catastrophising, later on, I was criticised by social services for not reacting enough.

A word about the authorities here. Rightly or wrongly, for the most part we had made the decision to run the gauntlet of trying to keep away from the radar of authorities – both police and social services particularly. I was absolutely convinced that we needed to try and keep him in school at all costs – and that an exclusion would mean a place in a pupil referral unit. Working in education, I truly felt that this would be the worst possible place for him to be. With the benefit of hindsight – perhaps I was wrong, but I will never really know. Our strategy with his school was to not reveal the extent of the problems and concerns we had – for fear that they would alert social services. If you’ve been with me on my blogging journey from the start you will know that when they eventually became involved in the main it was a roundly unhelpful, destructive experience, with one or two noteable exceptions ( and by that I mean individuals. One in particular, who since left the service as she couldn’t bear to not be able to help the kids in her care the way in which she would and could, if she just had less of a case load. She was a star. Don’t get me started. ) So for a very long time, we tried to manage our spiralling situation ourselves, with some input from the GP, whilst we got routinely turned away from mental health services.

He started self-medicating, and the self-medication started pretty hard, and it started with ketamine. Except I didn’t know it at the time. The fair comes to town in late September, and it has long been a favourite time of the year for me, marking the gateway to the Autumn. I have been going since I was a little girl, saving up my (scant) pocket money for that one precious evening where it would be spent on just a ride or two, winning a goldfish that my dad would swear about and which of course would last only a few weeks before being found floating in the fish tank, and coming home clutching a hideous plastic toy from the hook a duck, having perhaps got my teeth stuck in the obligatory toffee apple. We returned to the town of my childhood when we decided to start our own family, and the tradition of the trip to the fair started again in earnest.

AJ went to the fair with his new tribe. Only they kind of didn’t really. We took little M and saw them huddled on the town hall steps. Hooded, aloof, slightly menacing in their group. I know he saw us but he looked right through us as if we didn’t exist. Little M was so puzzled by this, and we moved along with him quickly. AJ came home at some point in the early hours and went to bed. When I say he went to bed, we found him the next day, sound asleep in the clothes he had gone out in. And there he stayed, with the exception of emerging every now and then for a drink or food, for nearly a week. And I assumed that he’d had a hard night on the drink (which was bad enough in itself but not out of kilter with many other teenagers) and then perhaps had a cold. It was a very long time before I learned that he had taken ketamine. He told me himself, and I had to look it up. Now I can tell if he has taken it at a glance. Whilst it has only been on a handful of occasions the impact is instantly recognisable to me.

As is the impact of Xanax. A couple of years ago, it was the thing, apparently. Cheaper than a bag of chips, and far easier to buy than alcohol. It was everywhere. AJ was once suspended from School alongside maybe 10 others who had all taken some in a maths lesson. Several ended up in hospital. He came home looking as if he’d had a stroke. I was terrified. Of course, he refused to admit he had taken anything and staggered up the stairs to bed where he instantly fell into a very deep sleep. We were so green, back then. I had no idea what had happened until the Headteacher called me the next morning.

I had in many respects a terribly sheltered upbringing. I was also that child that was perpetually in fear of something, sometimes I knew what, many times I didn’t. Kind of a continual impending sense of doom. I had never seen a drug of any description in my entire life until it all started with AJ. I was literally clueless.

So, this new crowd. He called them friends, to me they were the enemy. Dementors. Bit by bit they were taking my son in front of my very eyes and I was absolutely powerless to stop it. In fact, the more I tried to stop it, the worse it became. And I did try.

If I left the house I would often hear someone scuttling away into the night. Or hovering, doing rounds of the block. One night, seized with an unfathomable rage of motherly fury, I found myself, in the corner of a darkened car park, handing over cash to someone whose face I couldn’t quite see – flanked by several faceless others – begging them to stop supplying my son and leave us all alone. I tried to reason with them. It seems utterly ridiculous now – on so many levels – but I felt that if they could just see the impact that they were having on our whole family they would leave us alone. I told them that he couldn’t afford to pay them – and now, nor could I. They said very, very little. And then what they did say sent a chill down my spine “It’s (The Middle One) I feel sorry for”. I felt as if my heart had stopped. “How do you know him?” I asked. But they were already moving away. And then they were gone. I looked up into the night sky as if somehow the answer might be written up in the stars. I felt very, very stupid. Some months later I found that The Middle One had been trying to pay these people off to keep them at bay, with money earned in his evening job after school. Writing that breaks my heart, even now.

You would have thought that after this incident, I would have been more careful about confrontations, and generally speaking, I was. And then every now and then I would be seized by desperation, rage, I’m not sure what, a kind of mad bravado of a mother at her wits end, and I would set off in search of some kind of retribution.

And so the sticky, balmy, summers evening came, when I was sitting in my garden, wondering where he was and who he was with, as little M pottered about pulling up the young plants we had not long put into the garden. An anonymous text message appeared……your son is at the garages. For some reason that escapes me now, I was seized with a righteous madness that told me to go and confront them all and bring home my son. And so it was that I set off apace to try and find them. It took a while but I followed the smell of weed and sure enough found him, and them, huddled in an open garage space. As I rounded the corner I saw something passed from one to the other to the next one – quick as a flash. I don’t know what it was, it moved too fast. A slanging match ensued, I was overtaken with fury. Their faces ranged from mild embarrassment, to boredom, to humour. It was the humour that really got me. I tried to get whatever it was that had been passed down the line, it had been slipped into a jacket pocket and I wanted to see it for myself. A tousle. It was in my hands. I ran. They ran. Shouting, laughing “AJ your mums a fucking nutter” but I was ahead, then there was a hand grabbing my jacket, I fell, and then nothing.

I dont know how long I was there for. Maybe a few minutes. I came round, face down in the middle of the road. There was gravel in the palms of my hand. I hurt everywhere, but mostly, deep inside my chest. They were nowhere to be seen. A builder working on some scaffolding at a nearby building site was shouting “I’ve seen it all, someone call the police. Ambulance”. Footsteps, muffled, then faster. I could taste blood in my mouth. “Mum, mum”. Bare feet in front of me. Someone had gone to fetch the Middle One. Then my husband. Then people coming out of their houses. “Call the police” they said. “No” I whispered, pleading, and I limped home, supported by The Middle One. He had run all the way there in his bare feet.

We didn’t call the police and we didn’t ring an ambulance. Luckily, I felt, nor did anyone else. I did sustain an injury to my wrist which has permanent nerve damage, and I was treated in hospital for it, but I made up a story. I couldn’t bear to tell the real story, and I have only just done so now, to you. There is no moral to this tale. I guess there are words of advice, with the benefit of hindsight. Don’t go meeting drug dealers in dark alleys, and expecting any compassion or sympathy from them. Oh, the naivety. Don’t confront bloody great big teenagers who are high on god knows what and expect any good to come of it. You can’t influence who they are friends with, they find their tribe, and there is nothing you can do about it except wait, and hope and pray that they come out of it the other end.

He has, I think. There are wobbles. The path to recovery from desperately low self-esteem and self-loathing isn’t linear. This is not a feel-good hollywood movie. The spiral of massively limiting self-beliefs mean that self-sabotage, self-doubt and the propensity to take the slightest set-back as meaning the end of the world is always there. But that particular tribe have gone. Gradually, over time, there is a new tribe. It’s small. It has girls in it. The girls take no shit, and I like that. Before lockdown, they hung out at our house, all eyelashes and lip gloss, and had fun. They ate pizza and drank cheap beer and cocktails and played masses of x-Box and music too loudly and every time I heard that racket going on I smiled and thought – thank God. I know where he is, I know who he’s with, and they are just ordinary kids. The fear never, ever leaves you but the relief could swallow you whole.

Post script: It’s been a while since I last published a post. I have been drafting this one for some weeks, but I have found it very difficult. I’ve also been exhausted with work, feeling low myself and decided to give myself a break. I’ve also had a flurry of trolling since the last post, and whilst it has not upset me greatly, not least as you can’t put this stuff out there and not expect some of that, for a while it was difficult to find the motivation. I say all of this not for sympathy but in the spirit of sharing the fact that we all have our struggles from time to time, and I gave myself permission to withdraw and regroup for a bit. And I’m only answerable to me.