just because she wears it well doesn’t mean it isn’t heavy

I am tired. Little M says he is either “sleepy tired” and sometimes “tired in my bones”. I am tired in my bones. My mind is too full, my eyes are perpetually circled with dark shadows, and my heart is heavy.

I am completely unremarkable. I am like countless others across this planet. Adulthood brings responsibility, whether for children, parents, siblings, dependents, pets, employers, friends and neighbours. We all carry those responsibilities every single day, and some of us carry them better than others. This is not a sprint though, it is a marathon. Nor is it a competition, you have your story and I have mine. Our stories are circumstantial, borne of a million choices we have made and not made, both good luck and bad luck, genetics, access to support and resources, a lack of love and tender care, and a surfeit of it. That makes my story no more or less legitimate to me than yours is to you. We are equal, in our bid to muddle along in this big wide world.

I did not wait for adulthood before assuming the weight of the world on my shoulders. I took that on at a very early age, which of course became the root of my chronic anxiety as a child. A while ago I wrote about (some of) my long list of childhood anxieties, that broad expanse covering everything from the world’s great inequalities, to Russians, to what I feared was the imminent expiry of a household pet. Oh, and of course, worrying a great deal about a plethora of things that might never happen, that and world peace. It is no wonder that I have spent almost my entire career in one form of public service or another, my dad once commenting when I was a teenager that I had enough social conscience for our entire family put together. I am conscious of the unattractive picture I am painting of a precocious, tiresome girl. It makes me laugh to write that, but I am sure it wasn’t funny at the time.

My very strong need for equilibrium and a stress-free world didn’t just stop at worry at abstract concepts, world peace and humdrum micro issues. Oh no, I was far more proactive than that. I anointed myself as family peacemaker and went about my duties very seriously. In a family of four girls, two stressed working parents, a backdrop of gnawing, omnipresent financial worries, a crumbling, tumble down, freezing cold, damp house and a menagerie of pets we could ill afford, there was plenty of raw material to work with. Older sister having boyfriend issues? No problem, I could hide behind the curtains in her room and pop out at just the right moment to offer 8 year old advice to the unhappy couple at just the right (wrong) time. Money worries? No problem, I could set up a stall at the garden gate selling at least third-hand rubbish that nobody wanted. Overheard rows about money to buy food? No problem, I could set off across the fields foraging for blackberries, or whatever was in season. I had an absolute overriding need to make everything alright. This extended to me too. I needed to be “good” and “no trouble” so as not to add to the burden of household worry. I feel the need to say here that my rebellious younger sister ( and the youngest of we four) was not troubled by this same anxiety. She did exactly as she pleased, whenever she pleased, from toddlerhood until the day she left home, regardless of the consequences, all whilst I looked on aghast. Ah, memories. Good for her!

My interfering in household matters in order to smooth things over knew no bounds and I was particularly alert to the need (as I saw it) to insert myself into my parents relationship whenever it looked like things were going to kick off, which they did frequently. They both have very short fuses, my mums infinitely the worse of the two during my childhood, although in their later years it is my dad who is now the more mercurial. When I was little, dad seemed permanently angry with the world, a bitter cynicism largely directed at the privileged and the class divide, yet with a strong wish for us all to better ourselves. Thatcher the milk snatcher had signalled the withdrawal of free school milk for the over sevens the year that I was born, and my dad hasn’t got over the outrage, even today. Mum on the other hand went between relatively benign, given to long periods of quiet introspection, but punctuated with spectacular eruptions of bad temper. I wonder if the years of my meddling helped them get to over 50 years of marriage or in fact hindered them, but they are still together in their 80s, unhappily rubbing along like Hinge and Bracket (look it up, kids). While I think about it, I suppose I still do intervene from time to time. Hmmm. Note to self!

When riled, my mother was hot-tempered, potty-mouthed and impetuous. At the time I was mortified by it, of course I adore it now. It’s perhaps a better look in later years? We were latchkey kids, so we would be home from school before mum came home from work, her little moped buzzing like an angry wasp as she sped too fast down the hill. She was like a brooding thundercloud on two wheels. Bracing ourselves, we would wait for the door to swing open, and removing her helmet, she would rage about her day, which seemed to often end with her shouting “and then I told him where he could stick his bloody job”. And she usually did. In my memory, she never knowingly left any of her myriad of jobs except for in a blaze of glory. She must have been the employee from hell, a female captain caveman. In my late teens, I worked once with her, and literally only once. One night. She was cooking in a hotel restaurant and I was asked to go in to cover a waitress who was unwell. Halfway through silver-serving a grey haired, well manicured customer in the restaurant, a voice carried through from the kitchen, clear as a bell. “If you bring me one more bloody order after half past nine you can bloody well cook it yourself!”. “Good lord” said the woman I was serving, “Who on earth is that?”. “My mum” I replied, and I never went back. 

The problem was, we couldn’t afford for her to saddle up her moral moped and ride off into the sunset without so much as a backwards glance as often as she did, or in fact at all. We were really, really struggling, and we did for most of my childhood. I don’t think I actually realised that we were poor, or hadn’t thought of our family as such, until the day I overheard some girls talking about us at Primary School as my dad lurched off in his clapped out Ford Cortina with the vinyl roof peeling off alarmingly. It was like a car version of his comb-over. “Look at the state of that car” one said. “They’re poor” came the explanation. It stung. Were we poor? We must be.

Dad also seemed to go from one employment mishap after the other, although never as dramatically as mum. She worked a whole load of jobs, very often in kitchens, all ending in one disaster or another. Lack of money was a constant, bleak backdrop. We were largely fed from whatever mum brought home from the kitchens she worked in, transported  in washed out ice-cream tubs secured by a grubby elastic band and hidden in the bottom of her bag. Even the elastic band had seen better days. Our lives were like that – it seemed we were constantly living on the fly – just about getting by, limping along from one issue to the next. Again, I realise now that we were utterly unremarkable in that respect – there was a nation of other households not dissimilar to ours – back then and also now. It is a daily grind. I was obsessed with watching the dial on the electricity meter – as it made its way steadily towards the red I would feel physically sick, wondering at what point it would eventually run out. The day we upgraded to buying a sofa on tick rather than the usual parade of second hand cast-offs, I thought we’d arrived. Like so many others, we rented the telly from Rumbelows and if there was a really special occasion, you might get lucky and get something new for a change from the Great Universal catalogue, which was also the source of much (free) entertainment, looking at men in their underpants. 

One particular day, there was the mother of all rows. Mum had stormed out of yet another job and my dad was absolutely incandescent. Really, truly, at the end of his tether. There was a screaming exchange about money and dad slammed out of the house to take it out on his latest clapped out motor. (He has always said he believed in buying old bangers and then running them into the ground. I suspect this was borne of necessity and principles, but it was often inconvenient. The day mum went into labour with my youngest sister, the engine of the mini was sitting next to it on the road outside the house, and being 25 miles away from the hospital, the air was blue. I digress.) Mum lit another Raffles cigarette and went outside to take it out on the garden. I had heard every word of this row and I decided to take action. My heart pounding, I raced downstairs, scraping together some loose change from the bottom of mum’s bag. No more than a few coppers, probably. I took my bike out of the shed, and pedalling furiously, climbed the half mile of hill into the nearest village. Reaching the phone box, I abandoned my bike and went in. I can still remember the smell of that phone box, not least as I spent a good deal of time in it over the course of my childhood, that and the bus shelter. It’s where later we would gather with friends to ring dial- a- disc, or to nominate one amongst our number to ring the boy we all were mad about, only to collapse in giggles and slam the phone down the minute the poor guy came to the phone.  Leafing through the Yellow Pages, I found the name of mum’s employers. Then began a charade of trying to commit it to memory, as I needed to stand on top of it to see the numbers properly on the dial. Several attempts were made – memorise the number, stand on the directory – go to dial – forget the number. Finally I realised I had no choice but to rip out the page. Gripped with fear I looked around to see if anyone was watching me. It was the single most outrageous act I had committed to date ( and thinking about it, for many years after!). Eventually, pushing the coppers into the slot, I dialled the number. Job done, I carefully inserted the page back into the Yellow Pages and made my getaway. I figured if I was later taken in for questioning about my transgression I decided I could probably make a good case for myself and avoid incarceration. I was definitely too delicate for that. I think I must have been about nine. I shudder as I write this, as I wonder who was more mortified. My parents when they realised what I had done or mums (ex) employer, to have a small girl sobbing down the phone and asking for her mums job back. You see? I was not a normal child. I wanted to fix the world, and I wanted badly to fix my family.

Fast forward to the workplace, I climbed the ladder pretty fast (still Miss Goody Two Shoes) and took on a very maternal, nurturing approach to anyone that I managed. I thought this was the right and only thing to do until I started work with a coach (one of the most pivotal, profoundly influential women I have ever met – but that is another story) who suggested to me that this was not only inappropriate but wholly unhelpful approach which served to make grown adults dependent on me. I was really deeply offended by this feedback. She later went on to point out that it wasn’t normal to be 36 weeks pregnant and still trying to cover it up at work, in case anyone thought I was letting the side down. When I eventually told my team the announcement was met with much hilarity and not a little relief. I think “No shit sherlock” was the phrase. Given I had put on almost three stone it had been patently obvious to everyone for months, and they were all mystified as to why not a word had been said. 

Years later, it was this same coach who leaned across the table at lunch one day and told me gently that I would not be able to fix AJ. I could not and would not accept it. I was angry that after all the years that we had worked together – she didn’t really know me at all. I fix things. I make things better. I would make things better. I might have finally accepted that it’s not right to mother your team at work, but surely I was entitled to mother my child? I am ashamed to say that on reflection, I don’t think our relationship was ever the same after that day, and now I know enough to know without question, she was right and I was wrong. So wrong. I simply could not accept that I had no part to play, other than being his mother. I have subsequently learned that being a parent of a child with severe mental illness is to feel like a bystander with both hands tied behind your back. I must make that phone call and say thankyou to her, and that you were right and I was wrong, which she won’t need to hear but I need to say, along with saying sorry. Broken, fragmented and strained relationships are an inevitable by-product of mental illness in the family, and some of them will be of your own making. I offer no blame or judgement here, it is what it is. 

It is a shame that we come to forgiveness and a true understanding of our parents only when we are in mid-life ourselves. As a child I was embarrassed by our circumstances and I longed to be the family we were not. Yet we were loved and cared for. We did not go hungry, nor did we go unclothed. We were cold but then so many of us did grow up without heating, and you could always put another hand-me-down jumper on. Dad is one of the most highly intelligent, talented men I have ever known who for one reason or another turned his back on the career as an artist and sculptor he had trained for and spent a good deal of his life being angry about it. Mum just spent a good deal of her life being angry. I know now that she had every right to be, and our upbringing compared to hers was a chocolate-box childhood.

We had fields to play in, we had each other, we had music and books and intelligent conversation. We had parents who wanted better for us, and believed that we could do it. From a very young age, when funds permitted, dad would scrape together the bus fare to take me into Oxford. We visited every free museum and gallery, where he would delight in spending hours talking to me about great artists and composers, how to read and understand paintings, to appreciate both modern and more traditional art forms. He taught me about Modigliani and Mozart, Boccherini and Da Vinci. We visited most of the Oxford colleges and he would explain the history of each. He dreamed of me going to Oxford, and was greatly disappointed when I had other ideas. I went for a few interviews and was rather nonplussed at best, until I had a terrible experience at Oriel where I was almost physically picked up by two strapping women and carted off to a Boat House to have a look round. “You’ll make a good cox” they boomed. Talk about a cox out of water. I couldn’t have picked a more inappropriate college to visit, and the entire experience sealed the fate of my poor dad’s great plans for Oxford. Besides. I was tired of being the poor one, and I could see that here, I would never feel anything other than that. 

I was so ungrateful. My parents carried great burdens which were invisible to me. Worklessness, one financial disaster after another, the threat of eviction, and a small daughter who bellyached constantly about racism, nuclear war, potential kidnappers and peas. We were eventually evicted from the tied house I spent the first ten years of my life in. My dad had been made redundant, the house was to be sold, and we had to go. We didn’t go far though – just to the nearest village up the hill half a mile away. We took the glass out of mum’s beloved greenhouse and we sisters carried the frame up the hill to the garden of our new council house. We went back for the dog (who was not dead yet) and pushed her up the hill in a wheelbarrow, as her back legs were too riddled with arthritis to walk. Our new neighbours must have thought we were the Beverley Hillbillies. I have no memory of the bailiffs arriving. I don’t know if that was because we were ushered out of the way or if we did a runner before they came. The new house was a palace. Whilst a fraction of the size of the tied house, and still without heating, it was compact and had square walls and proper corners and wasn’t dark, or had mould on the walls. It became home for the rest of my childhood.

As an adult I have none of the same anxieties as my parents. I made it my business not to have. I do not want for material things. I have realised that these are not the things that matter. I would give them up in a heartbeat to have my son back. My point, and I realise I have taken a long time to illustrate this, is that each and every one of us face difficulties of every variety each and every day. We need not compare them because it doesn’t matter. You have your story and I have mine. Yours is as legitimate to you as mine is to me. We are all carrying burdens and some of us seemingly carry them well. I say seemingly, as sometimes, that is a carefully crafted illusion. If I can keep my composure, it must be alright. If I can look perfect, then I can be safe. Or mums preferred option, if I pretend it isn’t happening, it then can’t be true. Whilst completely understandable, at times none of these things is helpful, to me, to you, or to anyone on the outside looking in. 

Sometimes we don’t have enough emotional bandwidth to have a conversation about what is on our mind. Just as people have crossed the street to avoid talking to me, I have also hidden in shops before, rather than risk someone asking me if I’m ok. I’ve actually once hidden in a cupboard to avoid having to talk to someone. Sometimes, I cannot risk replying with anything other than “fine” when someone asks me how I’m doing, for fear of opening the floodgates of my bruised heart. We all do that, don’t we? Present that face to the world. I’m not saying we should all go around emoting all the time, lord knows it is surely a way to clear a room fast. I find it far easier to talk about something when it feels safely behind me – it’s a sort of dissociation I think. It feels like I’m talking about someone else. But when someone you know and trust asks you – and I mean really asks you – how you are doing when you aren’t doing well, sometimes it might be worth taking a risk and answering differently. Sometimes a stiff upper lip is bullshit and so is having it all. If we all just stopped pretending maybe we’d all feel a little less inadequate. Please remember that next time you’re comparing your life to someone else’s on social media, and find yourself wanting. It’s in the most part a carefully curated mirage. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just saying remember it.

We are into our fifth year of life as it is in this household. It has taken its toll on all of us in different ways. AJ turned 18 last summer. It was a day that we had longed for at times, in some of the darkest hours I would occasionally fantasise about no longer being responsible for him. It’s hard to admit that – it seems so grossly lacking in any maternal instinct. And it’s a fantasy of course, I will feel responsible for him for all my living days.

Before this latest lockdown we had a rare and unplanned lunch together. I have found that the best times to have proper (although sometimes fleeting) real conversations with my two eldest are in the car, whilst walking the dog, or if I dangle the offer of eating out in front of them. There was a chance day with only the two of us in the house. It was a “good” day. He was home, in every sense of the word. For a long time we had three main states, which were: missing; home but metaphorically “missing”; and home and present. I lived for the home and present. For a long time it seemed that those instances were fleeting. He would sometimes announce the transition between the latter two states, saying something like “I’m back” or “AJs back”. I used to cling desperately to the home and present times. I would go over the top, cooking favourite foods and trying to plan things to do together, we five. I have learned not to do that now, for his sake and for mine. I notice, I bloom inside, but I am more outwardly casual. I know now to enjoy that time in the moment, to treasure and cherish it and also to let go of it more gently when it surely passes, accepting it will likely come again. Finding some equilibrium is important when you’re in it for the long term. More measured when good times come, more accepting when they go. 

“Do you fancy going for some lunch” I asked, and to my delight he said yes. And so we sat, facing each other in a booth (they all love a booth) nursing paninis and fries. I ordered water and he ordered a milkshake. I laughed. “But you’re an adult now,” I said. “No mum”, he replied, “I might be 18 now but I’m definitely still a child”. We ate good naturedly, him talking about learning to drive and me quietly soaking in the bliss of these snatched moments of his company. More precious than the roof over my head. Needless to say, he wolfed down his food, and called for the bill. I took out my purse and he said “No mum, my treat”. Swiping his debit card, he stood up to leave. He ruffled my hair, kissing the top of my head and said “ I love you mum” and I told him I loved him too. I couldn’t stop myself from asking where he was going and who he would be with, I never can. I really must learn how to stop. He shrugged, “ah, you know, noone”. “Be good” I replied, and he smiled, as if I was the most gullible person on earth. “I will” he said and turned tail. You won’t, I thought. 

I ordered a coffee, turning things over. I was exhausted with the strain of holding it all together. Even my body was held rigid, with the resultant inevitable and constant aches and pains. Nobody held that expectation of me, only I. People often say “I don’t know how you do it” – to which the simple answer is that there is no choice. However, I can choose how I respond when someone asks me how I am. Instead of the usual “fine” I might sometimes entertain, “actually not so good”. I had recently bumped into the mother of one of Milo’s friends. “How are you she said”, “Yup, fine” I replied, and then burst into floods of tears. Inconvenient, whilst surveying the yoghurt options in Sainsburys. Something had to give.

He is his own person now. I can’t live his life for him, and I will no longer allow the last few years to cast such a long shadow over mine, at least, not all of the time. Getting up every day and wondering if that’s the day when the sky will fall in again is exhausting, stifling, de-humanising. It takes the air out of your lungs, the cloying fear of what might happen next renders you powerless.

He will make choices, right and wrong, as I have and will. I will see disasters waiting to happen and know that I am powerless to stop them. I am a bystander in his life now, more than ever. This time, not only with my hands tied behind my back, but also without a voice. I can no longer advocate for him. I am no longer entitled to information. He will or won’t make his own decisions about his own healthcare, and he is in charge of what he chooses to share with me.  

I need to learn to stop trying to carry his burden for him, and on occasion try and rest mine awhile. I will always be there to pick up the pieces. I have stopped running away from who I am. I am no longer ashamed of my upbringing, and I am in awe of my parents who did so much for me, for all of us. I see my mother for the extraordinary person that she is. 

I have my life to get on with. I will not hide in the shadows (or from people in supermarkets!) any more. What has happened to us could happen to any family. There but for the grace of God go the rest of you. This experience will not define me, but it has shaped who I am. I am older and wiser and I have freed myself by not being ashamed to show some vulnerability. I am my next fixer upper. Now is the time to offer myself some grace. 

Just as he is in his bid to separate from me, so I must learn to separate from him. I smiled to myself. My beautiful, hapless, generous, gentle, lost man-child. 

I finished my coffee, put on my jacket, stepped out into the bustling high street, and turned my face to the sun. 

Footnote: this photograph is used with the kind permission of Noelle Mirabella Photography. You can find her at noellemirabella.com. When I saw first saw this photograph it stopped me in my tracks. Cassandra says “This image was inspired by my life as a woman and a young single mother. You can find the story, whatever it means to you…….There are hidden messages throughout this entire image. It is a work of art that I am most proud of. It is not just my story, but the story of billions of women around the world”

Love and rage.