enduring friendship

The last few years have largely been quite solitary, and consciously so. I have chosen to withdraw from the majority of the people around me, and much of what I have written thus far has been news to my family and some of my closest friends. The reasons for this are complex and many, but in short, you just do what you need to do in order to get by.

I have written here and there about mum and the coping mechanisms she used over the years – which have largely been built on the premise of pretending things have never happened, and certainly never discussing them. There were many things that were supposedly unseen and unheard in our house during my childhood, yet they were most definitely both seen and heard by me and my sisters. It was a strange thing – often leading you to question your version of reality. It becomes a learned behaviour- the ability to paper over what doesn’t suit you, coupled with an innate inability to face facts.

I have never seen my mum cry more than a handful of times. Rage yes, but tears have been  rare. When I was maybe heading for my late teens, I woke one night and, on autopilot, made my way downstairs to check on the dog. She was sleeping soundly, but I found mum in the living room, shuffling cards, smoking, and weeping softly, silently. She barely looked up, although she knew I was there. I felt an immediate blinding panic beat hard in my chest – she must be dying, I thought, so unused was I to seeing her in tears. We had a strange, uncomfortable, relationship back then, me languishing in hurt and resentment, convinced that she didn’t love me, or at least not as much as the others. And mum? She just didn’t know how, such was her tightly coiled composure and grip on her emotions. I understand that completely now, that need to physically hold yourself taut and together, for fear that if you let any part of you slip, it will release a tidal wave. There was an ocean between us. “Go back to bed”, she said, smoking and shuffling, “I’m fine”. Of course I wouldn’t, or certainly didn’t- for some time. She was utterly steadfast in her resolve, and would not, could not, be drawn. Eventually I gave up trying to get any answers and I went up to wake my dad, and pulling his dressing gown over his nightshirt, he came back downstairs with me. “Go away” he said, “I’ll deal with this now” and reluctantly I went, only to hover on the stairs listening intently. I’m sure he knew I was there. I was never not there. She would not yield and eventually, exhausted, I fell asleep leaning against the bannisters only to be woken sharply by my dad making his way back up the stairs. As he prodded me, I remember feeling the dent of the spindle in my forehead, so heavily had I leaned against it. The same thing happened for perhaps the next three nights, and to this day I don’t know for sure what it was about, albeit I had and have my suspicions. Mum’s habit of internalising things is something that I carried too, and still do to a degree, which of course is ironic given I am sitting here writing this. I have no real memory of mum ever having a friend to share her thoughts with, such was her self-imposed isolation. Having lost all of her family at such a young age, I don’t think she ever really embraced the risk of letting many, if any, people get too close again. It is so sad to write that. 

I had friends who over the passage of the last few years have disappeared into the ether. It fills me with a hollow sadness, but I understand why. There is a great fear and stigmatisation that attaches itself to situations like ours. Some people retract, recoiling in horror at the thought of “catching” the disease that we are branded with. There but for the grace of god go they, only they won’t be so careless as to have allowed it to happen to their child on their watch. People have literally and metaphorically crossed over the road to avoid me, and I guess that is inevitable. For some, there is a fear of association. I’ve said before, I’ve warned my own kids about families like ours. We are trouble. There is a simple awkwardness – not knowing what to say or whether indeed to say anything at all. To a degree that is a very valid place to be – as I can’t tell you on what days I would prefer you to be kind, or sympathetic, or curious, or simply to comment on the weather. You’ll be damned if you do and damned if you don’t for sure. I watch those that are brave enough to approach me and wonder what tactic they will deploy. The straight out with it and usually misinformed, the vague and wary “how are you all?” usually delivered with eyes that speak “please don’t answer truthfully”. There are those that adopt a method akin to an office consultation – it comes like creeping death around a Boardroom table……”How are you? How is little M? How is The Middle One? And erm….” eyes averted, “How’s AJ?” Then – brace. Which way will I respond? Usually with good grace, letting us both off the hook of my misfortune. 

For some, it is all simply too close to home. One of AJ’s godmothers who lives overseas has not been in contact since the day I sat down to write and tell her this sorry tale. I thought she more than anyone would understand, and on reflection that assessment is probably true. She understood too much, and it was too close for comfort. She can’t live it all again, and whilst I know this, it still hurts.

I like to think I have become more accepting of all of these responses, although as I write I can feel a bite of bitterness somewhere, and I know that I need to find a way to let that go. Much as I might like to be, I am no Pollyanna. I am a grown adult and to a large degree I can live with the twitching curtains and whispering in corridors. It is human nature and perhaps says more about them than it does about me. I know my credentials as a good mother have been judged and found wanting but who are they to pass judgement on me? What they might say about me is none of my business. However, I am not as sanguine when it comes to my children. A couple of years ago, little M, then about 8, arrived home sobbing, delivered by one of the older boys he plays football with. A group of older boys had rounded on him in the park, taunting him and laughing at our dysfunctional family. Although he didn’t understand enough of what they were saying (and thank goodness for that) he did understand that they were being cruel, and in particular, that they said bad things about me, which he found utterly unbearable. He came home distraught and I felt a new kind of fury, one that frightened me with it’s intensity. I knew then that I was perhaps capable of great harm if provoked into defending my children.  

But this post is not about those who have gone. It’s about those who have stayed, and those that have joined me on my journey. 

I am fortunate to have a friend that I have known since I was around 8 years old. Hers was a small village school that inevitably succumbed to the schools closure programme and they arrived, maybe around 12 in number, to my small village school, which was larger than theirs and now safer with their numbers. Back then and still now, over 40 years later, we have ostensibly little in common. We can go for months without seeing or speaking to each other, each of us absorbed in keeping the wheels turning in our own busy, separate lives, which have little or no parallel. And yet when we do catch up, it was like yesterday – we are crowded in a phone box again, sheltering from the rain, smoking the odd cigarette and ringing boys only to slam the phone down, shrieking when they answer. Born in September, one of the eldest in our year, she was the mother of us all. Ironic, as she went on to have no children of her own, but she is the world’s best aunt and confidante, an agony aunt in the truest sense of the word. She has had her own battles with demons for most of our collective memory, and like me, for much of our childhood, would rarely speak of it. Happily now, with the freedom and confidence that middle life can bring, she is much freer with her willingness and ease in talking about it. Despite the fact that I might go for months without laying eyes on her, I know I could ring her in the middle of the night and she would come, parka over pyjamas, feet shovelled into slippers, offering neither judgement nor platitude. Just companionable acknowledgement of what it is to be broken and in need of comfort. She has always been an old soul, even as a young child, and I am thankful for her wisdom and unabridged quiet constance. 

I am lucky enough to have another such long term friend. We met when we shared an office as accountancy trainees. We studied for our professional exams together, we failed our tax exams together, we visited farms and attempted to count pheasants together at year end (can you imagine a more impossible task?) we climbed up grain hoppers in howling winds and peered inside, trying to estimate the tonnage remaining whilst being mocked by men who knew we had absolutely no idea. “I’d say half a tonne in there, love, what do you think?” and yes, we would reply, and dutifully tick off the list on our clipboards. We visited meat packing factories and clip clopped about in our scuffed heels and cheap skirt suits, being patronised and treated like ornaments. These were the days where female trainees were not allowed to wear trousers to the workplace, no matter what we were asked to do or to climb up during the course of the working day. We shared trials and tribulations, body spray and pot noodles. We delighted in sending a skittish, prattish Junior Partner who was universally despised, beetling back to his office which he would emerge from, tentatively, like a tortoise from his shell. We endured an overbearing Senior Partner who would appear red faced in our office – waving his arms and shouting, demanding trial balances and creditor reconciliations and attention. We compared notes on one of the male trainees who would periodically chance his arm and appear on our floor (male and female trainees being kept on separate floors, just in case!). He would sidle up and ask “fancy a shag”, his head cocked towards an empty office. Far from being a predator, he was one of the most socially awkward people I have ever met, and I think desperately lonely. Being obliging and a fixer, I did briefly contemplate it, sort of as a public service. Coming from a wealthy family, he had good suits and expensive aftershave, however he was also covered in spots and I suspected a virgin, so on balance, it wasn’t the best offer in town. At about this time, I went through a phase of attracting creepy, much older men whose opening line was often something like “I was in Malaya in the war, you know”. It happened at work too. The Senior Partner went on to sexually harass me over a number of months, locking us both into his office for hours on end, complaining about how his wife didn’t want to know him (and who could blame her?) and how much he loved me (of course, he didn’t). He would fly into terrible rages if men in the office spent too long talking to me and then would be terribly contrite, having massive bouquets of flowers delivered to the office. The receptionist would buzz down to the room that we shared, and say, half bemused, half bored, “He’s sent you flowers again”. I was 19, terrified, and with a complete inability to assert myself. My friend tried her best time and again to rescue me until one day, incarcerated in his office again, he pinned me up against the wall and tried to kiss me with his horrible peeling lips and I fled, distraught, and I never went back. The next day I went to see a Partner at another office, taking my sister with me for moral support. He was a huge, towering public school boy of a man, in tweeds and brogues, sporting a big face which sprouted too much hair from it’s orifices. He eyed me warily. News had clearly got to him. I had barely got through my first, well-rehearsed sentence when I burst into tears, and so did my sister in solidarity. He went a deep shade of puce, put his hand up but managed not to say stop, although you could see the word on his lips. He simply opened his desk, took out a cheque book, and bought my silence. A glowing reference arrived the next day in the post. 

I’m not sure much has changed in 30 years. The upside of it is that it bound she and I together, in a lifelong friendship that has seen and survived so much and endures almost in spite of our differences. On the outside looking in, once again, we have little in common except for our profession (although I hardly dare call myself an accountant) and that shared and hideous experience of a first workplace, yet she is the most enduring figure in my life outside of my family. Actually, she is family. We suffer with the same infrequency of contact, in the sense that life is busy and in particular, we carry careers and responsibilities that we take enormously seriously. She is the glue in her family as am I in mine, in many ways. So maybe we aren’t so different after all. Yet for all that infrequency, which ebbs and flows over the years, there is no one I would more entrust my darkest thoughts and fears with. We have seen each other through marriages and divorce, through illness, childbirth and howling grief, through belligerent bastards and laughingly so-called “sex addicts”, through fat and thin, and washed it all down at times, with far too much alcohol. We have watched each other make the same terrible mistakes, or variations on a theme, time and time again, waiting patiently for the moment when we move quietly in to pick up the pieces. It is the adult equivalent of the times when one or other of us would be required to hold hair back, whilst the other threw up, swearing never to drink malibu/ schnapps/ tequila again, and knowing full well that it would simply be a matter of time.  That friend who will cradle you in the dark, and sweeping the hair out of your eyes will whisper softly to you, “Yes, you do look like shit, and you will look worse tomorrow, but the day after will be better and so will you”. They will tut good naturedly as you weep mascara onto their pillow and watch over you as you fall into a fitful sleep punctuated by snoring, your windpipe choked up with tears and regret. The morning after the night before they will insist you eat breakfast and borrow their best top as you race out of their door for work, late and looking shocking. We live great stretches now in companionable silence, we have confidence and surety in the space between us. It is a silence borne of years of familial familiarity, neither of us needing to fill it. It can just rest – easy, ripe, peaceful. There are few people in your life where you can allow yourself to just be. 

And yet. She can go for months without really knowing what is going on, because I haven’t told her. I have not kept it from her, it is not a secret, I just haven’t had the will to articulate it. I am bored of it all myself. I barely had the energy to admit things even to myself, let alone say them out loud to another human being. Saying things out loud makes them even more real, and sometimes I have not wanted to conjure them into reality in that way. Not yet. So I have often released a kind of delayed narrative, usually safely after an event, when I am able to look it in the eye myself. It is a form of detachment. Conversely, I have also phoned her late at night, undoubtedly waking her, knowing it will be ok. “I need you to come” I say, and I give her the details, and she arrives, an hour and 30 miles later, with a bag full of essentials. A nightdress, knickers, a toothbrush, a comb for my hair. Money, a phone charger, chocolate, as I prepare for another night on the children’s ward on the thin hard bunk next to my childs bed. And she will hand them to me, half asleep, and put her arms around me, and sometimes nothing is said as there are no words, and she will drive 30 miles back home and try to go back to sleep, worrying about me, as I balance precariously on my bunk, in her nightdress, and prepare for another endless night. How lucky I am, I think, to have her. 

There is the kindness of strangers. There have been many people and institutions that have let my family down over the last few years, but there have been so many more people, some of them strangers, who have carried out the smallest acts of kindness. These come on some of the days where they are both the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but also gives you hope that there are so many more essentially good people in the world. To the family drugs counsellor early on who gently advised me against attending a family therapy session, thankyou. I know now that you were protecting me from the stories of other broken families, in the knowledge that to hear the first-hand horror of it at my point in our journey would cause me nothing but distress. To the stranger in the hospital car park who paid for my ticket as I stood sobbing at the machine, with my purse left in the kitchen at home, such was the haste with which I had fled the house, thankyou. To the receptionist at the Mental Health Centre who put her arm around me as I explained that my son had run away as we pulled up outside, thankyou. There are a myriad of other instances where a stranger has offered me their kindness when I have needed it beyond measure. 

There are strangers in my phone, some of whom have become friends, many of whom I have never met, and possibly never will. Some of them know more about me than the people I might see most days. There is a safety in a degree of anonymity, and also a kinship in finding your tribe. Much as there are downsides to instagram one of the upsides I believe is it allows you the ability, should you choose, to find your tribe. Like minded souls with similar experiences that can find a safe place to be, and of course your presence on social media can allow you to craft whatever version of yourself that you choose to show to the world. Over time and as I have gained followers I have felt drawn to the need to give a truer picture of my life, a life less curated, in pursuit of a less polished image that perpetuates the idea that everything in my garden is rosy. As I have done this so my tribe has changed subtly over time, some have moved away as this is not where they come for anything other than perfection, and others have found me, who need the reassurance that even seemingly lovely lives have both sunshine and shade. All of that is okay. I have an increasing sense that there is very little of permanence, and that life moves in phases. People come and some people go, and that gives room for renewal.  I embrace warmly, and I try to let go as lightly and gracefully as I am able. I know what it is to give away every shred of my dignity, clinging on to what is not meant for me so fiercely that it would pull my metaphorical fingernails from their nailbed. I could weep for that girl. I now try to believe in the saying “what is for you won’t go by you” – I hope one day to believe in it fully. For now it is a work in progress.

So a massive thankyou for the friends in my phone, one of whom, Ness, sent me this handkerchief. It arrived one day, out of the blue, and is one of the most lovely things anybody has ever given me. 

To be a true friend is to give with absolutely no expectation of anything in return. The mark of a sound friendship is to acknowledge that you are sometimes “in deficit” and to know that it does not matter. The point of friendship is surely to hold your friend safe when they need it, knowing they will do the same for you. Old friendships need not articulate this in any way, it just is. If you have just one such friendship, then you are rich indeed. 

So much of what I have written has been with heavy heart, and all of what I have written is from the heart. This post is written with a grateful, optimistic heart. For the friends, old and new, who have stood by me, who have comforted me, who have unquestioningly had my back, even when I have offered nothing other than being a crap and absent friend, thankyou. 

Ceefer and Griff, you are extraordinary.