Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
Born nearly 20 years after their last child, to parents already in their 40’s and 50’s, my childhood was far from conventional. While well meaning, my mother, and to a lesser degree, my father, always took the “line of least resistance” approach to parenting. Weary of the demands of a small child, when they were readying to move onto the next stage of their lives meant that they basically gave in to anything I wanted.
My mother returned to work when I was a very small baby, but my childhood nanny, who took over where she left off, told me stories many years later of a devoted mother, who caught to bus to her house during her lunch break every day, so that she could breastfeed me. I’ve become very fond of this memory that I can’t remember, as it means for a time, her love for me was bigger than her demons.
One of my earliest memories is of visiting my mother in a psychiatric hospital. It was memorable due to me being attacked by another patient, leading my father to declare that I would not be allowed to return – and so it was.
At the time, no one could understand my mother’s descent into mental illness. Not my father, not my brother and sister who were in their 20’s and had grown up with a “normal” mother – and certainly not me. I remember a woman that could be loving, expansive, generous and affectionate, and I adored her. I remember a woman that took to her bed for weeks at a time, howling and rocking and accusing everyone of not loving her. It was many years later before we understood that our love for her was no match for how much she hated herself.
As a teen, I saw my mother slide further into alcoholism, and an addiction to prescription medication – anything that would dull the pain she was in. Drinking made her angry, and it could make her mean. Mostly she was mean to me, as she saw my moving towards independence as a betrayal of her. Many times, she locked me out of the house, with herself inside, and all the shutters pulled down, and would yell out to me that she had taken an overdose. I would ask the neighbours to alert the police and ambulance, while I sat patiently on the front fence, waiting to be allowed to go inside, as though it was just a regular afternoon. Sometimes she had taken something, and sometimes she hadn’t, in fact, the only time I am sure she did was when she emptied a bottle of pills into her mouth right in front of me, and swallowed.
My mother was never able to beat her demons. Despite the many suicide attempts, and threats, she didn’t want to die, but she couldn’t find a way to live with what was tormenting her. In the end, the years of abuse of her body, mostly by lighting one fag from the butt of another, from when she got up to when she went to bed, claimed her at the relatively young age of 65.
The painful legacy that she left was a child who was left wondering how she fell so far short of ideal that her mother couldn’t even be bothered trying to be like everyone else’s mother, and for many years, I laid the blame for this squarely on my own shoulders. This was a burden that I carried for 13 years after her death, until I had a child of my own. Even with a life unburdened by mental illness, some time in that first year of my babies life, I suddenly “got” my mother. I saw the joy that would have come with my birth. I smiled at the woman that got on the bus for a round trip that took all of her lunch break, so that she could have a connection with her baby. I saw a woman that was almost certainly suffering from postnatal depression – something that was pretty much unheard of back then – and this left her open to self -doubts that had been under the surface for many years. Without help, it was easy to see how quickly these things got bigger than her.
With the birth of my own child, I saw that my mother loved me, and I forgave her. And in the process, I forgave myself.