The Parent Trap

Tags

Gen X, Gen Z, Intergenerational trauma, Interrupting intergenerational trauma, Millennials, Mom guilt, Parenting

I saw a lovely post on Instagram by one of my favourite bloggers about her relationship with her mother. In spite of very real failings and difficulties, she acknowledged that she is loved. She also said that she knew her mother had a very difficult life; and that Millennials and Gen Zers have a reputation for being ungrateful. The night before I had yet again, been processing my own difficulties re my son. I had begun to feel an acceptance that things will never change, that he won’t ever realise the effect his words have on me, or move towards a more balanced understanding that acknowledges the present and the past, the parent’s experience as well as the child’s. So that Instagram post really hit the spot. At the time I just dropped a few hearts in the comments; this is my longer response:

I love and respect the unique challenges and skills which each generation typically has, the Silent Generation, The Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials (Gen Y), and Gen Z. I enjoy reading about the characteristics, differences and culture wars between e.g. Millennials and Gen Z- side partings and skinny jeans beloved by Millennials and hated by Gen Z, Millennials fighting back when Gen Zers tried to cancel Eminem. I am Gen X, my husband is (just) a Baby Boomer, my son is a Millennial, my step son is an old Gen Z or a young Millennial and my step daughter is Gen Z.

I recognise the pain of the Gen X and Baby Boomer parents who are accused by their kids of being bad parents responsible for all their kids’ problems and who respond by calling them ungrateful. But I don’t think it’s helpful to fight across the generations, and I hope that in time there’ll be more of a discussion. (Please note I am not talking about wilful abuse and neglect of children here, I’m talking about loving parents who did their best with the knowledge and resources they had at the time) I spend a lot of time on Instagram and there’s two memes I see regularly:

1. ‘My parents when I try to tell them that my mental illness may have been caused by my childhood,’ (hand pushing away, not listening) This hurts my feelings because the meme maker/main character has no thought at all to the effect of their words on the parent. As I have experienced, there is no deeper pain than being blamed for your child’s problems. Maybe that pain was intended and revenge was justified in this case, but once it’s made and circulated then it potentially loses its specificity and specific target. Parents put their hands up in ‘stop’ because they aren’t strong enough to bear it. Do we all ultimately want to punish our parents into the same devastating pit of despair which we ourselves feel and blame them for? Maybe. But ultimately holding onto blame, pain and anger tends to prevent healing and growth.

2. ‘You don’t remember? Oh right, my childhood abuse was to you just a f***ing Tuesday!’
The second meme bothers me for different reasons. A very close friend of mine was repeatedly raped by a family friend from the age of seven. Her abuser knew what he was doing and would never have forgotten. So we can’t be talking about abuse like that, we’re talking about other things, things parents do that they may or may not know are harming their child.

I have an example of this. John’s ex, P, the mother of his children, invited her mother round to stay. During this time P confronted her about things her father had done when she was a child- he had locked her in a trunk (a blanket box or ottoman, not the boot of a car, for non UK readers) he had made out it was a game, but it wasn’t a game to P. P confronted her mother, herself a victim of what might be called coercive control today, emotional and physical abuse by the father/her husband, an angry, controlling man, about why she had stood by. More than twenty years later, John still remembers sound of the mother howling like an animal from upstairs. He didn’t but he said he wanted to wrap his arms around her; the mother’s howls years of suppressed guilt, or the sudden realisation of an unbearable truth.

I love memes. I’m fascinated by them. I love the way that, like graphic novels, the image and the words together become something so much more that strikes right into the heart in a super fast and very direct way, as well as being extremely specific (the man who forgot to add cow’s milk into Oreos being praised by vegans is a favourite of mine)

I think the reason that I, and other parents of Millennials and Gen Zers get upset by things like this is two fold. One, we didn’t have any memes. We had no social media. We didn’t have a powerful way to share our experience across the generations and the world. No one heard us. No one listened to us. No one asked us. We were left outside pubs or to sleep in cars when our parents went for a drink or to parties. Parents moved house or made big decisions and wouldn’t have dreamt of asking our opinion. My mum had a whole procession of male lodgers who she allowed to take me and my sister for drives or babysit us.

John’s mum was a lot more savvy re sexual predators, but took him across the English Channel in a small boat with no life jacket in a storm, on the whim of her tax evading boyfriend. To this day she is devastated, and if it’s brought up now she will be moved to tears, ‘I can’t believe I put you in danger.’ But mostly she won’t speak about it. The Silent Generation. Her own mother, she believes, died because her husband refused to buy her a washing machine, literally worked to death. My grandmother told me about wash day and boiling water in the copper, hands red raw.

The second reason that my generation gets triggered by these memes is, we tried. We read books, we were self aware, or thought we were. We knew we wanted to do it differently. Just like my mum when she raised me in a more liberal, hippy way than she had been raised.

My mother never mentions the lodgers, but I know she feels bad about the fact that we spent our childhood thinking we were going to be vaporised or die of radiation sickness, we lived in East Anglia, near the American Airbases with their nuclear Cruise missiles, and we were enlightened about the nuclear threat and very involved in CND. I never minded about that, but I suppose it’s the same as environmentally aware parents today (e.g. the guy from Extinction Rebellion saying six billion are going to die)

But the trauma and the mistakes and the love flows back and forth across the generations. Perhaps the only way forward is to accept it all and keep on living, in the present and in the future.

Welcome to Holland

Tags

Grief, Guilt, Parenting

So I had this thought. This great thing happened at work and I paused for a moment to really feel it and it made me think, the pain doesn’t go, the guilt doesn’t go.

I remember reading an article about grief, about how people say time heals as if you go back to normal but that never happens, it’s always there. You live with it, it is part of you but it gets maybe a little easier to manage. Like when you have a duvet and you’re trying to stuff it back into the cupboard and it doesn’t fit, that it maybe gets a bit easier to manage or a bit easier to put away.

So I live with the pain like V our friend the musician. Last time we saw her she looked radiant with a stunning new short haircut. She told me that all her life, drink or no drink, drugs or no drugs, she has episodes. The highest of the highs, making music, being on stage, connecting with the crowd, and the lowest of the lows, I’m gonna kill myself I’m gonna kill myself I’m gonna kill myself. She was trying to shave her head and her husband grabbed her and stopped her and that’s why she’s got this groovy new haircut. My mental health training kicked in, I might have said have you sought any help but I didn’t actually say what about antidepressants although I was thinking that. Even though I don’t take them. Despite one evening after my little yoga/dance session listening to Primal Scream I was blind but now I can see and thinking, that’s what I need to do I’ll go on antidepressants! I can be happy! A flash of insight but I still didn’t do it. John said about V well without that maybe she wouldn’t make the music and maybe she can learn to live with it… I thought maybe that’s where the music comes from even though I know that’s a cliche, the whole tortured artist thing.

Anyway this thing happened at work where in the multidisciplinary team meeting, the patients’ families were on zoom. These people, it’s as if you’re watching the news and there’s parents of children who have been abducted and they’re making an appeal. Those parents just look so broken and that’s what these parents look like. I was moved, I thought I’d like to do something for them, maybe some meditation or relaxation. I mentioned this to the new family therapist who is full of compassion, she said she wanted to start a family group and so we decided to do it together.

The first week I taught them counted out breaths* and we did the Metta Bhavana and then week two I did shoulder shrug** and then I did relaxation through the five senses… imagining yourself on a beach or in a wood or garden and all the things you can see, hear etc… one of the men nearly fell off his chair. I knew that one woman had a lot of trouble sleeping so I told them about Jody Whiteley on YouTube and mentioned The Joy of Painting (also on YouTube) put on to soothe by the BBC during lockdown, my mother in law and my sister in law had told me that it made them sleepy and was relaxing. I watched an episode, my eyes filled with tears, what a good man, ‘There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.’

*Firstly become aware that you have four parts to your breathing, the in breath, a little pause at the top of the in breath, the out breath, a little pause before the next in breath. Next, count your next ten out breaths. Count only your out breaths. Notice how your breathing magically slows… Great for the dentist etc.

**First breathe out, allowing you shoulders to relax. Then breathe in slowly and deeply, at the same time slowly drawing your shoulders up to your ears, so that the top of your in breath coincides with your shoulders being fully shrugged up. Hold that tension and your breath for a moment, before gently releasing your outbreath and lowering your shoulders in a controlled way, as if you were lowering a weight on a pulley. Safety- be kind and gentle to your body especially if you have shoulder problems. Don’t do loads in a row- the deep breaths may make you dizzy.

A few days later the family therapist said to me the woman who couldn’t sleep had been doing the shoulder shrug and had put on Jody Whitley and went to sleep straight away. A few days after that she said to me, ‘She wanted me to let you know she tried your technique of relaxing with the five senses and she was asleep before she’d even got past listen to the sounds outside the room,’ (which is the beginning bit where you’re drawing yourself inwards)

I felt very moved. I didn’t say anything at home but later when I was in bed a couple of little tears came out, just indulging in the feeling. I felt like it was one of the best things that ever happened to me in my career. When you work with people who are so complicated and there’s loads of other people working with them how do you know if what you do makes any difference… But here was somebody who was suffering who couldn’t sleep, I taught her something and then she slept. Even for me with all my negativity it was impossible to argue with that. I made a difference. That was worth doing. I did something good.

The next day driving to work I thought that’s where the compassion and the healing that worked for the woman came from; it came from my own pain and guilt and suffering. That’s where the healing comes from or at least that’s where the motivation to help comes from. And I thought that’s kind of the real meaning of the word Alchemy.

This inspirational poem helped STEPS Autism Treehouse Coordinator Claire through the time of her son’s diagnosis.

Welcome to Holland – By Emily Perl Kingsley

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like you’re planning a vacation to Italy. You’re all excited. You get a whole bunch of guidebooks, you learn a few phrases so you can get around, and then it comes time to pack your bags and head for the airport.

Only when you land, the stewardess says, “WELCOME TO HOLLAND.”

You look at one another in disbelief and shock, saying, “HOLLAND? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I SIGNED UP FOR ITALY.”

But they explain that there’s been a change of plan, that you’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

“BUT I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT HOLLAND!” you say. ‘I DON’T WANT TO STAY!”

But stay, you do.

You go out and buy some new guidebooks, you learn some new phrases, and you meet people you never knew existed.

The important thing is that you are not in a bad place filled with despair. You’re simply in a different place than you had planned.

It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy, but after you’ve been there a little while and you have a chance to catch your breath, you begin to discover that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. Holland has Rembrandts.

But everyone else you know is busy coming and going from Italy. They’re all bragging about what a great time they had there, and for the rest of your life, you’ll say, “YES, THAT’S WHAT I HAD PLANNED.”

The pain of that will never go away.

You have to accept that pain, because the loss of that dream, the loss of that plan, is a very, very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to go to Italy, you will never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland. 

Warts and All: the highs and lows of being a parent

Tags

Parenting

John and I had talked on and off for years about writing a kind of anti-parenting manual, or an honest memoir. I had resisted, feeling blocked, muggy and even slightly re-traumatised just discussing it. But John said he wanted to keep it hopeful- if not actually light and amusing- and so offsetting and limiting my tendencies to go all the way down and thereby hopefully protecting my mood and mental health. Once we had decided to do it suddenly articles were everywhere, and of course the more you look at stories on a phone or tablet, the ‘suggested stories for you,’ the more you get.

One of these was an article about an online support group called The Motherload The article was about the fact that they had to tighten everything up stop getting direct messages to protect their mental health because people had been so abusive and it became too much for them. It made me think how mean and judgmental women/mothers can be which is also why it’s so hard to share difficulties, as these people had tried to create a really nice online environment with their motto ‘Sharing the load of motherhood, without judgement.’

It also made me laugh that their examples of shameful things to admit to, that people could share on the forum but wouldn’t be able to share on their own Facebook or whatever, were things like for example you let your child play on their tablet for longer than you intended to or that you ordered a takeaway for tea…

It was like the other week when we were talking about our embryonic ideas for this book and John’s sister said that the worst thing that ever happened to her was that her daughter once threw some French books out of the window because she didn’t want to have a French lesson. As John said to his sister, we don’t want to be dismissive of people’s experiences but…

From our perspective the above examples are laughable of course, and for dealing with the things that we’ve gone through and for anyone dealing with things of a similar magnitude they’re gonna need a bigger boat. I suppose that’s what we’re trying to do here, we’re trying to build a bigger boat. 

I put a photograph of the beginning of the word document with a very brief announcement of what we were doing on Instagram and had a couple of thoughtful responses including a long and thoughtful message from our dear friend S, the only person who truly understands my experience as a mother. John and I have just discovered the joys of speech into text and so we read out S’s message to the computer and then each spoke our response. I’ll check with S before it gets published but I hope to include her message and our responses within the book. This is an extract from John’s response, which is for anyone who tried their best to do a good job and parented with tons of love but had a lot of difficulty:

I want to say something about how I think all of these women have done such an amazing job and they never give themselves credit for it and very few other people do and I suppose also you know what this book is about is about giving that a voice and it’s because they feel shame for the things that they perceived to have been bad or wrong they don’t want to talk about it so they don’t get a chance to have any positive feedback from it because they don’t mention about it in the 1st place (speech to text we haven’t mastered punctuation yet!)

We are writing our own stories of parenthood, which are very different: I became a mother at nineteen and was a single mother for most of the time. John became a father at forty and can talk from the other side, of being a separated father. Both of us went into our journeys full of love and the very best intentions, both of us have guilt from mistakes we made. We also have friends to interview who parented with love despite being alone, being victims of domestic violence, having mental health problems, having problems with drug addiction, and who are still here, as are their children now all grown up. We hope that in sharing our stories others may feel less alone.

“Our stories are all we have. The only thing that can save us is to learn each other’s stories. From beginning to end….For every life we know, we are expanded.”― Karen Fisher

For the parents

‘If you think you’re enlightened, try going home for Thanksgiving

Tags

Anything is possible, artists, confidence, mother daughter relationships, mother son relationships, Parenting, Self realisation, separating from adult children, Shaman, shamanic ritual

For SMUT and Self-Esteem, a very wise and perfectly written blog. Reflecting on everyday experience through tools such as mindfulness and Buddhist teachings.

Even at the age of forty seven I was scared about telling my mum of our plans to give up work and go off to India, particularly about selling the house. And on the way to telling her about the boat I was as nervous as if I were on my way to hospital for an operation. I played the song above, ‘You say you can’t, I hope you can, I hope you can…’

My mother is an astonishingly capable individual, potentially a lot to live up to, and who has very strong opinions. But feeling as if I’m not free to live my life as I wish to because of what she might think or say isn’t on her, it’s on me.

Again and again people say, no one can have power over you without your consent, and such like. Certainly in the run up to going away I said the same kinds of things to myself and tried to deal with it on an intellectual level. I did what needed to be done, but I made a big palaver about it, putting things off and getting stressed out, and expending a lot of time and energy on it all.

On Thursday of last week we made our first trip back to Norfolk to visit people. Firstly we went to see our dear friend K, who made us a lovely lunch*, let us go on about India, and was very supportive about my book and our ideas. She asked us each if and how we thought the year of travel had changed us. We both said we felt it had, but that we didn’t know exactly how yet.

Then we drove over to see my mum. Towards the end of the year of travel I had had dreams about this meeting, and woken feeling anxious and intimidated, as I was when I visited before I left. This time, I didn’t feel even a flicker of nerves on the way there, and sailed through the visit authentically and confidently. We showed her photographs, she made us a delicious meal**, and we chatted about general topics. We all seemed happy to see each other, and had a nice time.

In the past I had involved her too much in my life, and I had felt shadowed by her strong opinions. The year away provided the opportunity to reset boundaries. I’m sure she doesn’t approve of everything I’m doing but she appears to have accepted that I’m doing it anyway, and didn’t question or comment.

I know it’s because she cares but I have to have this bit of separation in order to fully realise my own personal potential.

I wasn’t fake friendly or fake tough, I was totally myself during that time, and that is best described as relaxed and powerful. And it just happened that way, that’s how I’ve changed. (Just got to keep it up!)

Then we went to see my son. He’s not, as far as I’m aware, working on the same things with me, but I know he’s done better the less I’ve been involved in his life, culminating in him being offered, while I was away this year, the chance to exhibit in New York in May.

(I still have to work on resetting habits and expectations re money though, now that he is almost thirty and I am not working at the moment.)

We all acknowledged that he’d done the best all by himself, and I told him what the Swiss shaman I met in Kerala had told me, that when you have a baby it is your job to ‘Give them the bliss,’ but then when they grow up you must set them free. The shaman said I must set my son free so that he can become a great artist.

*beetroot and chickpea burgers, pasta in tomato sauce and broccoli
**vegetable curry, rice, samosas, and apple crumble and (soya) custard
We were thoroughly spoiled that day!
Thank you very much for reading

This is life

Tags

family, Mom guilt, Parenting

 

So, family…  I have been processing some family/me stuff.  My son had some personal/life problems recently and called up my husband who went and supported him.  When I got home from work my husband told me all about it and said, you just need to phone him up and tell him you love him and that you are proud of him.  So I did (when I am out of my depth and don’t know what to do my husband gives good advice).

Then on Saturday we went to see a show that my son had curated and exhibited in.  All the artists have mental health problems.  My husband is at ease at these events, talking to the people from Rethink who sponsored the event and knowing just the right thing to say about my son’s work.  I think the work is good and I say so.  I know he has worked hard and that he’s come a long way and I recognise his achievements.

But I feel like I am expected to say more and that whatever I say isn’t enough.  I dislike the feeling of pressure on me, the fact that what I say is so weighted, so that my words seem to sound awkward.  I am not good at dealing with this stuff.  Why does it matter so much what I think, I’m just a human being, I don’t mean anything.   That’s not for you to say, you are his mother.  It’s for the child to come to that realisation themselves.  In the meantime, just be a parent, act the role, do what’s needed.  Sometimes you just have to give people what they need, and he just needs praise off his mum.  Why is it so hard to do that?  I noticed my mum was much less forthcoming than me; I was chatty, I gave out praise, even though I wasn’t as at ease as my husband.  On the way home we talked and talked until I worked out why I feel uncomfortable at these events.

The people from Rethink might judge me as a bad mother because my son has mental health problems.  He might even have spoken about the tumultuous teenage years and said critical things about me.  But mainly it’s this:

The whole event revolves around having mental health problems.  Everyone’s talking about it, it’s right there.  And there on the wall is a series of three of my son’s paintings.  Yes they are very good.  As my husband said you could see them in a gallery and you wouldn’t think they were out of place.

But they are unsettling/distressing.  The paragraph of text beside them explains that they are all about living with a mental health problem and what that feels like.  That’s fine when it is someone else.  But when it is your own child you are looking at something no parent wants to see.

Yes of course the exhibition is a great achievement, as are the paintings, but it means coming face to face with my child’s suffering.  I think this is even worse for my mum, because I think in some ways grandparents can get even more upset.  I noticed she didn’t even read the text.  I read it, to be polite and supportive, but it was sad.  And as the artist’s mother, it was really sad.

This post isn’t about self pity, it’s about playing detective.  So that’s why it’s hard, because it’s upsetting.  I am expected to give praise and be happy about his achievements, which I do and I am, whilst experiencing distress from having to literally look at his mental suffering.

So that all makes sense now.

That’s why it was so nice going round to his place the week before the exhibition.  He answered the door in a paint splattered t-shirt and a lungi, and showed me into the sitting room.  He and his girlfriend were working on several huge canvasses, sheets spread over the carpet, creating a makeshift studio.  It reminded me of the places I lived in during the late 80s.  For a moment, everything just looked exactly the way I would have wanted.

I am very pleased and amazed he got into art school, with no prior qualifications, it is a towering achievement.  But what I am most pleased about, even though it hasn’t been easy for him or us, is that he has followed his path.  Despite pressure from everyone, including me in the past, he has resolutely devoted himself to being an artist.

 

Thank you for reading.

F is for Family*

Tags

Guilt, healing, Mom guilt, Parenting, Teenagers

Warning, contains depressing content

My son is 28.  Christmas 2016, I pretended to go away for Christmas because I couldn’t face us spending Christmas together.  He wouldn’t have wanted to come anyway; we’d only been speaking since the September and things were still slightly frosty.  Prior to that we hadn’t spoken since Christmas 2015:  I had picked him up to bring him to ours for Christmas and he started fidgeting and then shouting in the car on the dual carriageway.  I was frightened, exasperated and completely incapable of dealing with it.  You work in mental health, you’re supposed to help people, I remember him saying.  I stupidly tried to reason with him, to connect with a part of us that was above all this, to explain that I wasn’t the one to help him, because if I had, I would have been.  In the middle of a panic attack isn’t the time, and he was extremely angry and disappointed with my response and my inability to respond.

I think what he doesn’t understand is how upsetting it is for me, but then he probably also doesn’t understand why I can’t just be all mumsy and cuddly, and I don’t either, but I can’t.  I don’t believe that would make any difference, but I understand why he’d be dismayed and upset that I couldn’t.

I remember one time dropping him off at the walk in centre with a girlfriend and just leaving him there, another time him at the doctor’s clinging onto me and me just being unable to touch him.  (This was when he was sixteen or older, in the middle of our relationship being very poor, him having a panic attack).

I used to think there was something deeply wrong with me, that I didn’t love him, or wasn’t able to love him, but then one night in meditation a year or so ago this came into my head:  you love him, that’s why it hurts so much.

Before I got pregnant, I wanted a baby very much.  When he was born his father and I were super attentive and loving.  When he was a young child we had lots of fun times, baking, playing with the dog, painting- there was always an easel and a washing line to hang up the paintings in the kitchen; riding trikes and bikes indoors, having big unruly birthday parties.  It’s nice to remember the good stuff.  Because there was bad stuff: it was quite hard for me, I was very young, a single mum from when he was one, and he was sometimes very ill with a serious medical condition, so there’s a lot of bad memories around that, hospitals, blood tests, unpleasant tests and medicines.  But even so, overall, it was a pretty happy, child centred life with supportive and loving friends and family.

Then he hit 12, 13, went to middle school, and having been very happy at first school, began school refusing, truanting, later at 15, petty criminal stuff and got arrested.  He and his friend would just mess up the house and break everything, so the sitting room ended up empty, it didn’t feel like a home…

Refusing all medical treatment, refusing to have baths or change his clothes… at 16, 17, 18, refusing to go to college or get a job or come out of his room.  I knew something was wrong but was powerless to fix it.  I sought mental health services advice, they said it was behavioural and he wouldn’t engage in any case.  I had no idea what to do.  The relationship had completely broken down.  Everyone gave different advice, I felt like a complete failure as a mother.

I became seriously suicidal.  When he was 16 I called the council about housing options for him.  The woman who answered the phone said you have to chuck him out and he has to turn up here with his bag and nowhere to go.  I can’t do that, I said.  She said, well you haven’t reached the end of your tether yet then, when you have, that’s what you’ll have to do.  Two years later, sitting at the top of the stairs, my boyfriend holding me, me screaming about suicide and paracetamol and knives, I reached it.  I packed up his stuff and called my mum and asked her to have him.  He was 18.  He actually went to stay with his girlfriend, got a place in a hostel, got given a council flat, couldn’t manage it, and now rents a room in a shared house where he’s been for several years.

I am sure there were a million other ways to handle those years but whether or not the person I was then would have been able to implement them even if she had known.  Like a series of random dropped stitches that ultimately cause everything to unravel.  Was there something, were there things I could have done differently?  Was there another way it could have turned out?  I’ll never know, because I can’t go back in time, and there’s no control group for a life.

Relatively speaking, the years up to twelve had been easy.  I suppose I’d always thought love would be enough.  So when this child who you’ve given so much love to, who had previously seemed so happy in your company, becomes someone who no longer responds to you, it is very difficult.  It is hurtful, confusing, and all confidence in parenting abilities goes out of the window.  I just didn’t have the skills to deal with this new person.

After he moved out, I used to see him and drop off bits of money, always feeling bad for not giving enough whilst at the same time thinking I shouldn’t give much so that he’d be motivated to sign on or get a job…  He usually wanted a lift, and it was often difficult, him criticising my driving and us arguing.  His council flat was given to him bare and empty, the same as when I’d been given one at 22 when he was 3 years old.  But whereas I had bought and laid the cheapest office cord and painted it myself, he did not do anything.  His washing up and rubbish piled up everywhere.  My mum paid for flooring, my (now) husband spent a day mucking out the flat.  I went round one day after work when I had a cold and painted the kitchen but he didn’t help and we argued.  He got diagnosed with anxiety.  I paid for endless CBT.  My husband and I spent hours on the phone giving advice about panic attacks when he called us up.  Nothing made any difference.  Until I just kind of stopped trying to help as much.  He got himself a nice room in a shared house, where he still is.  He got himself into college and then university, where he is today.

A Round-Heeled Woman, predominantly about sex but includes a devastating passage about her son, who seemingly ‘punishes’ her failings as a mother by running away, not calling, and living on the streets, in freezing conditions, eventually calling her up on Christmas Day, destitute and freezing cold but refusing to come home.

The only other time I have come across people like me (mothers almost destroyed by guilt) is on an ASD training day where parents of kids with Autism spoke to us.  These mothers had kids who didn’t sleep, who flew into rages and smashed up the house.  They looked like battle worn survivors.  I was in awe of them.  But what I remember most is what they said about how they felt as mothers:  as a mother, you feel like you’ve got ‘guilty’ stamped on one side of you, and ‘failure’ on the other. 

What is the name of the emotion I feel when I see or think about his teeth, which are in a terrible state- I took him to the dentist and made sure he brushed his teeth as a child, but his illness, and poor care as a teenager and adult have taken a severe toll (recently he has said he is going to the dentist and going to go through with what is now major work, and I have given him the money to do this)…

Or when he recently asked for ‘anything from my childhood to remind me it wasn’t all bad because all I can remember is hospitals’…  To quote Alice Sebold, well that last comment just ripped me a new arsehole:  I spent my whole adult life from 18 to now, 47, loving, caring, worrying, and it was all for nothing, because all there was was bad and nothing I did mattered and nothing I do now makes any difference?

What is the name of the emotion again?  Suicidal, if that’s an emotion… despair… anger… panic… paralysis… horror… fear… tension.  Mostly there’s a bit of tension.

I used to work in an anorexia hospital and I am ashamed to say we used to judge the parents sometimes, we used to think they were cold.  Now I realise they were just wretched, forced to look at something no parent would ever want to see, their child yellow, furry and emaciated.  I was afraid of what I saw on my first day; they have to face both the horror and the fact that they haven’t been able to stop it or help with it.

Okay, I’ve felt it.  I’ve taken it all out and looked at it.  Instead of pushing those feelings away, tightening up and thinking that I can’t bear to look and won’t be able to cope, instead of that I’ve let my chest relax and my arms fall open and I’ve sat here with those feelings.  There’s a peace in accepting ‘guilt’, in letting it wash over me, just letting it be, sitting with it without fighting it.  Ready to start over…  To make mistakes every day.  We all do.  Start again every day.  What else can we do?

Is there anything I can do?  No.

There’s a comfort in this calm acceptance, in the moments where I can find it, that feels better than the pushing away or the anxious worrying or the futile attempts at problem solving.  It definitely feels better than endlessly going over past mistakes and missed opportunities.

Like a jumper that has unravelled beyond repair, the only way is to remake it from scratch.

And like my mother says re coping with the ageing process, well you don’t have any choice but to cope with it, because the only alternative is not to be here.

Right now, drag my mind into the present.  Right now, drag my thoughts and my gaze towards the positive.

So this Christmas, when my son said he’d come over Christmas Eve and stay until Boxing Day, especially as my husband was working and I would need to pick him up and drive him an hour to ours, I was a little nervous.  Whatever you do, don’t get angry, or don’t sound angry, my husband said.

The car journey was okay, and once home I made dinner, we swapped YouTube and Netflix recommendations, and the evening passed without incident.  Christmas Day we saw my mum, my husband came home, and my son’s girlfriend arrived in the evening and we all played Cluedo.  So yeah, I guess my Christmas was okay.

 

With metta

 

*F is for Family is my third favourite of the adult cartoons on Netflix, along with my second favourite Big Mouth which is a very warm portrayal of going through puberty, a largely neglected topic that has certainly never been covered like this before, and my favourite, so much loved that I wrote a post about it here, BoJack Horseman