The Art of Not Being Ok

I don’t remember a lot about when my children were small.

I don’t mean that their childhoods are missing, or that i’ve blanked them out. I want to say right now that the good times, the silly things, the stupidest bits and possibly a lot I’d suspect they’d rather I’d forgotten is definitely still there. But if I try to remember it in sequence or even as a lump of time when they were small and it was just us four – there’s not really very much at all.

You’d think that would be a shame, especially since it was before electronic media was so prevalent, so there isn’t much captured of their lives and how they were growing – being a single mother of three small children under ten keeps you too busy for taking many notes – but there are some pictures. My youngest as a baby gets more than a fair share of course, and her sisters with their home cut hair – which I was luckily mostly ok at – are there too.

It’s odd how looking at photographs now feels so strange. They seem so frozen and static compared to e-media; you can’t just quickly sharpen or crop or brighten them. They just sit and slowly fade, forever slightly out of focus and badly framed, with the washing pile in the background and the stains on the walls forever caught in that damning shaft of sunlight.

And there are my children, in their rectangles of badly-aligned aspic, grinning back at me, showing me their toys, wearing my shoes, starting to emerge from their chrysalises, changing and developing into the people they are now…

But I don’t want to write about them. They have their own voices, and their own agency. I remain proud and slightly amazed at how strong and brave and talented they are, and that, well, they survived me being the parent I know I struggled to be, at least then.

It’s not that I feel I was neglectful, or did them any harm. I hope not, anyway. They were bright and healthy and did well in school, and we got through my husband leaving me when I was six months pregnant with my youngest, and his mother deciding that I must be to blame for that because he hadn’t the balls to tell her it was because he was having an affair, so she got her revenge by calling social services on me. Three times. They were very understanding, which was nice. I suppose it must have happened a lot, or at least it seemed to back then. I know I heard other mums at school talking about it at the school gates. It became the in thing to threaten your neighbours with, for a while.

I didn’t really mix socially with the other mums at school.

“It’s the one time when you are guilty til proven innocent, and that will always be the one thing that’s impossible to prove…”

Obviously, the social workers couldn’t just come out and say, ‘We know it’s your mother in law’, but there was eventually A Conversation, where we discussed some things about my situation, and I said That Person hadn’t been in my house in two years and they said it was going to be declared a malicious complaint. No further action would be taken and the file would be closed and the person in question would be spoken to, and told to basically, well, stop that, and shut the fuck up.

Which was also nice.

But in the meantime, I’d had an unexpected phone call in the midst of coping with everything else, telling me that someone had called social services to say that my children had no clean clothes, and there was no food in my cupboards, and no clean beds to sleep in. And everyone knows that once they’re called it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, they don’t listen. It’s the one time when you are guilty til proven innocent, and that will always be the one thing that’s impossible to prove. And then they just turn up and take your children away.

I don’t think visually. (It’s called aphantasia, and you should look it up, because it’s really fascinating and they are only just starting to research it). It means almost all my memories are not really visual so much as emotional and situational. I remember that phone call though. The texture of the wallpaper next to the old sewing machine table where the phone was – because phones were tied to one place, in those days – and the horror, and the numbness, but actually not being able to cry.

And then madly preparing for a visit from a stranger, but knowing that I could do this – because I had to. Because I had to do it alone, because who could I tell when I didn’t know who had done this to us?

So I hid the worst of the non-prioritised mess and chaos in cupboards and the oven, and cleaned the previously non-essential cleaning, and tidied things that people who aren’t me tidy.

My husband, bless him, prior to leaving us, had been working away from home in the week, and when at home had either been programming, computer gaming, drinking, smoking or all four. This was the nineties and he’d lost a tech start up he’d set up with two ‘friends’ after they ran out on him with all the cash and left us nearly bankrupt.

But we’d survived, just about, though it was hard. We’d stuck together, but we also, slowly and very gradually, started falling apart. He was working a lot, and I now know I probably had post natal depression after my second daughter was born. Maybe even after my first. I know he came home from work one day just after we were freshly back from hospital to find us both, my new daughter and me, crying on the bed because I just couldn’t feed her, and I wanted to so much. The midwife had told us to keep trying and it would ‘just happen’. He went out and came back with bottles of formula and all the stuff for bottle feeding. God, the relief…

I wanted so badly to be a good mother, and do pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding and all the things right, and none of it quite went to plan. Even after reading everything I could from Sheila Kitzinger to Claire Rayner to (briefly) Dr Spock – tho he can fuck off back to Vulcan, along with the midwife who told me that you can “read too much, though,” before not answering my question about the invasive prenatal tests she was offering me. Even after all of that, my own body let me down.

I loved my children, of course. My beautiful, astonishingly bright children. But I felt aware they were this way despite me, rather than because of me. Nature, and not nurture.

“the midwife arrived just in time to catch my daughter. Which is the surest way to get an all-natural delivery, I suppose…”

My first child, with her eyes just like my father’s, and her smile like my Aunt’s, thrived once I had feeding her sussed. Suddenly she was hitting all of her targets and starting to learn to walk and goodness she was talking and oh my I was pregnant and there was another baby.

My second child, with her huge blue eyes and her golden hair and placid nature; all mysterious qualities that made me think I didn’t deserve her, and so she was probably just going to die. It wasn’t that my firstborn was a difficult baby, it was just that this fairy child was obviously not really mine, and not going to stay. I dealt with this stoically, and simply tried to love her whilst she was here, though not too much, of course, and slept with her next to me, whilst she was small. The fear of her dying faded, but I remember it still, the profound, inescapable finality of it. Jesus wept.

Anyway. It turned out I was ok at being pregnant and did pretty well at childbirth after the first time, when I was left alone in a room with my husband for what felt like days, and my request for ‘some pain relief’, which I thought would get me gas and air, got me pethidine.

(That shit is good, though. Fuck).

Third time’s the charm, and six years later, I got my magical home birth, even though due to ‘miscommunication’ the midwife arrived just in time to catch my daughter. Which is the surest way to get an all-natural delivery, I suppose.

She was the only one I managed to breastfeed, but I think that was because I had reached a point in my life where I gave no more fucks about a whole lot of stuff. And yet also, too many. It was a complicated time. Some things remain a blur, and some are so sharp…

She had no name for two days, my swiftly delivered, green-eyed baby girl. It’s so odd to think she’s a young woman now, when I remember holding her then, in our tiny bathroom, when she was so small and warm and new.

Funny story. One of the names my husband suggested for her – he was there for the birth, my mother and father were downstairs with her sisters – was the name of his then girlfriend.

Apparently he just likes the name.

It’s true. You can’t actually make someone’s head explode with with your mind.

He’s not a bad or stupid person. I spent a long time occasionally saying to my now grown up daughters when they were dealing with him and his new family that I was sorry, and that he wasn’t a dick when I married him. I have since re-assessed and apologised to them again. Christ on a fucking bike.

Skip forward six months or so. I had no friends nearby, no family either, but I did have the internet, and at the time I was doubly fascinating in that I was both a girl and in the UK, so I managed to make some friends. Goddess love you guys on Compuserve. For the first time in my life I was alone at night, but most of the US was just getting started, and wanted weird, nerdy, lonely British people to hang out with. I came to love the sound of our 28.8 modem connecting. It was my beacon in the darkness and often all that kept me going.

That and left over tuna pasta and £1.99 Lambrusco. For a litre and a half. I shit you not. I first found this icon of continental sophistication at Brahms and Liszt in Manchester (that then became Panama Hatty’s) as it was the cheapest thing by the bottle, and as write this I realise it was probably to blame for me meeting my ex-husband. Don’t drink shit wine and date, kids. Really.

After he left us, he would still come home almost every weekend to see the children, and contribute towards our bills, too. He continued to pay the mortgage, make unexpected offers of cash for things we didn’t actually need and he would usually get us a week’s shopping most weeks too.

He couldn’t take me shopping though, because then, he’d have to take the children too, and who wants to take children anywhere if they don’t have to? I mean, that’s obviously fair enough. He didn’t want to leave me with cash because it would, of course, be too hard for me to do a big shop on my own with the children – especially since I don’t drive – and whilst he’d leave me £20 for electric, if he left me much more – well, what did I need it for? Emergencies like what? I just had to tell him what I needed and he’d get it with the next shop. Christ. It wasn’t hard, was it…?

You end up totally powerless, and unable to go anywhere at all. Ever.

And so I ended up hunting for 5ps to buy milk down the sides of the sofa, and eating leftover tuna pasta, and taking too long to apply for income support.

Because it wasn’t what you did, was it? Because it wasn’t as if we needed it. We weren’t starving, or sick or homeless. There were people who needed it more. Plus, my executive function processing is a bit screwed when it comes to coping skills, it turns out.

Sheer desperation and help from the internet got me there in the end. Hell, they don’t make it easy, (though it was a sheer delight compared to PIP and bloody Universal Credit) but I did actually get there, with my children, when necessary, to the kind of brutalist concrete building that sucks the joy of everything for a mile around it, and renders you a husk for days afterwards.

I got there and managed to go back there every two weeks, and kept going there even when I was eventually working part time, and when they kept fucking up my claim, and we had to go through the whole accursed process five times, although it was them who incorrectly filled in the forms. Tortuously. I don’t know if you have any keyboard skills and have ever had to watch someone with none attempt to type important things – for an hour – whilst alternately patronising you and ignoring you. I genuinely once started crying with frustration. If there is a Hell, this is what it is like.

Some years down the line, of course they won and they broke me. They always win. It’s only luck that by the time that happened I’d managed to get more hours at work and we didn’t starve.

“Do we have to keep going to see the man about Jesus, mummy? It’s boring. We can’t ask questions…”

Throughout all this I made sure they didn’t chase my ex-husband for child support because I told them how very much money he gave us, so they left him alone. And in this, I may have lied. He did still contribute to our bills and I thought that was fair enough.

I had no idea how much he was earning at the time. All I knew was he came back every weekend and saw his children who adored him, and he was great with them. And then we’d drink wine on Saturday night and he’d tell me about his girlfriend and how shitty she was to him and how controlling and abusive she was, and how he couldn’t talk to anyone else, because no one else knew about his awful, sordid affair.

I never told him about his mum calling social services. I knew how much it would hurt him, and he was going through so much already. So that’s why he kept taking the kids over to visit her on Sundays still – apart from the big falling out we all had when it turned out he was dropping them off with her and she was secretly, secretly, taking them to Sunday School. “Do we have to keep going to see the man about Jesus, mummy? It’s boring. We can’t ask questions…”

And I kept counselling him about his batshit girlfriend he was obviously staying with because he hated himself for what he’d done, whilst he enabled my drinking, used up my emotional strength and then fucked off back to sunny Leeds again every week, with his work colleagues and his socialising and his tidy little flat. And I slept when my baby slept and talked to Americans and the odd British stranger on Compuserve, and dropped my older daughters at school just about on time every morning, and picked them up again just about on time every afternoon, and sleepwalked and drank and talked online and that was my entire life.

Meanwhile, on the internet… Another Brit turned up and jumped into an off topic thread with a deftness that surprises me to this day, and we just ran with a story that in many ways, we are still writing. She’s sleeping beside me now. Reader, I married her. That was a plot twist I never imagined, back then. Although, hell, maybe I did.

She saved me.

Again, it’s been terribly hard, strange and complicated for my redoubtable offspring. They have known my wife since they were tiny and have had many different stages of relationships with her. I hope I’ve done my best to be as honest as I can with them. I’m not good at this stuff. Executive function again.

You see, I’m examining a lot of stuff about myself, and whilst I’m probably not a high functioning alcoholic, I am a functioning autistic, and emotionally I am all over the show. Or barely in the show. Or in a different show entirely*. I know, now, that’s what my father was. I know that’s why he genuinely didn’t understand why we would be upset sometimes, and I’m sad now that I didn’t understand him more when he was alive. But I think we knew each other, in our way. And he loved us a lot, in his own odd, sarcastic, northern way, and knew we loved him. That’s more than a lot of people get, and I treasure it.

My wife came in and saved me from the mire that was slowly consuming me. She made me look at myself again, more clearly and with something approaching care. She helped me connect with my children, too, more openly, and more directly. She made me talk to them, look them in the eye. and hug them. She made everyone say please and thank you. She saved us all without anyone, or even her, noticing, because she thought we were rescuing her from her father. So everyone won prizes that day.

“It’s only now, now, at fifty-fucking-three that I have any real understanding that not being ok is nothing to be afraid of.”

It wasn’t all easy, mind you. Fuck no. Money was tight, and we did our best, but it was never quite as simple as it should be, and there was always one more mountain. One more bastard headfuck holding us back. There still is. But there is onward, forward progress. For us both. It’s so slow it’s barely perceptible, and I know all this, all this writing is because I am up and fizzy*. I may crash or bounce back from it, but I’m going to use it while it lasts and try to not let it get away from me.

I’ve been terrified of the thought of mental illness since I was young, because my inner voice, my self awareness, was all I had. ‘What if there was nothing one day? What if there’s just blackness? What if I open my eyes and I’m gone?’ I would think, at a pompously young age. And yet I remember my school work eventually getting away from me, the panic, and of not knowing what to do. Of junior school, and not understanding the other children. I remember having a meltdown during my AO levels, when I was doing Pure & Applied Maths when I wanted to do just Pure Maths, and my mother giving me half a valium, and feeling so calm suddenly. I stopped doing maths completely, and just did Art and General Studies. I recommend that very highly. I was the envy of our very small girls’ school sixth form, and a lady of leisure in our common. room for most of that last year, or off discovering Pink Floyd and Grace Jones in the Art Room.

It’s only now, now, at fifty-fucking-three that I have any real understanding that not being ok is nothing to be afraid of. And that’s what needed to change. That’s what would have saved all of us, so much sooner. That’s what would have made a difference to all our lives, long before this.

That’s my point, in amongst all this poverty porn and “Troubled Lives”. If that stigma wasn’t ingrained in us, maybe my father might have understood himself better, maybe I would have struggled less, suffered less, maybe there’d be less pain in the world, right now. In my life right now.

But I have to conclude by saying, I don’t actually regret anything. Without all of this, without every misstep, fuck up, crisis and long, dark night I would not have the people around me I do now, the children I have, the grandchild I have or the wife I do. And I would not change any of them. I’d wish them more happiness, and less pain, but I love the bones of them all, and they are my absolute pride. Fuck yeah, fam.

*Possibly even in two shows. I see you, possible bipolar diagnosis. With my devastating side eye.