by Bev Thomas
Tom was always a worrier. When the twins were little and we read them bedtime stories, Tom was always overly concerned about the fate of the characters. Tom Rabbit was a story about a child’s soft toy left out in the rain. He got to know and love the story with its happy ending of reconciliation, but each time, the moment of abandonment in the rain on the hard stone wall left Tom’s small face devastated. It was the same with all tales of missing things; the mislaid giraffe, the teddy left behind on the bus, the juxtaposition of loss and reconciliation both thrilled and terrified him in equal measure.
On the first day of school, Carolyn was up and dressed in her uniform, her hair brushed, all before breakfast. I was holding her hand as we stepped through the gate, but her fingers were desperate to wriggle out of mine. She searched for and found her class queue and then stood neatly in line. When it was time to file into the building, she was gone, without so much as a backward glance.
It was different for Tom. He clung tightly to my hand, and all the way up the hill he asked the same questions; when would school finish? Where would I be standing? How would he manage to see me over all the tall people? Would I definitely be there? What if I wasn’t? What would he do?
After Carolyn had happily disappeared into the classroom, and the last of the hesitant children were coaxed inside, Tom was still curled up like a monkey in my arms, hands tightly clasped around my own. Often, after he’d gone, I’d see the moon-shapes of his fingernails in my palms, or the indentation of my ring where his hand had squeezed so hard. That first day, in the end, to prise him off me, I gave him my purse; it was a long red one with a golden clasp that clicked open and shut. ‘You can have this,’ I said, handing it over, ‘so you know I’ll be coming back.’
His teacher, Mrs Flynn, told me he could keep it with him in class, and all morning I pictured him sitting at the table, opening and shutting that shiny golden clasp, clicking away the minutes until home time.
Now I wonder, what would I think if a patient had told me this story? What conclusions might I draw? Would I wonder about this boy’s separation anxiety? And what would I think about the mother giving her purse as a ‘transitional object’? Why would she think the boy would need to know she was coming back? Would I want to know more about the mother? About her own separation anxiety? Her own secure attachment figures?
I didn’t ask myself any of these questions. I did what was required of me. If he needed me, I was there. If he was anxious and unsettled, I was there. I worked part-time, so I could alter my schedule to accommodate pick-ups and drop-offs. Three out of five days I was there when they both came home from school. It was soon clear that the structure of term time was a struggle for Tom. Sports, lessons, the very act of attending school itself, were all examples of large organised activities which he seemed to hate. Perhaps it was the herd mentality, but also the pressure to perform in a group. When I asked what he enjoyed the most, he always said, ‘Lunch break,’ when he spent his time helping the gardener dig over the flower beds. ‘Wet-play’ days, the whole class cooped up indoors when it rained, were intolerable to him.
It was when the twins were at primary school that my mother embarked on her fourth, and what turned out to be, final alcohol detox programme. This time, it was a twelve-week residential stint in Taos, New Mexico. She showed me pictures of a large red clay adobe house, under the shade of cottonwood trees. The rehab programme adhered to strict boundaries. ‘I’m sorry,’ she explained, ‘it’s a silent retreat. So you won’t be hearing from me for a bit. You can keep in touch, though – send letters, or parcels. We’re allowed to receive things, we just can’t give anything ourselves. Silence is a way of encouraging self-reflection. Finding who we are and the root of our difficulties.’ It was hard to relax into this sudden silent exile. And for a while, I didn’t trust the lack of drama. Kept waiting for the phone to ring, with a teary or belligerent request to be picked up from the airport. But there was nothing. She rang the evening the twelve weeks were up. ‘Haven’t I done well?’ she said and told me she’d signed up to the advanced programme. ‘Integrating the learning back into our lives,’ she said excitedly. ‘It’s all about relapse prevention and sustainability.’ She told me that if she got through the next three months, she was going to stay on as a volunteer. ‘Run some groups,’ she said, ‘give something back. They picked me out. I was selected,’ she added proudly. I was in the kitchen, making a cottage pie at the time. She sounded high and giddy. I smashed the potatoes against the saucepan as I listened to her incessant chatter. ‘You should see me,’ she gushed, ‘I look so healthy. Taken years off me.’ Her euphoria was exhausting. I’d heard it all before. I wished her luck.
‘Luck?’ she scoffed. ‘Luck has nothing to do with it.’ I put the phone down, grateful for the impending silence of the next twelve weeks.
It was around that time that Tom’s night terrors started. He was eight. It was textbook stuff. Sudden and abrupt night waking and I’d find him sitting bolt upright in bed, his body rigid, staring at something only he could see in the room, a look of dread stretched across his face. Sometimes he was crying, other times it was more of an animal-like moan, and it could take up to an hour of lying next to him, stroking his back and coaxing him out of his strange reverie. I read up about them; common at this age. Sensitive children were susceptible. Something they grow out of. And sure enough, he did. But while the nights became more peaceful, he was left with a legacy of worry, a general state of free-floating anxiety that could land randomly on whatever was close at hand. He began to catastrophise about the world, an item in the news about a plane crash, or a motorway pile-up would cause him to ruminate about the event. Once, the local news reported a collapsed wall at a school that had injured a child. What if that happens at our school? What if someone gets hurt? It wasn’t long before the worries escalated into feelings of unwarranted responsibility. One morning, on the way to school he’d noticed roadworks in the street where someone in his class lived.
‘I saw the lorries. They go so fast round the bend.’ His face was tense and earnest. ‘I must tell Charlie,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Because he might not be able to see round the lorry. He might get knocked over crossing the road.’
When I tried to make light of it, to point out that Charlie would see it for himself, he became agitated. ‘But I know about it,’ he said, ‘and if I don’t tell him, and something bad happens, then it will be my fault.’
I tried to reassure him. To help him see that the world, for the most part, was a safe place. But we turned off the news and stopped listening to the radio in the car. It helped, for a while.
As the twins got older, David was back teaching in London full-time, and he got more involved in family life. ‘You’re too enmeshed,’ he said, dramatically clasping his hands together, ‘you need to separate from Tom. Step back. Let him be his own person.’
Let him be his own person. The words stung. He knew they would. And I felt a roar of hatred. It was what I’d wanted most for my children, because it was the very thing I’d struggled to achieve for myself. In my own childhood, any opaque rules of parenting would be further clouded by an opened bottle of gin. I had to furrow my own path through the chaos. I was good. I was helpful. But I had no idea who I was. I was like a small limpet in a wide-open sea, desperate for a rock to cling to. I found them outside the home. In teachers who took an interest in me; the PE teacher who made me captain of the netball team, the drama teacher who suggested I direct the school play, the English teacher who awarded me the annual poetry prize. I remember standing up in front of the whole school; the sense of feeling special, being singled out, was so achingly acute, I thought my heart might break.
‘Let him find himself. Toughen up a bit,’ David said. ‘He’s just started in Year Six. Let him make mistakes. See if he can manage things – on his own. Without you.’
I opened my mouth to speak, but didn’t know what to say.
‘Ruth,’ he said, ‘in le
ss than a year he’ll be in secondary school,’ he continued. ‘Have you seen the size of those kids? You can’t be hovering at the school gate handing over your purse as a keepsake. He’ll be ripped to shreds.’
That was always the problem with David. He took something that had happened in one context and applied it to another. Once, after I’d confessed to being nervous in advance of a conference talk, he went on to assume I’d feel the same at all public speaking events.
‘How are you feeling?’ he’d ask earnestly, a hand on my shoulder.
‘Fine,’ I’d say lightly, as I put on my earrings.
‘It’s just that I know you find these occasions difficult.’
Initially, I’d read it as concern. His attempt to draw on a previous feeling of anxiety, a clunky and rather robotic way of nurturing and offering care and attention. And at first these links, these associations, didn’t bother me. I’d laugh and say, ‘No – really, I’m fine. I was nervous last year because Professor Bridgeman was there. This is different. I only have to say a few words of thanks. And anyway,’ I reminded him, ‘I’m collecting an award on behalf of the team. I’ll be with all my colleagues. I’m looking forward to it.’
As time went on and I became the director of the unit while David was passed over for successive promotions, I realised that there was something unhelpful, even undermining, about these comments. As if by mentioning a previous vulnerability, he was trying to drag me back to an earlier place of insecurity. Soon, I became adept at keeping things to myself, not telling him how I felt. In truth, that wasn’t a new skill for me. It was a habit I’d already mastered, a survival technique I’d learnt much earlier in my life. Perhaps it was something I’d always done – but it calcified the day my father left. I was ten years old when I came back to find he’d gone.
‘I don’t think that’s relevant,’ I said, my voice tight. ‘I gave him the purse when he was in primary school. His first day,’ I said, ‘that was six years ago.’ I was angry. I hated the insinuation that I was babying him.
Of course, I wished Tom were more light and carefree. Especially when I could see there were times when he seemed happy and less burdened. It was usually on holiday, when absorbed in an activity; digging trenches in the sand, or making a dam across a stream. The task would consume him entirely. Everything else fell away and there was a purity about his immersion in something that gave him real joy. But his life couldn’t just be constructed around these things, and I came to dread seeing his small frown when he came home from school. His worry made me tense, agitated. I can see it didn’t help. And of course, the more he worried, the less he fitted in. Sometimes I could see his concerns loop around specific things, other times his anxiety simply multiplied like duckweed on a pond. I tried to tell myself he’d grow out of it.
‘As parents, it’s not our job to take it away – tell him everything is fine. We have to bear it,’ David said, ‘so he can learn how to bear it for himself.’
He held his hands out in exasperation. ‘Ruth, you’re the therapist – you know all this.’
While I nodded in agreement, the next day, I resumed my position, scooping up the duckweed into nets that I upended on the side, only to see the surface choked over the following day.
His worry became my worry.
You have to bear it.
Could I bear it? Maybe I simply couldn’t. Maybe all I saw in him was my smaller younger self. My stomach a tiny knot of anxiety. It’s fine – with the rictus smile of tension stretched tight across my face.
Six
Hayley’s hair is scraped back into a punishing ponytail that pulls at her scalp. Several small greasy strands hang either side of her face. She’s wearing a shapeless grey tracksuit and dirty trainers. Her eyes are set in a hard mean stare.
‘I dumped Tony,’ Hayley says, reaching into the side of her bag for a packet of chewing gum, ‘told him to fuck right off—’ and as she looks up at me, she slowly folds a piece of gum into her mouth.
Her eyes are small and watchful. I feel her waiting for me to slip up. To say something banal or stupid that she can pounce on and mock. Fleetingly, I find myself thinking of Carolyn, and the deterioration of our relationship.
I wait for her to say more.
‘He was a dead weight,’ she says.
She holds my gaze. There it is again. That look, daring me, willing me to say something.
Her anger is exhausting. A great big wall of truculence that she wants me to run and hit myself against. I feel weary.
‘I had to drop him,’ she says.
I think about the young man who accompanied her to the first session. His face etched with concern, offering to hold onto her coat in the waiting room as she and her father came to my room.
‘When I met him,’ I say, ‘he seemed very worried about you.’
‘Kept bringing me flowers,’ she scoffs. ‘Always there – following me round like a love-sick puppy. Fuck off, I said – and take your fucking roses with you. A dead weight,’ she says again, and she chews violently on her gum, her arms folded across her chest. ‘I’m better off on my own.’
Of course she is. At the moment, she’s the dead weight. The lump of uselessness. A blot on the landscape. Anything good that comes her way must be annihilated, such is the strength of her disgust for herself. It’s so strong, I can almost smell it. Like something rotting at the back of a cupboard. I can see how hard she’s working to get everyone to hate her as much as she hates herself. If you are repeatedly vile to other people, pretty soon they will move away. Leave you alone. Confirming the belief that you are truly despicable. I know how comforting it can be to have the way you feel about yourself reflected right back at you. I know that feeling very well. Head down, full of self-loathing, and batting back anything good that comes your way.
Once, years ago, when I was a trainee on an acute psychiatric ward, a patient got very angry. She was a giant of a woman who was shouting and waving her arms about, kicking chairs and tables, hair wild around her face. People were afraid. Someone pressed the panic alarm. Staff edged away. I joined them. My heart pounding, my back against the wall, waiting for other staff to arrive. What happened next was extraordinary and unexpected. Mary, an Irish nurse, a tiny diminutive woman, stepped slowly forwards. She walked towards the patient and gestured to a bench. ‘Can I sit down?’ she asked quietly. Stunned, the patient dropped the chair that she was holding above her head. ‘You must be feeling really bad,’ Mary said. ‘Why don’t you sit down with me?’ And in that second, the anger seemed to fade from the woman’s eyes. Mary reached for her hand and said, very gently, ‘I can’t imagine how frightening all this must feel.’ And on this, this huge hulk of a woman slumped down next to her on the bench, head in hands.
I’ve thought of this incident many times over the course of my career. How much it’s taught me about anger and aggression.
I spoke to the nurse about it afterwards. ‘What were you thinking?’ I said.
‘I wasn’t,’ she shook her head. ‘But I knew she was frightened. I could feel it. We could all feel it. Her anger was fear,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Fear that she was trying to get rid of and give to us. I wanted to give her something else. Something that showed I wasn’t afraid. Something that told her I could bear it. That however badly she was behaving, I could bear her. I wanted to give her some warmth.’
In my worst moments of guilt about Tom, I have almost willed judgemental comments from others. Sometimes, I’ve positively encouraged it. After his hospital admission, I felt undeserving of sympathy and kindness. I rejected all support and help. Some friends persevered, but for the most part, over time, people got the message and gave up. And pretty soon, I was left to glory in the comfort of the self-imposed exile that was my punishment. Yes, I think, looking at Hayley’s thin tight lips, her angry chewing jaw, I know just how comforting that place can be.
‘It seems hard,’ I offer, ‘for you to bear anyone being nice to you.’
‘I told you,�
�� she says, her lip curling into a snarl, ‘he’s useless. Going nowhere. And this,’ she says, jabbing a finger in the direction of my chair, ‘this isn’t helping either. It’s a waste of my time.’
I nod and tell her that I imagine that, at the moment, she feels so bad, nothing will help.
She stares back at me, almost writhing with fury in her seat. It’s like the hatred she feels is poisonous, coursing through her veins, contorting her body into a shape that looks ugly and hateful. Her eyes are accusing. Her jaw set out in an angle of defiance. A ‘say-something-useful’ pout. She’s trying so hard, I think, to be hateful and mean. It’s so exaggerated, like a cartoon version of a moody teenager, I have to stop myself from smiling.
She lapses into silence. She looks down at the grey bag on her lap, picking at the zip, drawing my attention to it.
‘S’pose you’re wondering what’s in here? You’d said to bring something – something that reminds me of Mum?’ and then, in a deft move, she unzips it and turns it upside down, shaking out several hundred photographs that spiral out over the coffee table.
She curls her lip into a snarl. What? it seems to say. Again, that challenge. Willing me to reprimand her for the mess, or for the way some have spooled out over the floor.
With her face impassive, she leafs through a handful of photos in front of me. ‘Devon … Spain … first day at school … princess party for third birthday … Year Six party … sports day …’ and on she goes. Her voice is flat, like she’s reading from a list. I catch a glimpse of some of the pictures. Sand dunes, an English seaside scene, the twinkle of Christmas tree lights, a villa balcony, a blue dress with a white ruff. She’s taunting me with her flatness, her lack of engagement. Willing me to comment, or to reprimand. I do neither of these things. She continues to flick through them. A mound of family memories, moments between mother and daughter. It makes me think of our own family photographs. Some of which have made it neatly into albums, while others still remain expectantly in packs, with dates scrawled on the outside, and then the most recent ones, now digitised, that may never make it off the computer. They pop up when I am at my desk, random pictures of Tom or Carolyn, holiday memories that nudge their way onto the screen, while I am writing a report, or doing an online shop.
