A Good Enough Mother

by Bev Thomas

  ‘Thank you,’ I say eventually, ‘for bringing them to show me.’

  She shrugs.

  I reach down for several that have fallen onto the floor and pick them up carefully.

  ‘Tell me about this one,’ I suggest.

  She peers at it. ‘Brighton,’ she says.

  I continue to fan through the pictures, with a deliberate slowness. I think about the huge angry woman on the ward, and how the small nurse slowed everything down and sat with her, and did the opposite of what she was expecting. I pick up a photo from time to time, and ask her about it. Where was she? What were they doing? And in that slow process of retrieval and reminiscing, of sifting gently through these memories, she too starts to slow down, to stop and look. She continues to answer my questions curtly, just words, or monosyllables. ‘My brother. The beach. Christmas in Dorset. The Isle of Wight.’ But as I persevere, and she understands that I am not overwhelmed by the volume of pictures, and that I am interested, really interested in them, I feel she begins to soften. She leans in closer across the table. She stops fidgeting. Perhaps it’s the care I am taking. The fact that I am really looking at the images. Really trying to see her – and see who she is. I see you. I see the two of you. And because I see what you had – I see what you have lost. And something shifts between us.

  ‘What about this one?’ I ask. It’s taken outside, on a pavement. Hayley looks eight or nine, with an older woman with dark hair in a ponytail. She’s standing by a red bike. Smiling a wide toothy grin.

  Hayley reaches across for it, nods with recognition. There’s the hint of a smile.

  ‘My birthday,’ she recollects, ‘ninth, I think … my new bike—’

  She hesitates. ‘Mum had wrapped it in brown paper. Put it in a box. Ribbons and tissue. I had no idea I was getting a bike. She wrapped it so well. Totally hid the shape. It must have taken her hours,’ and she twists her hands together in her lap.

  She looks up at me.

  ‘I am thinking,’ I say, working hard to hold her gaze, ‘that while it’s hard for you to tell me how much you loved her. How much she loved you. And how dreadful you feel. You have brought these images, these memories which tell me that story.’

  Hayley says nothing, but there’s a softening of the silence.

  She looks down at her hands.

  ‘Lots of teenage girls argue with their parents. In fact, most teenage girls argue with their parents. Particularly with their mothers. It’s normal. It’s part of life as a teenager. And it’s part of life as a parent of a teenager.’

  Again, I think of Carolyn. How her fierce self-reliance made my advice redundant.

  ‘Lots of teenagers wish their parents would disappear. Simply go away. Parents – particularly mothers – with their questions, their concerns, their worries, they get in the way of freedom … getting what you want.’

  Hayley continues to stare. Lip out, jaw set hard and expectantly.

  ‘But for many girls – and boys – it’s a wish. A momentary wish. A fantasy.’

  There’s a pause.

  ‘If you’re one of the many teenagers who’s felt this,’ I say, ‘then I wonder how difficult it must feel, now your mother really has gone away.’

  ‘It was the dress,’ she blurts out. ‘I’d just bought it, was showing it to her. Mum said it was awful. Tarty.’ She struggles to continue. ‘I saw it happen. It was like a film. Slow motion – and yet really fast at the same time. Like I knew exactly what was going to happen, before it actually did.’

  As she tells the story, I see the two of them on the pavement outside a crowded shopping centre. The argument about the dress she’d just bought to go to the party. Too short. Too red. Too grown-up. Too cheap. On another day, it might have been about the time to come home. Or about drinking. Or not eating properly. The thinness of her arms and body. Or about not texting her the night before. Or not getting back in time to babysit her younger brother … or a million other things that might spark an argument between a parent and a teenager. Then she hears people shouting and a woman scream. Then out of nowhere, behind her mother, a car comes careering off the road and onto the pavement.

  ‘She was driving like a drunk,’ Hayley says.

  There were no traces of alcohol found in the body of the driver. A Mrs Susan Hamilton was fifty-eight years old, and suffered a massive and fatal stroke at the wheel of her car. Consequently, she lost control of the vehicle as it ploughed into the pavement on a busy Saturday afternoon in Wood Green. Hayley’s mother died on impact, wedged up against the lamp post against which she was leaning. There were other injuries, but she was the only fatality.

  Hayley tells me how her mother had put down her shopping bags as they were arguing. ‘“I’m tired, Hayley,” she’d said, and I stopped in the street to shout at her, instead of walking on – she stopped, too. If I hadn’t argued – or stopped – we would have been somewhere else entirely.’

  Hayley looks away.

  ‘The last thing my mother said to me was something about how the dress made me look cheap. And guess what?’ she says, looking back at me, as she picks the skin around her fingernails, ‘The last thing I was saying to her? Not out loud – but in my head. I was practically shouting it at her—’

  She drops her head down low.

  ‘Why don’t you just fuck off and die,’ she whispers, ‘that’s what I was saying in my head. How shit am I? That just before it happens, I’m saying I hate her. The actual moment she dies, I’m wishing her dead.’

  She inspects her fingernails.

  ‘So now you know. It was my fault,’ she says without emotion. ‘I did it. I made it happen.’

  She looks up at me defiantly now. ‘You really don’t want to mess with me. You don’t even really want to be around me. Look what I can do,’ she says, ‘you never know what might happen,’ and there is real menace in her voice.

  I do not feel threatened. I lean closer towards her.

  ‘You were angry,’ I say simply. ‘You had an angry thought.’ I press my palms together. ‘Do you know what?’

  I can feel her listening.

  ‘You won’t be the first or last teenage girl who’s had a hateful thought about her mother. We can have a murderous thought, without being murderous.’

  I have her full attention. ‘We can have bad thoughts – without being bad,’ I say, very slowly and clearly. ‘I imagine the baggage you’re carrying about must be really heavy. Awful to carry round with you. Maybe you can think of it like a rucksack – and put it down for a while. Give yourself a break. Pick up something else. Pick up some of these lovely memories,’ I say, gesturing down to the table.

  She blinks back at me.

  ‘Mostly what I feel listening to your story is great sadness. How awful for you to feel so bad. To feel so powerful. To feel like the bad girl who made the car swerve round the bend. I’m so sorry.’

  She sinks down lower as I’m speaking, as though the heaviness is threatening to crush her.

  ‘What I also see here,’ I say, and I pick up a handful of pictures, ‘is that you are the girl who laughed and made sandcastles with her mother on the beach. The girl who appreciated how her mother wrapped her birthday present. These pictures show me that there was so much more than that single bad thought you had about your mother.’

  She says nothing in response, but I can tell she’s still listening. I know that she can hear me.

  I pick out one photo and hold it up. ‘Underneath all this fury – there is loss. Often, it can feel easier to stay angry. I know you feel it was your fault. It wasn’t,’ and I shake my head. ‘But letting go of that feeling, means you will have to let in a tide of other feelings, grief and sadness. It will be very hard.’

  Hayley says nothing. Makes no sound. A solitary tear rolls down her cheek. Nothing follows and she doesn’t move to brush it away. She ignores it. Simply pretends it hasn’t happened. Then she looks up at the clock and starts to gather the photographs together and sweep them back into the ruc
ksack. Her hands move more gently, reaching down to pick up the ones that have fallen on the floor. I help her pack them up. We do this together, in silence, until every last picture has been put away.

  ‘Perhaps you can bring an album, next time you come. We can start to put them in a book.’

  She gives a nod. Like a blink.

  As always, at the end of the session, she sits poised on the edge of her chair, like a schoolgirl waiting for the bell. This time, the zipped-up bag is cradled on her lap. This time she doesn’t ask if she has to come back, or why she has to ‘keep coming to this dump’.

  For the first time, she says goodbye. A gruff muttering, then, ‘See you next time,’ as she shuffles out the door.

  It’s a small triumph. Like a glimpse of green from the winter soil. But I see it. I claim it for my own. It’s what I am good at. Holding, bearing it all, waiting for the breakthrough that I know will always come.

  It’s in this state of triumph that I sit waiting for Dan. He’s due at four o’clock – and at ten past I ring through to Paula. There is no sign of him. He has not rung in and left a message. By quarter past, I think perhaps he won’t be coming, and I feel an acute sense of disappointment. Sessions when a patient doesn’t come are marked as DNA on the system. Did Not Attend. They are hard to fill. The time that you would spend seeing your booked patient becomes a time that you spend thinking about them. Wondering about them, reflecting on the last session and their state of mind.

  It reminds me of my previous supervision session with Stephanie.

  ‘It’s rude,’ she’d said, as she pondered over her three DNAs in the previous week. ‘If they could just pick up the phone and tell me they can’t make it, then I could use the time to get on with something else. Instead,’ she said, ‘I spent the whole of the session waiting. Expecting them to come. Maybe they’re running late. Or something’s come up. Whatever. Common courtesy, don’t you think? Just to call and let me know?’

  Again, that impenetrability. That concrete thinking that was verging on obtuse.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I offered, ‘that’s the point?’

  She screwed up her face, shaking her head. ‘What? I don’t quite—’

  ‘If a patient doesn’t come, and doesn’t let us know, we’re left with all sorts of feelings. When they don’t come, it’s still their time. Maybe they’ll come. Maybe they won’t. We are left with them, even if they aren’t there. Let’s think about rudeness,’ I say, ‘how else might you understand the feelings you’re left with?’

  ‘Out of sorts?’

  Inwardly, I sighed.

  ‘What does “out of sorts” mean?’ I prompted.

  She shrugged. ‘Discombobulated?’ she offered.

  Perhaps it was her tone of voice – less obtuse, more like a child in class, hand in the air, desperate to give the right answer. I began to wonder whether her own feelings were somewhere underground, buried things she was trying hard to dig up.

  ‘I understand what you’re saying. What might be the feeling behind that?’

  She stared back at me, ‘Well, it’s irritating, isn’t it?’

  ‘Can you say, “I feel irritated?”’

  She looked confused.

  ‘Let’s think about what the patient might himself be experiencing. Is it possible that the patient himself might be feeling angry and irritated? Angry about what’s happened to him? Irritated by the fact he has to come here and talk about it? Angry that he is the victim, and in the hands of the “expert” whose life might seem perfect? Do you think it’s possible that he feels these things very strongly, and he might want you to experience a tiny bit of what that might be like?’

  I paused for a moment. ‘Remind me – who was it that you had to cancel the week before?’

  ‘When I was off sick?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Neil Dixon was one of them.’

  ‘Well, perhaps Neil Dixon felt angry at his sudden cancelled session. Perhaps he was looking forward to coming … in need of help and support, given what has happened to him? Perhaps he wanted to retaliate. Perhaps he wanted you to feel what he felt. Let down? Rejected?’

  She frowned. ‘I was ill. It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘I know that. And he knows that. He will have got the call from Paula. But what he knows and what he feels are two very different things. And all this is unconscious, of course,’ I went on, ‘it’s not likely to be something he’s aware of – at all.’

  ‘I can’t help being ill—’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you can’t. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s about understanding the impact of your unavailability. In fact,’ I added, ‘our lack of availability is fundamental to the work. How a patient is able to internalise separation from the therapist says a lot about their early attachment figures. And vice versa.’ I reminded her about Winnicott. ‘His theory about the “good enough mother” would be something to have a look at,’ I said, but she screwed up her face.

  ‘I see it everywhere,’ she groaned, ‘almost every magazine article I pick up; good enough parent … good enough teacher … good enough partner.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Sounds like a way of letting yourself off the hook if you mess up. An excuse for mediocrity.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s become oversimplified. The original meaning’s got lost. It’s about the fact that maternal limitations play an essential role in separation and in the child’s developmental process.’

  I glanced up at the clock. I could see we were running out of time, but I also wanted her to do the work and make the links. ‘Why don’t you have a look at the paper again, then we can talk some more. I think the conference will really help. It’ll cover attachment theory and you’ll then be able to see how it relates so crucially to our approach to therapy with trauma patients.’

  She nodded. Then she told me she wasn’t used to having DNAs as a trainee. ‘Up until now, my patients have mostly come. Perhaps it was the different model? The weekly homework tasks—’

  ‘So, this is important learning for you,’ I cut in, ‘something to really think about,’ I said, before she had the chance to tell me yet again about the structure of CBT.

  So it is, on that Friday afternoon, in the absence of Dan, I am thinking about him. After the initial disappointment, I then review our work together and I think about my confusion at the end of the last session. The pull to collude with his view of the world. His feeling of grievance, of being let down. I remember his sense of power in those closing minutes. The sudden shift, and how, as a result, he got what he wanted.

  At my desk, I’m leafing through the notes and my thoughts turn to the brutal rape in the park. The subsequent panic attack in my office. How he might have been left feeling raw and exposed and that it might have felt difficult for him to come back and see me again. His desperation. His hopelessness. The cuts on his arm. The cuts on his arm. The cuts that I failed to even ask about. Somewhere in the distance, there’s the sound of a siren. An ambulance weaving its way to the hospital. I feel a sudden coldness. And then there was his comment about the dead plants. Was he trying to tell me something? Was it a warning? I think about Tom and the signs I might have missed. That dark night in the kitchen. The sight of him. Ashen. The black shadow that fell across his face.

  Jittery, I ring Dan’s mobile number. It goes straight to voicemail. Without thinking, I leave a message: I was expecting you this afternoon. I hope everything is all right. It’s not something I would ordinarily do. But, as I put the receiver down, I tell myself it’s warranted. That it’s an exceptional circumstance. And it’s somehow a comfort to hear his voice.

  I ring Paula. ‘Have we had Dan Griffin’s medical notes forwarded from Hackney?’

  When she tells me nothing’s come through, I call the surgery. The woman on reception puts me on hold, then tells me there’s been a problem getting them from his previous GP. She tells me Shirley, one of the administrators, is dealing with it. ‘She’ll be in tomorrow. Can you call back then?’

 
I try to concentrate on admin but can’t settle. I go to the window, unlatch the catch and push it open. The spring sunshine is warm on my arms as I reach for the pots from the window box. I lift them up, snapping off the dead leaves and twigs. Dan was right, some are dead. But others have strong roots and when I fill a cup of water and pour it into the earth, they drink thirstily. I add more, until water drips down from the metal railings. It’s as I’m placing them back that I look down to the car park and see the figure on the bench. Someone in a black jacket, or a hoodie. At six floors up, I’m too far away to be sure, but I think it’s him, and I think he’s looking up at me, watching me as I carefully tend to the plants. I feel exposed, to be caught acting on something he said. I step back to the desk to reach for my glasses, but when I return to the window, the person has gone. I look up and down the road. There is no sign of anyone. Perhaps I have imagined it. Perhaps there was no one there at all.

  Seconds later, the phone rings. ‘Ruth – I have Dan Griffin here,’ Paula says, revelling in the misdemeanour. ‘Shall I tell him he’s too late?’

  ‘He has twenty minutes,’ I say, ‘you can send him down.’

  Seven

  The relief I feel about his arrival soon morphs into a different kind of feeling when he’s in the room. He strides in and sits down without a word. He’s wearing a red long-sleeved t-shirt. There’s no sign of a black hoodie. I find myself staring at the rucksack he’s dropped on the floor.

  When I tell him I was beginning to think he wasn’t coming, he nods, offers no explanation for his lateness. ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he says. He sits still in his chair, arms folded, staring at the floor. ‘I’m sick of it.’