The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  Maternal deprivation

  I am a disappointing child. I wish I wasn’t, but I am. In a pub garden in Surrey, my mother made this clear again. My mother was nibbling at a fishcake, because she’s a delicate eater and takes tiny bites. I was tucking into a burger and chips, because I’m not and I don’t. My mother doesn’t actually use the word ‘disappointing’. She is a very polite woman and that would not be kind. She just sighs and points out yet again that she’s the only person she knows who doesn’t have any grandchildren.

  My mother adores her children, who are, of course, not children. In terms of my career, or what used to be my career, she has always been my biggest fan. She buys at least two copies of every article I write. She copies them and sends them to her friends. Every time I’m on TV, she both watches and records it. When I was on the Today programme once, she phoned as soon as I got out of the studio. I had just been in a fierce discussion about whether actors or poets were better at reading poems. ‘I agree,’ she said, ‘with the other chap.’

  My mother has more energy and zest than almost anyone I’ve met. You would think she has won the pools when she has managed to find a half-price navy skirt. You can imagine what it was like, on the day the first Star Wars film came out, to find that she had tracked down lacquered pine kitchen cupboards at Debenhams with 33 per cent off.

  She has lived in Sweden, England, Bangkok and Rome. She speaks fluent English, Swedish, Italian and German, good French and basic Thai. She was the best student in her year in her home city of Halmstad and after she met my father she did a four-year degree in two. She brought up three children while working as a teacher, did an Open University degree, had people to stay, sometimes for weeks on end, and served delicious meals several times a day. She drives old ladies, has run various support groups and is known for being a brilliant hostess.

  These are all excellent qualities to have in a mother, but when you are a fortysomething single woman who doesn’t know most of her neighbours, isn’t the lynchpin of any community and has to stay with her seventysomething mother when she’s had a big operation, because there’s no one else to look after her, it doesn’t always make you feel great. When I go to see my mother, I sleep, as I’ve always slept, in my childhood bed. And because I start to feel like a child, I start behaving like a child. I rifle through her lacquered pine cupboards and sniff out the hidden Kettle Chips.

  My mother is not the kind of person to go in for public speaking, but I think she could fill lecture halls with talks on the subject of ‘what to do when you don’t quite get the children you want’. It isn’t that she doesn’t like us. We are, at least most of the time, pretty decent, honest and polite. She just didn’t realize how much would go wrong with us. She didn’t realize how much could go wrong with us. Or how much we would end up costing the NHS.

  My mother’s friends’ children are things like doctors and lawyers. They live in big houses. They have children and husbands or wives. My mother’s friends spend Christmas in these big houses with their grandchildren. They don’t spend Christmas making polite conversation with their unmarried middle-aged daughter and their unmarried middle-aged son. My mother has supported her children through more ups and downs than she even knew existed. And now, at the age of seventy-eight, treating her youngest child to a burger and chips in a pub garden in Surrey, she tried very hard not to mention the fact that she didn’t even have a child with a regular job.

  It wasn’t my mother who wrote a poem called ‘Motherhood’, which talks of shutting away the family photos and sweeping everything ‘absolutely clear of motherhood’, so that there shall, at last, be ‘room, time, space, for everything’. That was my friend Mimi, in her book The Meanest Flower. I have read an awful lot of poems. I have met an awful lot of poets. Of all the poets I have met and read, Mimi Khalvati is one of the poets I love most.

  ‘I’m sick of the good,’ she says in that poem, ‘Of drooling over photos / that lie, lie, lie’. The poem is about the anger, grief, pain and sheer bloody effort of motherhood and of how ‘everything / everywhere’ is a mother’s fault. She is not talking about the domestic stuff: the washing, the PE kits, the endless, endless meals. One friend of mine worked out that she had spent about two years of her life doing the washing and wiping the floor. Mimi didn’t mind this. She didn’t love it, but she didn’t mind it. For Mimi, as for my mother, the pain started when her children got ill.

  When her daughter Tara was twenty-five, she was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease that usually leads to loss of sight. ‘It’s not one hundred per cent in every case,’ Mimi told me, ‘but I think the prognosis was seventy-five per cent likelihood. At first you have a sort of sense of disbelief, really. You have a sense of shock and horror, but also a misplaced sense of optimism that it will be all right.’

  She had the same sense of ‘misplaced optimism’ when, two years later, her son Tom was diagnosed with schizophrenia. ‘I had a very strong voice,’ she said, ‘saying: don’t panic, don’t worry, it will be all right.’ But it soon became clear that there was plenty to panic about.

  ‘I first heard of it,’ she told me, over more tea in her sitting room, ‘when he was taken into a psychiatric ward in Sussex. He phoned me up and said, “Mum, I’m in hospital.” I rushed down there. Your body does one thing. Your body shakes or trembles, you get jelly legs, but then your mind stays like “I’ve got to deal with this, I’ve got to cope with it. Think. Stay focused.” Your body is out of control, but you get into a sort of cold part of your mind.’

  That was twelve years ago. Tom has been in hospital several times since. The longest stay, of five months, was the worst. ‘I actually thought he was going to die,’ she told me, ‘as a result of the medication. He was catatonic. He couldn’t eat. He was skin and bones.’ It took a year and a half for Mimi to persuade a new young doctor on the ward to do something about the drugs her son was on. ‘I presented her with a long list of side effects and said: look at these, these are all Tom’s symptoms, including things like inability to swallow.’ In the end, they agreed to ‘baseline’, where they take a patient off all medication, in order to build it up again. ‘Well, they took Tom off everything,’ she said, ‘and within a week, literally only a week, nearly all his symptoms had disappeared.’

  This probably saved Tom’s life, but it didn’t cure his schizophrenia. There isn’t a cure for schizophrenia. It is, as my mother knows all too well, a case of messing around with medication, a case, in fact, of trial and error. Mimi has written poems about her son’s illness. In the first poem of a sequence called ‘Sundays’, she writes about Sundays with her son, eating sour cherry rice and meatballs after a walk in the park. Tom is listening to the radio ‘to stall / hallucinations’ and drown out the voices in his head. Afterwards, he plays the piano. ‘Between his fingers’, she writes, ‘things grow, little demons, / fountains, crocuses. Spring is announced and enters, / one long green glove unfingering the other, / icicles melt and rivers run, bluetits / hop and trill.’

  In the music there is a kind of spring, but here, too, are demons. It’s like those old medieval maps showing the edge of the world. Here be Dragons. Dragons, unfortunately, that often can’t be slayed.

  Tom is handsome and gentle and very loving to his mother. He is also a brilliant musician. He is, of course, the one who has paid the heaviest price for his illness. He’s the one who has gone to A & E with panic attacks and who has to live with the daily terror of what his illness might bring. In the next poem in the sequence, Mimi writes about how, on another Sunday visit to her flat, he ‘can’t even swallow his own saliva’ without hearing ‘the voices’ or ‘seeing / babies streaming towards his mouth’. I don’t know how many of us would be able to eat if we saw babies ‘streaming’ towards our mouths. Mimi has written a few poems about his illness. ‘It’s a political decision,’ she told me, ‘because I think mental illness should be more visible and understood.’

  There are times when Mimi has no idea how Tom is because he som
etimes won’t see her for months on end. It was during one of these periods that Mimi had ‘a very, very overpowering feeling that something was drastically wrong’. She went round to his flat, and there was no answer. ‘I knew, somehow knew,’ she said, ‘that he was in there. In the end, I borrowed a ladder from a neighbour. I climbed up the ladder to this first-floor window, climbed in through the window and Tom was in the most terrible state. I called an ambulance immediately. He was taken away and hospitalized.’

  You’d have thought all this would be enough for a mother to bear, but some of Tom’s therapists have suggested that his illness is Mimi’s fault. ‘All sorts of things were suggested,’ said Mimi, with a weary smile. ‘Sexual abuse, just for starters. Plus, all the other sins that mothers commit. I’m over-protective or controlling, or too loving, too close, too dominant, too passive. I think we live in a mother-blaming culture. As mothers, we know very well that we’re always to blame for everything. If something’s gone wrong, it’s our fault.’

  When Katherine had her son, she knew straight away that something wasn’t right. ‘I’d been in labour for four days,’ she told me, over grilled trout in a members’ club in Soho, ‘and all sorts of things had gone wrong. He was screaming and the midwife said, “I’ll take him off you, we’ll be able to settle him.” I was like, I don’t actually care if you throw him out of the window.’

  I nodded politely, and tried to hide my shock. ‘I had,’ she said, ‘no bond.’ The midwife came back after forty-five minutes. ‘They couldn’t shut him up. I thought: “I’ve got this baby that nobody can deal with. How am I going to do it?”’

  I met Katherine on Twitter. She used to read my column in The Independent, and we became ‘Twitter friends’ and finally met for lunch. One of the things she tweets about is the challenge of dealing with her autistic son. There is autism in my family. Autism is, in fact, part of daily life for about three million people in this country, but many families affected by it find it hard to discuss.

  ‘Right from when he was born,’ she said, ‘I knew that when you hold them, they’re meant to mimic your facial expressions. It’s one of the first things they can do and he didn’t. He wouldn’t look at me.’ Katherine was composed as she talked, but in her eyes I could see the memory flooding back. ‘I had this baby that would never, ever stop shrieking. Literally, before he woke up, he would be shrieking. When he was a toddler, I lost all my friends, even friends I’d had for a long time, because he just hit their children.’

  It didn’t help that the healthcare professionals thought there wasn’t much wrong. ‘I was really overweight then,’ said Katherine, who is now so slim and gorgeous that I felt a stab of envy when I watched the waiter eye her up, ‘because I’d eaten to try and cope, and so they just had this picture of me as this fat woman who couldn’t look after her son. They’d give me,’ she added, and the contempt was clear in her voice, ‘all these books on positive parenting.’ Oh yes, that old standby for mothers, ‘positive parenting’. It makes me think of the book I once found on my mother’s bedside table. It was called Maternal Deprivation. She read it for the A level in sociology she did on Tuesday nights, but only after cooking the dinner, of course.

  It was when Katherine’s son went to school that he was finally diagnosed with severe autism. ‘He didn’t quite fit any of the models,’ she says. ‘He’s very bright and in some areas he excels, but his social skills and impulse control and sensory problems are more like a child who can’t talk.’ Katherine learnt the hard way that her son can’t use his imagination. ‘He can’t put himself in the future, or in someone else’s shoes. So he’s like a toddler. If there’s something happening he doesn’t like, it’s going to go on for ever, and that’s why he just destroys everything.’

  It sounded, I wanted to tell her, like hell, but you can’t really tell someone else that their life sounds to you like a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. So what, I asked, was the average day? Katherine made that face you make when you’ve been pretending everything is fine, but it isn’t. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘by the time he was ten or eleven he’d kind of withdrawn into himself a bit more, which was a relief. He’d wake up and go to the loo and he’d get his iPad and sit in bed with that. At some point, you’d have to go in and get him ready for school. Sometimes, we’d have to sit on him to get the clothes on him. Who was the one with the rock? Sisyphus? It was the fact that we’d been doing this since he was two, and we’d never be able to stop doing it. Every single day. Having the same arguments with him, and having to explain why he had to wear socks, why he had to wear shoes. He was always unhappy and then he would lash out. He would punch and kick us. He would kick my shins and headbutt me, sometimes just in this blind rage.’

  I was on my way back from a holiday when I got a call from my friend Louise Murray. I have known Louise since I was twenty-three. We met when we were both doing a ‘diploma in printing and publishing for graduates’ at the London College of Printing, in a tower block at the Elephant and Castle. It wasn’t the dreaming spire I fantasized about when I watched Brideshead Revisited, but whenever we go past it, my mother says, ‘There’s your alma mater!’ In that tower block we were taught by retired printers who had practised their trade in the days of hot metal and didn’t have all that much time for English literature graduates who dreamt of discovering the new Sylvia Plath. I was instantly drawn to the fiercely bright Scot with shiny pink Doc Martens and spiky red hair. She had dangly earrings that looked like daggers, which matched, I thought, her razor-sharp tongue.

  We both went on to get jobs in publishing and met in cafés and bars in Camden to swap tales of office life. We once travelled round southern Spain together and rounded off our trip with a couple of nights in Torremolinos. It was, to be honest, a bit of a relief after the mountain villages where the people had seemed rather dour. In Torremolinos we finally got a friendly smile from the waiter, and the paella we had been constantly told was on tomorrow, but never tonight.

  When Louise fell in love with an academic called Stephen, I knew it was time to panic. The two other women in our little group of friends from the Elephant tower block had also found partners, and I was the only singleton left. Two years later, Louise got pregnant. When I saw her cradling a scrap of pink flesh in a hospital bed, I felt as if she had managed to get to the other side of a chasm I might never reach. When her son Sam was three, she took a sabbatical from her job and went to live with Stephen in Japan. She was quite pleased to leave behind the long hours in the office. She loved Japan and she liked being a fulltime mum. Then she discovered that she was pregnant with twins.

  ‘I had spent the whole first year of my son’s life thinking he was going to die,’ she told me, in a hotel bar in Edinburgh. ‘I couldn’t believe I’d brought something so precious into the world and I thought there was going to be a cot death. I didn’t relax until he was a year old and the risk of cot death had faded. By the time I got pregnant again, I was pretty relaxed about it all, but when I found out what could go wrong with twins, I thought: I’ve really got to get a grip here because I could be miserable for the next nine months. I thought: let’s not read too much about it and get on with things, which I did.’

  Because of the risk, Louise decided to go to stay with her parents near Glasgow for the last few months of the pregnancy. She was on a Scottish island with her parents when the contractions started, fifteen weeks before the babies were due. When a doctor saw her, he called an air ambulance. ‘It was a beautiful journey,’ she told me. ‘There was an amazing view of the Scottish islands. When we got to Glasgow airport, we landed in a ring of fire engines and police cars and in my arrogance I thought: ah, they’ve done that just for me. In fact, one of the engines had failed on the plane and the police came and took the pilot away. The midwife burst into tears and said she was never flying again. And I was thinking: hang on, I’m in labour here, early, I’m supposed to be the centre of attention, but I was also thinking: this is going to make a great story.’

  T
here was an ambulance on the runway, waiting to take her to the hospital. ‘I still thought it was all going to be all right. I thought it was Braxton Hicks,’ she said, ‘pretend contractions. By the time I got to the hospital I thought: this is really hurting quite a lot.’ She was taken to a delivery room and given an epidural. ‘When the first one came out, I said, “Is it alive?” And they said, “It’s too soon to tell.” And then they said, “The good news is it’s a girl, and girls are more likely to survive.”’

  Both babies were girls, and both were put in incubators straight after the birth. After a week in hospital, Louise went back to her parents’ home. Every four hours in the night, she was told to get up to express milk. ‘Basically, you’re producing a teaspoon,’ she said, ‘because milk doesn’t come until twenty-eight weeks. I spent most of my days at the hospital.’ And what, I asked, did she think was going to happen? ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘they were going to die.’

  ‘I felt that I was falling into an abyss, actually. The psychologist comes along on day two or three and leaves a note on the incubator saying you might like to talk, and I thought I would, but I never did. I’m glad I didn’t. I talked to friends instead.’ I have never seen Louise cry, but now I saw that there were tears trickling down her cheeks. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I felt very buoyed by the affection I was getting. In particular I remember you, actually. You were so upset.’

  I certainly was upset. I remember clutching the phone in a multistorey car park at Gatwick and thinking: my friend’s babies are probably going to die. It was only in that hotel bar in Edinburgh, thirteen years later, that I got the full story of what happened next.