Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt McAllester

  The handwritten notes of the admitting doctor, a different physician, quote my mother: “I feel awful, I'm awful, I achieve nothing, do nothing and bother everyone with my beastly phone calls.”

  “Poor Don,” she is quoted as saying, “I don't know how he puts up with me.”

  The doctor notes: Dazed looking but quite responsive. Sat quite still in chair apart from picking at hands. Head bent most of time. Expression gloomy. Speech normal in form but content full of thoughts of worthless-ness, guilt and desire to shut world out. Lies in bed to escape but thoughts crowd in. Ideas of Reference—convinced people talking about her all the time.

  My mother was given medication, the letter from the hospital to her doctor continues. Twenty-four hours later she was entirely normal, her behaviour was appropriate, her thinking coherent and her mood was euphymic [the doctor intends to say euthymic, which means the patient is normal and no longer depressed]. She was noted to have a slight tremor but no other evidence of physical symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. She remained well over the next 5 days and was therefore discharged on no medication, and we presume that the psychiatric disturbance on admission was due to alcohol and drug misuse.

  They presumed? Well, they got that seriously fucking wrong, I thought when I read the letter. Did they not read the notes that were in front of me now, more than a quarter of a century later? How could they not see what was clear to me, a fifteen-year-old boy, what was clear to all in the family, what had been clear to the doctors who had treated her at the same hospital in 1981? Not very far below her now full-blown alcoholism was an underlying illness, a severe depression. Insanity.

  The doctor continues, says that she has advised my mother not to drink for several months, but that thereafter I did not see why she couldn't resume social drinking.

  My God, I thought, what was the doctor thinking? How could she have been so stupid? Did she think my mother would calmly return to having an occasional glass of sherry at cocktail parties? Being well-spoken and intelligent does not make you sane, but I could tell from the letter that the doctor was impressed by my mother's recent decision to return to college, to study theology.

  Ann is a first-year student on a theology course at New College, which she greatly enjoys, the doctor writes. But to me, my mother's newfound desire to learn Hebrew and ancient Greek so that she could read earlier versions of the Bible is a cause for worry, not a sign that she is putting her life back together. Religion has become just another context for her increasingly common delusions of grandeur.

  The letter finishes: I have arranged to see Mrs. McAllister [sic] in 5 days time to ensure that there really is no depressive illness lurking in the background, since she has had two past admissions for this and has a very strong family history of depressive illness.

  As far as my mother's medical records showed, the doctors now saw her as someone with what was primarily a drinking problem. How could they have decided that alcohol was the fundamental problem? I did not understand it at the time and, as I read further into the notes, I understood it less.

  When I saw her today, writes the same hospital doctor in July 1985, she was most reticent to discuss her problems. Finally she burst out crying and professed to be lonely and finding it difficult to cope with the problems of two adolescent children on her own. Matthew has been accusing her of ruining his life probably referring to the breakup of the family and Jane has been sitting her A-levels.… I could tell from the shape of Anns face that she had been drinking again and she admits to one bottle of wine or sherry every evening when she feels at her worst, particularly if the children are out.

  I felt today as I always have that she is strained, nervous and unhappy, the doctor writes in September of that year. I am sorry to say I feel I have helped Mrs. McAllister [sic] very little.

  The doctor's tone is becoming more concerned and gentle. She is clearly at a loss. My mother is slipping away from everyone.

  Two years later: This 44-year-old married woman was admitted to… hospital on 31.7.87 feeling depressed and ashamed and having drank 3 bottles of whisky in 3 days, a different doctor, one of the professor's staff writes on August 31, a month after my mother's admission. Her brother, who had come to visit her, brought her to the hospital.…

  She described sleepless nights and although her appetite became good when she was in hospital, she had neglected to feed herself beforehand and lost a little weight. She said she had felt like comitting suicide recently but was unable to because of her children. There appeared to be no hallucinations or delusions and she was clearly a woman of high intelligence with some insight into her current stresses She recovered very quickly from her excess of whisky, but the medium and long-term prognosis must be guarded, since it has been very difficult to help her in the past.

  There were letters from my mother to her doctor, begging his help in repairing the family. There was a letter from a hypnotherapist my mother saw to help her quit smoking—including a note of how she slept in and didn't make the second appointment. One doctor noted she was smoking sixty cigarettes a day.

  Thank you very much for your letter about this unfortunate lady, writes the doctor from the professor's staff on December 10, 1987. I have been quite distressed by her recent apparent deterioration. She failed to attend one of my Out-Patient appointments and then mistook the time of the next one. She presented visibly shaking, unable to drink a cup of coffee without spilling it and talking garrulously of a cure for smoking…. It is very difficult for me to tell whether the drink problem is masking a hypomanic episode, however her condition did not warrant admission.

  Hypomanic episodes are the periods when mentally ill people, especially those with bipolar disorder, become extremely talkative, creative, intellectually agile, angry, or otherwise very clearly overexcited.

  38

  I wait until my mother and I have both calmed down from our latest fight. I need her to understand that I'm not making a threat out of anger. We are in the kitchen.

  “Mum, I want to go and live with Dad,” I say. “I'm just not happy here. And I don't make you happy. It's better this way.”

  In the days that follow, she cries and I feel guilty. With me gone and my sister at college, I know that she will be alone now. She asks me to stay.

  Then she yells about my father: “He's won now. He's got what he wanted. He's got all the money and he's got you and I have nothing. Nothing. Nothing.” She bangs her fist hard on the dining table and then breaks out into desperate sobs. I tell her that it's not that I want to live with Dad—I just can't keep living with her.

  I move into the small room at my father's mews house. There's no desk for me to do my homework. The room is too small, too integrated into the house, for me to hide in. My records, my stereo, my other things—there's not enough room here for the possessions that give me comfort. This is exactly why I wanted to live on my own. I knew living with my father wouldn't be much better, and in some ways it is worse. But I have no choice.

  A few weeks go by and he can tell I'm not happy. We are sitting in his small kitchen at dinner one evening.

  “I know it's really small in there, but I think we may have a solution soon,” he says. “I've bought the house next door, and I'm thinking we could knock a hole in the wall between them and you could have a bit more space there.”

  I look at him. “You're saying I'm going to have my own place? Next door?”

  “Well, we have to wait until the guy who's renting it moves out in a few weeks, but then, yes, if you want, that's where we'll put you. It's not terribly pretty in there—extremely seventies and a bit dark—but it's a lot more spacious than here.”

  I can't quite believe it. Many years later he tells me that he had been planning this for a while—he had seen the trouble brewing between Mum and me—but he did not want to lure me away. If I came of my own accord, fine. And if I came, he knew there would not be enough space in his house.

  “Do you want to see it?” he asks.

  We go
round and knock on the door, and the guy living there lets us in. My new home-to-be has a shit-brown ancient bathroom suite, tatty old cream carpets, wooden paneling, a cheap kitchen, and a classic seventies gas heater. It could do with some major work. I am euphoric. I have gone, in a few seconds, from being one of the most self-pitying boys at my school to perhaps the luckiest in all of Edinburgh.

  When the tenant leaves, a builder comes and knocks a door between the two properties, and when my father and I get out of the car and go in to what is essentially now one house through two different front doors, we laugh. “It's like the Beatles in Help!,” I tell him, “the way they get out of the limo, go through four doors, and end up in one long house.”

  We rig up an old Morse code buzzer so that he doesn't have to come and get me every time it's dinner or someone has called for me or he wants to speak to me. Three buzzes for food. Two for phone. One for a chat. He is teaching himself to cook, using a book by his old Let It Bleed cake-maker, Delia Smith, which is rather morosely titled One Is Fun! I'm allowed beer. Clara can stay the night. I can cook for friends in my own little kitchen—and sometimes for my father. I have to call if I'm going to be home past twelve or stay at someone's house. I have to clean my half of the house. I have it pretty good.

  My mother does not like coming here. She has become very aggressive toward my father and anyone she considers his friend. Sometimes she will come to the mews and kick and punch his front door, shouting obscenities. His answering machine fills up with dozens of messages from her in a few hours. One day she bursts into his boss's office and spits at him. When she comes over, my father locks the door between my place and his. It is not possible for them to have a civil relationship any longer. Even if he wanted to help her, he couldn't. To her, he is the enemy. She says terrible things about him to me. And she tells me she still loves him deeply.

  Living alone now, my mother deteriorates further. With my sister at university in Oxford, my mother's parents dead, nearly all her friends alienated by her accusations and hostile letters and phone calls, the job of keeping an eye on her falls to my uncle Paul and to me. My mother has moved to a new house, where she still keeps rooms for my sister and me. I have a key.

  I am home at the mews in the early afternoon of May 18, 1988, when a manager from Safeway calls my father, telling him that his wife is in the supermarket. She was in the checkout line, he says, when she turned to the customer next to her and began insisting that she get to the hospital immediately in order to get to her “schema-thoughts” appointment.

  “Do you know what schema-thoughts are?” my father asks me.

  “No,” I say.

  I call the manager back and ask him to keep my mother there until I arrive. I drive across Edinburgh fast. When I arrive, the police have already taken my mother away to a normal emergency room, from where she is taken by ambulance to the psychiatric hospital.

  My uncle, her brother, is already there when I arrive. I am eighteen and I have spent much of the past year going round to her house, sometimes finding the key deliberately kept in the lock on the inside for two or three weeks on end. I ring the bell and shout through the mail slot. I call her on the phone. She never answers. I return and peer through the kitchen window at the back of the house, trying to work out if any of the dirty plates and pans have moved since the day before. I throw pebbles at her bedroom window on the second floor. I have no idea if she's alive or dead in here. When she finally opens the door to me, I have to step through dozens of emptied bottles. Her sheets are sometimes soiled. She is usually filthy, in her bathrobe. One day she opens the door and I see a gash on the side of her head. She has fallen and hurt herself, although not badly. I know that she can be committed only if the police and doctors are convinced that she is a threat to herself or to others, so I always look for cigarette burns in the sheets as proof that she is about to cause a catastrophic fire, but I find few.

  These disappearances happen more times than I can count.

  I am studying to get into college, hopefully somewhere in the south of England, far away from Edinburgh. But I've planned another escape before that—a year off in the United States and France.

  Paul and I greet each other in the hospital corridor.

  “Hiya, Matt, how you doing?”

  “Great,” I say.

  “Yeah, me too. No fun this, is it?”

  “Do you know what schema-thoughts are?” I ask him.

  “No,” he says.

  “Apparently Mum remembered she had an appointment to have schema-thoughts here. But I'm not sure.”

  From a room off the cold, dark corridor, my mother appears in her slightly pilled beige coat. She is unsteady on her feet.

  “Hi, Mum. How are you feeling?”

  “Matty, I had to have my schema-thoughts,” she says immediately. “A voice started to tell me to get to the hospital to have my schema-thoughts.”

  She is trembling and she is sweet. She is not angry, not aggressive, does not try to hit me, as she has sometimes recently. For a very small woman with severe health problems, she is fiercely strong, and when she attacks me it is all I can do to hold her wrists, keep an eye out for her kicks, and wait until she tires. But now she is lovely, vulnerable, and in pieces. I feel enormously protective of her. Paul and I sense a rare opportunity, with both of us present and my being a little older than in previous crises, to persuade the doctors to take her in and fix her. We sit down with the doctor in his office. There's something about his manner—not overly concerned, it seems to me—that immediately makes me unhappy.

  He writes in his notes that my mother, on admission, was beginning to shake—no other syms. of D-Ts [Delirium Tremens] other than above.… Said she had been drinking too much recently and felt it was time to stop—otherwise there were no significant life events; she felt “stupid and embarrassed” to be here.… Speech appropriate thoughts—no formal thought disorder, no delusions, or hallucinations, nothing atypical other than behaviour described above. Mood—euthymic, denies suicidal intent. Insight preserved.

  We, of course, cannot see what he has written. Unless he looks more carefully at my mother's medical notes and inquires of us about her past, he will not understand what he's dealing with here. His notes make a passing reference to a history of alcoholism and depression.

  “Ann is suffering from the effects of alcohol withdrawal,” he says. “Delirium tremens. She just needs to dry out.”

  “Yes,” I say, trying to remain calm but feeling the fury rising inside me and knowing that it shows on my face, “but she's also mentally ill. She was talking about these ‘schema-thought’ things, which obviously don't exist. She had a voice in her head telling her to come here. Do you get that from drinking too much?”

  “Yes,” he says, “it happens.”

  The doctor says that there are only so many beds in the hospital and they are not really given to people who have drunk too much. Paul and I argue that my mother needs looking after.

  “She may be suffering the effects of alcohol now,” I say, “but she's otherwise very mentally ill.”

  The doctor is impatient. “You can't send her home,” I say. I am unwilling to compromise. Finally he agrees to have her stay the night.

  The doctor writes in his notes that my mother refused admission for detox—despite encouragement from myself + family.

  On a morning in July, two months later, my mother goes to her doctor. She is showing severe symptoms of alcohol withdrawal again, obtaining diazepam to help her with the symptoms.

  In October she turns up in another emergency room, in her nightdress and a sweater, smelling of stale urine. She has been found lying in road shaking…. Claims that the BBC are trying to kill her by depriving her of cigarettes. She says she has been told by her doctor that she would die of a disease named “plediotony,” clearly something she has made up. People are stealing from her, she says. She tells the doctor she is twenty-one years old. The doctor's diagnosis: paranoid psychosis + alcohol.


  Her habit was to stay in bed with a bottle of sherry or whisky on the bedside table which she would drink until she fell asleep and drink more when she woke up until she fell asleep again, he writes. She would only get up or leave the house in order to buy herself more bottles. Following this routine she would drink two or three bottles per day.

  While this latest stage in my mother's disintegration is occurring, I am in the United States, staying with my aunt, working in a restaurant in Newport, Rhode Island, and then riding through the huge country on Greyhound buses, camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains, staying in five-dollar youth hostels, reading D. H. Lawrence when I'm in New Mexico, Jane Austen in North Carolina, John Steinbeck in Colorado, watching fall turn to winter all across a continent I've never been to before this trip, a country that feels like a good place to be and an easy land in which to hide. No one can call or write me for nearly three months.

  39

  AGAIN AND AGAIN, AS I READ HER MEDICAL NOTES, I SAW my mother entering the care of medical professionals and almost as soon slipping away. Christmas 1989 was a catastrophe. I was home for the holidays from the college I had been attending in Brighton, and my mother was admitted to the psychiatric hospital shortly after I arrived. It was her seventh admission in just over a year, the notes say. And I saw, for the first time, a clear diagnosis from as far back as 1981: depressive illness… and then manic depressive psychosis. But within the same paragraph she is described a few days after her admission as a well groomed, attractively dressed woman who was calm and composed, and able to give an articulate account of the difficulties of her life. Her mood was normal. There was no evidence of psychosis, she was cognitively intact.