Finding a Voice

by Kim Hood

  I figured this must be one of Grandma’s Irish things – and it was the one thing that cemented our connection – Grandma and me. The cup of tea. We could certainly never talk about the thing that most often brought us together – Mom’s illness. But we could put the kettle on several times in an evening – watch it boil, prepare the cups, the tea bags, the sugar, pass the mugs to each other, sit down at the table together and sip a good cup of tea, passing small talk between us for the time it took to drink it. I readily accepted.

  While Grandma got busy making it, Francie filled me in on the arranging she had been doing while I slept.

  ‘So, all going well you can visit your mom on Sunday if you’re up for that. Are you up for that?’

  ‘You mean at the hospital?’ I startled.

  I had never been inside the psychiatric ward before. It had just never been an option to visit. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

  Scared? Would there be lots of crazy people wandering around in hospital gowns talking about the end of the world? Would Mom be one of them?

  Relieved? I wouldn’t have to worry and wonder how she was.

  ‘It’s up to you, kiddo,’ Francie offered. ‘You just usually ask and we’ve usually felt you were too young.’

  ‘Ok. I’ll go,’ I decided on the spot.

  ‘And I’ve an appointment arranged for you to meet the school psychologist on Monday morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Frankly, I think you need to process a few things and me telling you isn’t going to do it,’ she offered, shrugging. ‘Besides, I think Dr Sharon needs something a bit more challenging than teenage angst.’

  I decided to ignore the whole topic. Frankly, I had had quite enough of strangers prying into my life over the years. I wasn’t the one who needed fixing after all. Why couldn’t there be more effort put into helping Mom?

  ‘Well, that’s that. I’d better run and let you two have a bit of time together.’

  ‘Well then. I’m sure we’ll be seeing you again soon, Francie. As always, your presence is appreciated in these times.’

  Francie gave me one last smile as she left.

  I looked around the kitchen, seeing things that usually did not even register, but now seemed to have signs pointing at them. The three hooks by the back door each had far too many coats on them and several had slipped off and lay strewn on the floor on top of piles of shoes. The table was half covered with piles of envelopes, papers, flyers and a few books seeming to keep the piles from cascading down. There was the calendar, turned to February, even though it was September, up on the cupboard. I thought of the contents of the fridge and cupboards and wondered how on earth Grandma would manage to cook one of the traditional meals she usually cooked.

  ‘Here, now.’ Grandma handed me a cup of tea.

  ‘Thanks, Grandma.’ I took a few sips.

  ‘We’ve some shopping to do,’ she stated, answering the question about dinner, and signalling the end of my all too brief respite from the world.

  Grandma had a car, so going shopping was actually not so bad compared to shopping with Mom. Mom didn’t drive, so normally grocery shopping took half the day by the time we walked all the way to the main street to catch the bus into town twenty minutes away. There weren’t many buses on Sundays either, which was the only safe day to go shopping with Mom because there weren’t as many shops open that day. Even so, if I didn’t set a strict agenda, shopping tended to go wrong. Like the time she decided to buy the giant – and expensive – jar of spirulena health supplement because she decided on the spot it was somehow healthier to drink green sludge for a week than to eat food. Or the day we stopped at the pet shop to buy and liberate six budgies in the window. We had lived on instant noodles all that week.

  So it was nice to just get into Grandma’s car and not even have to decide which store we were going to. I simply fetched what she asked me to fetch from the aisles and didn’t have to give one thought as to whether we were at the weekly limit yet. Then back into the car, arriving home barely an hour later, warm and dry.

  Dinner was the same. Grandma told me what to chop, how to do it, what to put on the table and how to place it. She indicated when it was time to get up to clear the plates after we had finished eating our homemade shepherd’s pie and tea. I didn’t have to make a single decision. Pleasant in a way.

  But after a whole eight hours of it the following day, Saturday nonetheless, I was finding it a lot less pleasant. Saturday was usually a day of leisure in our house. It was the day Mom and I ate only snacks – no cooked meals, opening the fridge and cupboards whenever we felt a bit peckish. We would get up late, read, and watch movies, sometimes not even bothering to change out of our pyjamas at all.

  Not so with Grandma here. Saturday started with cleaning windows because the sun was shining. While I didn’t mind the thought of clean windows I didn’t see the urgency in having clean windows right now. It was coming into winter after all, and so most of the time our curtains would be closed to keep the heat in. Couldn’t it wait until spring?

  Then after lunch Grandma had us in the car and off for a walk along the river walkway. Again, it wasn’t that I didn’t like being out on a nice day; it was just so regimented. Especially with Grandma marching along like a drill sergeant. By the time we arrived back home in the late afternoon I was fed up with seemingly having my every thought dictated. I ached for the comfort and freedom of my little cabin.

  ‘Grandma, I’m going to go for a small walk,’ I announced after the obligatory cup of tea.

  ‘But sure, haven’t we just been on a lovely walk?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but, I just …’ I struggled for an explanation that would satisfy. I wasn’t used to having to ask to go, and I suddenly realised I had never actually told even Mom about the little cabin. That was the kind of relationship we had, short on personal details, at least my personal details.

  I had found the cabin quite by accident a couple of years ago. Anyone could find their way down to the river. There was a clear path leading straight down to it from the corner of our road, but from there it was only by skirting along the overgrown river bank for fifteen minutes or so that you came to the small clearing.

  It must have been abandoned years ago, but despite having few panes of glass left in the windows and a door that only pulled halfway shut, it was surprisingly dry. Over time I had made some crude repairs to the few broken bits of furniture in it so that I had a table and chair of sorts, and a pretty comfortable armchair. I used to like to pretend I lived there, and I’d brought things to make it homier. It was the only place where I felt truly myself, without any need to adjust how I was feeling or how I was being.

  And that was what I needed now. Being with Grandma was hard for me in a totally different way than being with Mom – but with both of them I had to follow what they wanted, all of the time. I could feel my eyes begin to well up and I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. I was determined not to cry.

  Grandma just took my chin in her hands then and said, ‘Go on then, pet. An hour so. It’s better than watching the television.’

  I could have hugged her, if it were not that hugs just didn’t happen between us.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sunday came too fast. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to see Mom yet. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be the mom I wanted to see.

  Usually she left me as crazy as she could be, and came back weeks later as sane as she could be.

  This was uncharted territory being there for the in-between part. And it was all too raw and real still. The image of Mom in the bathroom with a bloody steak knife beside her, mutilated arms splayed out, was sharp and detailed. There hadn’t been time yet for the memory to get fuzzy. By the time I usually saw Mom after an episode I had talked to her several times by phone, her voice becoming less slurred and more coherent as the weeks passed and the medications did their jobs.

  Yet Francie was right, through all of those other times I had asked, begged at ti
mes, to see her. Especially when I was way younger it had been frightening to have her just ‘go away’. I had worried about her, wondered if it was jail she was in because she had been bad, feared I would not see her again.

  Despite the many, many talks I had had over the years in all sorts of offices about what happened to Mom being an illness, something she needed medicine for to get better, I had never been able to compare these episodes to any illness I knew. Other illnesses you could talk about without being met with silence and stares. Other illnesses had a set timeline and a surety of how to know when you were better. You didn’t get social workers with other illnesses. With other illnesses kids got to visit their parent in the hospital.

  Well, now that was going to happen.

  Grandma drove the car up to the front door of the hospital and told me that she would meet me in the lobby in one hour.

  ‘You aren’t coming in, Grandma?’ My stomach did another back flip. It had been doing that all morning.

  ‘I don’t believe it would be appropriate, Jo. This is your visit.’

  I wondered if she was just as scared as I felt. I didn’t, after all, remember Grandma ever going to visit Mom in the hospital.

  At the front desk I asked for where to go for Sue MacNamara’s room.

  ‘Just one moment, please,’ the woman at the desk said. ‘That is a secure floor and I need to get clearance.’ She pressed some buttons on her phone, spoke to someone and then gave me directions to follow the yellow line to the elevator and press the buzzer on the locked door to the right on floor four.

  It was the longest elevator ride ever. At the locked door I hesitated a moment before pushing the button. After waiting for what seemed like ten minutes I was about to press the button again when the door opened and a nurse ushered me in.

  ‘Jo, is it? Sorry for the wait; it’s hectic today and I wanted to have my plate cleared so I could bring you straight down without delay.’

  I took the scene in. It was an ordinary hospital ward, with a nursing station, a small waiting area with stiff, straight chairs and washed out green corridors branching off in three directions. The only hint that this ward may be somewhat different was the man walking through the waiting area in normal street clothes who stopped to stare at me, breaching unwritten social rules of how strangers behave with one another. It made me feel a little creeped out, but it wasn’t as bad as the drooling zombies I had imagined.

  ‘Charlie, go ahead now. They’re waiting for you in the rec room,’ the nurse dictated to him, and then continued down the middle corridor with me in tow. At the end of this we were buzzed through another door, emerging in a sort of lounge area, with a few plastic-covered armchairs, a shelf with some tattered paperbacks and magazines, and a television at almost ceiling level in one corner. Another whole corner was taken up with a second nursing station, this one completely glassed in.

  Mom was sitting in one of the plastic, pale green chairs looking toward the television. She hadn’t noticed me yet so I waited for the nurse to direct me to what I should do next.

  ‘Go ahead and pull a chair up with your mom. I’ll bring you out a glass of something. It’ll have to be whatever is going in the fridge.’

  I dragged the nearest plastic-coated armchair across the cold, institutional linoleum to beside Mom and sat down on the edge of it.

  ‘Hi, Mom.’ I tucked my hands tightly under my legs and waited, afraid of what would happen next. Slowly Mom turned her head toward me.

  ‘Hey there.’ Her eyes didn’t seem to focus on me and her face was expressionless. I wasn’t sure what I should say or do, but then the nurse returned with two plastic glasses of juice.

  ‘Here you are, Sue and Jo,’ she said. ‘Sue, you might want to just spend some quiet time watching TV with your daughter.’ And to me, ‘Your mom is pretty tired right now. The medication she is taking is giving her a rest, but it makes her awfully groggy and she might not feel like talking much.’

  ‘Thanks, Patricia,’ Mom slurred, taking the nurse’s hand and giving it a squeeze.

  So we spent the hour watching a murder mystery show on the little television and talking very little. Those couple of sentences, directing what we should do had made the visit all so normal – like we were at home watching TV after school – only with very bad décor.

  I didn’t exactly forget to notice that there was a little bead of drool in the corner of Mom’s mouth, or that there were bandages peeking out of the sleeves of her hoodie. And there was a woman who came in from the courtyard to have a very loud conversation with a nurse at the desk about how the government had been blackmailing her for years. And I did notice that when the nice nurse left the lounge she had to be buzzed out of the locked door. These were all things that I had imagined and worried about – Mom drugged and not herself, crazy people and locked doors. Yet none of it held quite the same importance or scariness that I’d imagined it would.

  After the hour the nurse returned, took our glasses and indicated it was time to go.

  ‘Bye, Mom.’ I didn’t know what else I should say. Get better? See you soon?

  ‘Come here,’ Mom said and pulled me in for a hug. My eyes stung with the instant tears of relief that flooded them. It had been a long time since we had shared anything as normal as a goodbye hug. I hugged her back fiercely, trying to open all of my senses so that the memory of this contact might never fade.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I had hoped that Francie’s arrangement with the school psychologist had been forgotten. Francie hadn’t mentioned any time that I was supposed to meet the psychologist, and she hadn’t rung over the weekend. Maybe it wouldn’t happen?

  But it did. During second period Monday I was fetched from class by one of the administrative staff and delivered straight to a small, almost empty room.

  ‘Dr Sharon is on her way. She’s hit a bit of traffic, but we expect her any minute now,’ the secretary said and then left me to sit in one of three chairs.

  It seemed like hours before the doctor – was a psychologist a doctor? – arrived. I had almost memorised every word on the three posters on the wall by that time.

  Finally the door opened and Dr Sharon came in, looking every bit the doctor or professional type. Her hair was held back in a bun and she wore a navy skirt and matching jacket. Despite being apparently very late she walked in calmly and took her time taking her jacket off. Only when she had methodically arranged a notepad and pen on the table did she fully look at me.

  ‘So,’ she started. ‘Francie thinks it would be a good idea for us to spend some time together. What do you think of that idea?’

  This caught me a bit by surprise.

  ‘Um, well, what do I have to do?’

  ‘Nothing – or everything,’ she said. ‘It depends what you want from our time.’

  ‘I don’t know why Francie wants me to come here. I think I’m okay.’

  And then it hit me. Was this about separating me from Mom? Was this the beginning of assessments and preparing me for that? I felt the blood drain from my face and I suddenly felt dizzy.

  ‘Did I not do it right? I called the crisis team! She’s been well, she’s taken care of me. Really, really! I’m okay. I just made a mistake going over to a girl’s house without asking and my mom got worried and then the worry turned bad. But I’m okay and she’ll be okay!’ The words tumbled out, pleading, begging, hoping that a corner hadn’t been turned that could not be retraced.

  ‘Jo,’ the doctor stopped me and then waited a minute before continuing slowly. ‘This isn’t about evaluating you, or your mom, or your home situation. I have nothing to do with social services I promise you. This isn’t even about your mom. It’s about you.’

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I would come to learn that this was the most talking that Dr Sharon would ever do without asking a single question.

  ‘So, again, what do you want from our time? What can I help you with right now?’

  I thought about the question. I didn’t
know that anyone could help me with anything. My life wasn’t a made-for-TV movie. There wasn’t a beginning, middle or an end to the reasons why I was scared and lonely much of the time. It was just – life. Until a few days ago I wouldn’t have even felt so awful, even with Mom needing the hospital.

  I thought about the last three weeks. Classes weren’t so bad, but lunch hours had been miserable so far. Eating my sandwich in the hallway by my locker – alone – while everyone else sat in groups. Walking the halls, trying to look like I was on my way to meet someone. Passing kids I’d gone to elementary school with whispering to kids who had come from other schools, and just knowing they were whispering about me.

  But maybe I would have gotten used to that.

  It was the dangled carrot of friendship that had ruined everything. Someone who might actually like me and possibly even understand me. Maybe. And now it was worse because for once in my life I could imagine a life I had only ever hoped for. Yet I wasn’t sure I could have a friend and my mom.

  What was I going to do about Sarah? After our meeting on Thursday, she probably thought I was weird. Which, if I wanted to focus on Mom, was a good thing. So why didn’t it feel that good?

  ‘I hate lunch hour,’ I blurted.

  Dr Sharon said, ‘Well, let me see what I can do about that.’

  And she didn’t even ask me why.

  I had expected that it would be at least a week or two before I would see Dr Sharon again – if I did. I was pretty used to meeting with this or that professional, who usually got moved to some other job before I could even remember their name.

  So I was completely shocked when a second message came to me during last period on the same day.

  This time she was behind the table waiting for me.

  ‘So – lunch hour,’ she stated simply. I waited, but no more was offered. After an age she went on to say, ‘Tell me about that.’

  ‘I … it’s complicated.’ It wasn’t really, but how could I say I want to avoid seeing someone who might actually want to talk to me without sounding ridiculous.