29. Jul, 2019

Enduring pain

As I move toward the 1st anniversary of the death of my mum, I a little morbidly reflect on a year of sadness, emptiness, pain, and frustration.

Feeling like I have been put through the wringer, I wonder if this thing we call life ever gets any easier.

I’m just coming off the back of enduring what I can only describe as the worst physical pain I have experienced in my lifetime, giving birth to my hardy 10lb 10oz son seemed a doddle in comparison. I am recovering from a tonsillectomy and tongue coblation (which is in essence liposuction of the tongue) so take all those times you have bitten your tongue whilst munching on your favourite treat and multiply the pain by a thousand.

I now know my surgeon was in no way jesting when he discussed the procedure with me. He told me I would hate him the first week, sort of like him by the end of the 2nd and by week 4 we would be mates again.

Such acute physical pain is only bearable because it comes with a disclaimer, you know your symptoms will improve with care, successful pain management and time, which I suppose is also true of childbirth.

But a different pain altogether is that of the utter desolateness of depression and in recent months the raw and devastating effects of the grief I have endured at the passing of my dear old mum, and it’s been a year tinged with a sadness I can’t seem to shake. I reflect on the last hours with her and still can’t help wonder whether I did enough or was enough and I believe that moment will haunt me every day for the rest of my life.

The death of my mum has ruffled my feathers and it has highlighted the presence of a feeling of unfinished business. Time not spent together, questions left unasked and things left unsaid.

My mum was a warm, kind and caring woman in every respect, but her passing has given rise for me to reflect quite deeply on our relationship and our life spent together and now she is gone, I want to know more. She was, at her very core rather a private person and kept many matters close to her heart and my deepest regret is that she seemed never to be able to really open up, to trust me with her innermost thoughts, her secrets, her loves and her hates, nor I guess, gift me the keys to her mind and heart.

She was, just as we all are, a product of her childhood which was tinged with trauma. By the time she blossomed into womanhood, her family had halved in size, losing both her sister and her mother before the tender age of 19 and there is no possible way to fathom how much this tragedy affected her. Apart from glossing over the details she never spoke in-depth about her experience of loss at such a young age and the imprint it left on her.

She did share she was keen to marry young and to start a family of her own and she had told me she was also determined to have three children and although wanted, I occasionally tended to think, as the third child born, I was in fact the spare after the pair. This is not something she would have ever wanted me to feel, but despite her best efforts, I tended to carry this feeling with me.

Mum and dad, although loving each other deeply, were never a perfect fit and their marriage ended in separation when I was 12. On this day, like shattered glass, my life splintered into a million pieces, most of which I am still picking up and gluing back together.

I still have so many questions for her. Children are the innocent collateral damage of divorce. Divorce doesn’t just happen to adults, it happens to families and in the snap of fingers, or the blink of an eye my family’s walls were compromised and they came crashing down around me.

At this juncture it is important to impart that up until a couple of years ago I laid blame squarely at the feet of one parent over the other, because this was my narrative, the story I was told was lop-sided and as much that sides should never be taken, it is an unavoidable consequence of divorce. So, with the absence of little information, I tended to do what most kids do and that was to blame myself for the destruction of a marriage and of the family unit.

Unbiased communication is not a strong point of a recently, hurt, angry and divorced parent.

When I had my mental health breakdown in my mid-forties, I began therapy and I did this because my psychiatrist had all sorts of issues managing any pharmaceutical intervention. My underlying health diagnosis of ME/CFS left me with an acute sensitivity to the side effects of medications, so she thought a two-pronged approach incorporating medication and therapy would be the most effective mode of treatment for me.

Opening your mouth and tossing down a pill is like throwing a Band-Aid over a seeping wound. Not a cure, just a management strategy. Attending therapy regularly and confronting your inner-most demons and fears is like grabbing the edge of the Band-Aid and peeling it back so that each fine hair on your skin pulls to maximum extension until it snaps strand by excruciating strand. Traumatic and invasive in every way, but despite the intricacies of such confronting work, it has been one of the most rewarding journeys I have taken.

I am an inquisitive person by nature. The word “why” has always been my go-to, working as a radio producer for most of my working life I was able to feed this curiosity, but instead of looking outward for answers to feed my inquiring mind I am increasingly looking inward for personal fulfilment.

I guess that’s why I feel frustrated at my inability to really know my mum as I would have liked to. I have very little memory of my early childhood, through therapy, my body fills in the blanks more than my mind does and not all that I am discovering is ideal, but by weaving together the checkerboard quilt of my past in this way I am learning to better understand myself.

I finally comprehend why I have grappled with a lifelong battle with anxiety, how much our early life experiences influence both our brain and physical development into adulthood and how learning to understand our past can help us heal both physically and mentally.

My mum’s legacy runs deep within my veins. I am both thankful and grateful for her efforts in raising me, in making me the person I am today. We all have trauma of some kind in our past, we can either live in denial, sweeping our troubles under the carpet along with our vices, or we can take a leap, wade into the deep and use what we learn in the quest for self- nourishment and self-improvement in the hope that it will bring us the peace we solemnly deserve.