Trigger warnings for self harm and suicide.
I recently had to have the talk with Flower.
Not that talk – we’re a few years off talking about sex yet, but the other talk. The talk about the scars on my arms.
I knew it had to happen, in the summer, when I catch the sun (I don’t tan, I sorta go red and slightly darker) my scars are more obvious. They’re whiter in the summer, more prominent and eye catching and while they’ve faded over time, they’ve definitely not gone anywhere. Seeing as it’s been almost 15 years since I regulary self harmed, they probably won’t fade much more, or to a point where they’re invisible. But then, am I looking at them with biased eyes? I know they’re there, I can never escape them, so are they more obvious because I see them that way or because others do?
A philosophical quandry I’m not really ready to get into.
But they’re obvious for Flower to ask about them.
She asked at dinner with my mum one evening, which definitely wasn’t the right time for the chat and it’s definitely not something Tabby is ready to talk about yet. Flower is pretty mature for her age, I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out exactly how to explain something without upsetting her or lying about it entirely. I had hoped to avoid it, I’ll be honest, cause I don’t think I was ready. But who said parenting was easy. I wear the scars, I raised the child, I have to be the parent and talk aboout it.
So we talked. I told her the truth. I was very ill, for a long time. That I didn’t cope or get help for a long time. That I didn’t have the ability or the language to talk about what was wrong.
And, most importantly, I didn’t have my parents asking or listening to me.
I can tell when Flower is sad, and I sometimes get frustrated with her when she can’t explain why she’s feeling sad or down or anxious. I forget sometimes that she’s not even 9 yet, she doesn’t have that emotional intelligence it took me years to build. She doesn’t have 4 decades of language to take from. And somtimes, sometimes there isn’t an explantion. I have gotten better at stepping back and accepting that she can’t tell me (for whatever the reason). But I’m not perfect, and these things take time. But I am trying, which I never felt like my parents were.
My Parents
I love my mum, she did a lot for us, worked from the age of 15 to feed her siblings, live in a two bedroom flat with 8 other people. She was the eldest of 11 and was always the mum, always the mother figure, even to my dad, even to her friends. But because she had it so bad, I think – especially when we moved to Wales – it made hr blind to other kinds of suffering. I had a roof over my head, and a big room and food and snacks and toys and no responsibilities, and was living on easy street compared to her childhood and teenage years.
Depression really doesn’t descriminate though, and my dad was an alcoholic and me and my sister spent all the school holidays with him – usually in the pub. It was a different sort of hard. I could have anything I wanted at my nans. Sweets, money, coke, toys.
But it came with a price. You had to ask dad first and he usually had to have had a few drinks. It also came with a side of guilt, to the point it just wasn’t worth it. Even as an adult, getting anything from him, comes with strings. I’ve seen him beaten up, arrested, gone with him to pay off fines in the court house as a child, ran away from the police with my nan and sister after a family dinner, blanked out a few things too.
We ate crap, hardly bathed and my sisters eczema was left to get out of control to the point that it would take the six weeks of term to get it under control again, only for it to go to hell once we were back at nannas. And my nan drank too, a bottle of sherry a day. She sat in her chair and watched the sports (cricket, rugby, football) and soaps and was in bed by 9pm. The only stable adult in that household was my granded and I miss him terribly still over 20 years after he’s passed away.
Of course, I didn’t tall Flower all this. How could I? She loves her grandparents, and really enjoys spending time with my mum – even with her dementia.
What I did tell her was that Grandad is a great grandad and he loves her but he wasn’t always a very good dad. And that is the truth, watered down certainly, but he is a good grandad. He was not a good dad.
I told her that nanna Jackson was a good mum, but she didn’t always listen to me. She loved me and tried her best, but she didn’t listen for a long time and it was hard for her to see anything that was better than her childhood as a bad thing. When I was a teenager and we were living in Wales, life was better and she didn’t have to work three jobs to pay the bills but she still had two kids, an alcoholic ex-husband and several younger siblings to look after. And my aunts and uncles were all adults, but had many issues. One sister was schizophrenic, one was a heroin addict, she still had her grandmother to think of for mnay years as well. Her health wasn’t the best (asthma, arthritis, and god knows what else) and, well, of everything me and my sister were gone half the year and easy in comparison to everything else that was going on and had gone on.
When I was 20 or so, when she discovered I was self harming and had tried to kill myself, I think she really realised how bad things were and how little I spoke about them.
I don’t want that for Flower and Tabby. I want to be able to have conversations about mental health with them. I want them to be able understand thier mental health in the same wasy they undertsand their physical health. I want them to cry on my shoulder and let me pull them out of the darkness if they ever find themselves there. I want them to be able to say I have a headache and I have heartache.
Having the conversation was part of this and I hope it makes a difference.
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