Since my mother’s dementia has worsened and my sister and I have spent more time together after an outing with her, we’ve been talking more about our childhood regarding my mum – previously, all conversations have been about dad and his failings, brushing over any of mum’s issues. While she wasn’t as bad as dad (he drank), she was far from perfect, and the older we get, the further away she slips from us, the more we have analysed her role as a parent.
We came to the conclusion that she probably didn’t want kids.
My mum is the eldest of 11, from several different marriages of her parents. I don’t think she has a full sibling, only half siblings and step siblings. I’m not sure, to be honest – siblings I thought were half were step, and well, it never really mattered to mum or me.
But being the eldest did mean that she was the mum – something that would be called parentification today, but was simply survival and love for her siblings back then. She had a dad who drank, a step mum who gambled and an absent mother who was on her third husband and fifth child by the time she turned back up in my mum’s life. She stepped up, fed, clothed and parented her paternal siblings because no one else would. Marrying my dad, two weeks shy of her 17th birthday (dad was also 17), was an escape from the 2-bedroom flat the 9 of them were living in, but not necessarily an escape from parenting. She was going to join the Navy around the same time, but when it came down to it, she couldn’t leave her siblings behind. In fact, she took two of her sisters with her for a short while when they were teenagers.
I was born when my mum was 26, a full ten years later. There’s a lot I’m not clear on. She went to Coventry Polytechnic and studied interior design, had several jobs, good and bad, was a skinhead, and she took part in the poll tax riots. My dad worked in warehouses until he developed epilepsy and then developed alcoholism. But in those ten years, they didn’t have kids, from 72 to 82. They had a house, it sat not far from Highfield Road, the old Coventry City football club ground in the middle of the city, just an old 2 up, 2 down that my great aunts had given them the deposit for.
I first got the inkling when my wife had asked her a question about what me and my sister were like growing up, and the answer was something along the lines of her not really remembering because she didn’t really get involved. She was the main parent, but she didn’t really get involved. And at the time, I just thought she meant those early years, after she kicked dad out and was working 3 jobs, but the more I think about it, the more I realise she wasn’t involved.
Now, she wasn’t neglectful – things weren’t easy, so no, we didn’t always get to school on time, and sometimes we didn’t have socks on, and we didn’t have a dining table for a long time or a toaster because she couldn’t afford to replace them. But we were fed and warm and cared for. Her not being involved meant more of a detachment than anything bad. A detachment that made it easier for her to send us to our dad’s house for every holiday (half terms, Easter, Christmas, six weeks of summer), easier for her to adapt when both her children moved out in the same year (me at 18 to fail at uni, my sister at 15/16 to live with her stupid boyfriend and his stupid brother).
Us moving out meant she was done. We were the last of her kids to need her as a parent. She’d been a mum from the age of 6 to the age of 44ish; even her maternal half-sister, who has schizophrenia, had settled. Only her younger brother, Andrew, was still in need, but he was in and out of prison. Aside from sending him cigarettes, she pretty much left him to it. The sisters she’d taken in were married and having kids of their own, her brothers too and despite all their problems, they were their own problems. She was done having to deal with dad (they’d never had formal child support, but I think there was a custody hearing because I remember being in court).
Even her parents were gone. Her dad had died when I was 6 years old, and she had no reason to speak with her stepmother any longer. Her mother died when I was older, a teenager, I think. My memory of the event isn’t as defined as the death of my grandfather, who was the first death I had experienced. They both died before they were 60 (and isn’t that always fun to explain to doctors), and I often think about my grandad Jackson’s “chucky” eggs and labour songs and my nanny Gwen’s little house in the valleys and singing “she’ll be coming round the mountain” as we drove down the twisty turns to visit her.
This is not to say my mum wasn’t there for me. The disconnect definitely caused issues for me; I struggled as much with her dismissals of my problems/emotions over the years (because how could my life be a problem, when her own childhood had been so bad) as with my dad’s drinking. But when I was hospitalised with haemolytic anaemia, she visited me twice in the hospital, which was 160 miles away. I was only in the hospital for two weeks. She came and helped me move when I left my ex and moved in as a lodger. She found me a flat and came and helped me move back to Wales a year and a half later, when I was done with therapy and done with England.
I don’t blame her for anything, not the dismissal of my problems, not the attempts to get me to eat things I struggled with (“there are starving kids in Africa,” she would say), not even how she sent us to stay with dad and didn’t really do much about the fact that he spent half the day in the pub. I did, once, when I was younger and angrier, but now I’m older, now I have my own kids, now so much other stuff has happened to shape me and break me and remake me.
She did everything that was expected of her for years, and I don’t blame her for taking the chance to do something for herself finally.
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