Tanya Frank

Mums Like Me: A Conversation for Change

Once upon a time I used to ask my wife to support me with all things technical, setting up my phone, my laptop, a blog page, or a new piece of software. It was intimate, this gift of time bestowed upon me. It felt a little akin to being loved. But I think I may have taken too much, asked too often. Eventually she got tired and busy with her own work, and said I should Google it, do it myself. Maybe that is what happens in a long marriage. Maybe it made sense, and was essentially what was right and proper. We all need boundaries, right? Things become lopsided otherwise.

What I didn’t realise is that she would get fatigued about other things too, including what it meant to parent our younger son after his dive into this thing we call psychosis.

She wasn’t alone. I got burned out too. Compassion fatigue. It really hits you hard, takes you down and makes you mad too if you aren’t careful.

In some ways I lost him, my boy, or he lost himself, or his mind, or the life that we all envisaged that he would lead. Now don’t be fooled, the essence of him, his core, his soul, the elements of everything that makes him human are still as much in him as they are in all of us, but cycling through the psychiatric system again and again creates its own after shocks, physically and psychologically. The San Andreas fault line in Los Angeles had nothing on the divide we faced, the chasm where I couldn’t reach him.

I did consult Google, not to learn how to upload or download or transfer files, but rather to try to make sense of what had happened. I spent hours with the search engine for company, my heart fast, my chest a portal of fear.

I had another son, but he lived five hours north of us. I hadn’t asked him to help me with technological matters as far as I recall, but that was because I needed him for more practical matters. With his brother’s altered states we were all thrown into crisis, a state of fight or flight. Fifteen years on I wish I hadn’t saddled him with the kind of responsibility that was just too big and grown up for his slim boy-man being. I regret breaking down and weeping so often in his presence, expecting him to bring his Brazilian Jujitsu strength and youthful energy into the ring to help me wrestle this enormous competitor—his brother.

Maybe it was the isolation of being immigrants, having flown so far from the nest that led me to lean so heavily on my elder son or the fact that my wife worked and stayed away during the week, had ailing parents to consider and at some point had to ‘let go’ for her own self-preservation.

Whatever it was that happened in the wake of my son’s diagnosis, his forced stays in the psychiatric wards, the drugs that left him either so sedated he couldn’t return to his life, or so restless that he couldn’t sit still, there was a deep loneliness to it all. The kind that reverberates in your chest like a gong in an empty room

I wrote a book about what happened in those early years. It wasn’t all sad and desperate. Life has shades, and so does ZIG ZAG BOY. In terms of the technology I needed to learn, I found my way through it. It was somehow suddenly so easy to repair a broken link, to update my files, to save something to the cloud, at least compared to navigating madness, or trying to fix my boy.

More than publishing a book, I found community. Other mothers in my situation. It was this that lifted me enough to dare to tell my truth.

I still believe the other mothers saved me.

‘When a mother orca or dolphin gives birth, the other females in the pod are heavily invested in the offspring. They help the calf to the surface to take its first breath. If the calf dies the pod doesn’t let go, but gathers around and stays with the new mother for some time, supporting her in her journey. This can go on for days, this shared tour of grief. At some point the pod will stop pushing the calf to the surface, but it will still hunt for food for the cetacean mother. It will not abandon her.’ Chapter 20. ZIG ZAG BOY: A MEMOIR OF MADNESS & MOTHERHOOD

I know that in time I will find my way around this substack technology. In some way I am doing it already. I will be proud of myself for uploading some images or art work, crikey maybe even a little video in time! But at this late hour as the dust motes float above my reading lamp and the sound of silence is piercing, (that high tone like a whine of a mosquito that seems to happen only at night, and that has plagued me ever since childhood) I don’t want to face it. I feel tired.

Tired of doing, instead of being.

It is not just oh so late, but I am oh so old. It is easy to revert to the familiar refrain of ‘if someone could show me they love me enough to do it all for me.’ I want to be set up with a little icon through Canva, to be told the difference between notes, chat, thread and comments. I think I could do the rest, carry on from there.

But it is 1:14 AM. My wife is asleep next to me with her eye mask firmly in place. Some nights she sleeps in the room next door with the cat who is aged ten now, the one we love the most out of all of our cats because she loves for love’s sake and not just for food, the one that brings tears to my eyes when I consider that she could be more than half way through her life, a good healthy life, a life well-lived. A life of freedom.

Going back to the technology for a moment, you may be pleased, like my wife, to know that I worked out out how to download a podcast and set up my bluetooth headphones. This in turn meant I was able to join Krista Tippet yesterday afternoon on my walk through Epping Forest. It had been raining heavily. I edged around banks of mud, knowing I could fall. Tippet was interviewing Nick Cave and they talked about grief, how there is a raw beauty to it, how it is bound up with life and love and spirituality. Nick has lost two sons. I have two sons. children are not meant to die before their parents. It is against the order of things, or it should be. I don’t think they are meant to go mad either, and yet they do.

So how do we survive it? How do we cope? Mothers like us?

As Nick’s soulful timbre ended the interview, I reached the lake. I shook my head, Crying now, and smiling, holding both things at the same time. Love and grief. Loss and hope. A gravel biker emerged just then, locking eyes with me before swerving around the dog. He saw me. A brief human connection. What was his story I wondered, out there in the mud and the cold, rolling through the dirt and puddles, the fragile landscape of being human. And what did he know of mine? On the one hand my deep pain of knowing that my younger son is still locked in a psychiatric ward, that my elder son has to watch, that my wife and I can’t save or fix either of them, or each other, and that the cat, the bloody favourite one could die before us, and it will feel unbearable because it will feed into all of the other losses we have faced and not quite got over. Yet on the other hand there is the magic of moving through this moment. The fading light soft on the water, the thinning moon just visible above the oaks, the dog bounding ahead of me, wrestling with a stick, undeterred by the mud or the risk of slipping, the smooth hot cafe latte with “just half a sugar then—go on,” that I will buy from the Community Larder when I exit the wood, sip-sipping for the satiety the sweetness brings.

How else do we do it? Us poor mothers?

Tomorrow I am going to swim outdoors in single digit temperature. It is my third winter of taking the plunge. A way of practising “self care,” although that is a mild mannered little term if you ask me, masking how on some days it is really more about staying a-fucking-live.

The only difference in my ritual is that this year I have stopped wearing neoprene other than booties, gloves and a hat, even though my skin is red and smarting afterwards and my body itches and tingles as my blood supply comes back to the surface. It is the duality again: this deep freeze, the pleasure-pain in my lizard brain. Like psychosis, the experience is ineffable. There is only my breath, short and sharp, no words in the liminal space.

The woods. The water. The writing.

Through these pages I hope to find refuge, to write for writing’s sake, just like the cat loves for love’s sake. I haven’t done this in many months. I think I lost myself a bit or maybe even a lot, trying to do what I thought a newly published author should do. Promote, push, sell, brand myself, find an angle, something newsworthy, write an op ed about it for the New York Times, get likes, build my platform on social media. Make a little bit of money for god’s sake, what is wrong with that? But the truth is that it was the writing that saved me back then when my son lost touch with consensus reality, when we all went a bit mad as a family. The writing and nature and the other mothers. So I want to turn to it all again in its pure unadulterated form.

The writing and nature and other mothers that kept me afloat.

I want to show how other mothers in my situation are using their voices too, as ways of surviving, of setting the record straight, of using writing as activism. We pretend that I teach them, but mostly they teach me. I hope they will weigh in on it all. It is symbiotic our relationship, an organic evolution of sorts. And maybe, in time, if I am really and truly blessed, I will hear from others out there, who resonate too with our words, and feel compelled to join the conversation. Oh and if anyone wants to help me with the tech, I am all ears. Just don’t tell my wife, and for heaven’s sake don’t tell the Google!