SHOCK AND ACUTE PAIN, PART OF ME RELEASED A BREATH I HAD HELD FOR YEARS’

by her bed each evening, holding her hand while she cried and told me she wanted to die. Some days she would scream in a drunken rage at me for not being supportive enough. Other times she would beg my forgiveness for not being the mother she had been before. Each day, I would catch the train to school and carry on as if our life was the same as it had always been.

She remained in this cycle of deep depression, drinking, crisis, hospitalisation, improvement and back again for many years. She had good times, but somehow they would make the bad times even harder. As time went by, I became accustomed to the way our relationship had settled into something else: mother and daughter who loved each other very much but for whom the balance was always going to be flipped.

Eleven years – almost to the day – after she had that first panic attack, my mother hanged herself. I was 22. I heard the news late at night in London, where I had moved only a few weeks before, having just finished university. I was 14 when she made her first suicide attempt; I had been waiting for this call for years. Waiting for it and dreading it – and now the waiting was over. Amid the shock and the acute pain I felt at the permanence of it, a part of me deep inside released a breath I’d been holding for years. It was no longer my job to look after her.

Thirteen years later, I recognised the panic I felt as it became clear that my son Arthur was going to be very dependent on me. This time I was no longer the child who needed to care for her mother, but a mother who felt like a child as so little did I know about how to support my autistic son.

It had been a creeping realisation. Small things slowly pieced together. When he was