Womb with a view

I raised my head from the kitchen table and the room slowly swam into focus. It took me minutes to work out where I was. Mum’s house. Why had I suddenly fallen into a deep sleep at two in the afternoon?

Then the slow realisation that the bitter taste to my lunch, which I’d commented on, had been crushed up sleeping pills. I’d been drugged by my own mother, who had disappeared. I groped around for my phone to call my boyfriend, but it was gone. Mum had taken it, desperate to find the home phone number I refused to divulge because she often called multiple times at night.

When she reappeared I confronted her, demanding my phone back. She breezily refused. I wept, still groggy and confused. Drugging her 24-year- old daughter was a terrible thing to do. She shrugged, saying she often took that amount to get to sleep and that I’d be fine in a few hours. She drove me back to the coach station in Exeter and I sat in a daze on my way back to Bristol, struggling to process what had happened.

An only child, I’d been brought up by my mum, who’d cut off contact with my dad when I was a baby and cultivated an ‘us against the world’ attitude. She loved me with a ferocious intensity and I loved her the same way. But she had mental health problems. Doctors struggled to diagnose it – a personality disorder was as much as they could say and medication didn’t help. This meant that while she kept me clothed, fed and clean, read me bedtime stories, came to my school shows and could be clever, funny and loving, her behaviour was erratic.

She often fell out with friends and family and I was forced to take her side. She had OCD about hygiene and couldn’t handle other children in the house, so I wasn’t allowed anyone over to play and I had my own part of the sofa where I was allowed to sit with ‘outside’ clothes on. She’d have very public meltdowns if I made the mistake of sitting on a public toilet seat.

I had a vague sense that this wasn’t normal and, as I grew up and became more independent, our relationship started to unravel. She couldn’t cope with not being the centre of my world and her mental health worsened. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home from secondary school to a dark house, curtains all drawn because she was in bed, asleep, depressed. She’d often threaten suicide and drive off for hours, leaving me at home wondering whether she’d return. I’d frequently stay with friends because she said she couldn’t cope with me, even though I was a geeky and untroublesome teen.

At 18, I secretly resumed contact with my dad. He’d also experienced her behaviour and was sad to hear she was no better. He’d been unable to cope with it, though, so couldn’t offer advice. When I eventually told Mum that we were in touch, she didn’t speak to me for weeks and said she’d never forgive me.

When I went to university, it was a separation that tipped her over the edge. She’s spent the years since trying to have the most destructive impact on my life. Throughout my student time, I’d get distraught phone calls saying she’d broken limbs or had cancer, or had been attacked in the street. I’d get sucked in, feeling terrible distress, until I discovered it wasn’t true.

As I matured, I began to work out when she was making things up and refused to be drawn into the drama. So she resorted to other tactics, like calling work colleagues when I was away on holiday, telling them that she was dying from cancer but couldn’t get hold of me. I lost count of the number of times I had to take calls from HR on holiday.

Another time, she rang Dad in the middle of the night to tell him that I’d been killed in a car crash. He spent a few tortured hours believing I was dead until I spoke to him.

Aged 27, I took a new boyfriend home for Christmas and she tried to give us food poisoning with seafood that was months out of date. When I caught her, she panicked and ran to the bedroom, where she started cramming sleeping pills into her mouth. I spent much of Christmas Day pinning her to the bed because, until she calmed down, she’d grab at the pills or try to scratch herself every time I let go. I thought my boyfriend would be horrified (although I’d warned him it might be a difficult day), but he was kind and compassionate to her.

A few months later, I took her on a minibreak to Cornwall because she’d complained that I didn’t spend enough time with her. But she ended up locking me out of the

house, then called out paramedics and told them that I’d been hitting her with a brick.

Each time another awful thing happened, I’d come close to just cutting her out of my life, but I know she doesn’t want to be the way she is and I keep hoping she’ll get better, that I can just love her out of it. The tragedy of her particular mental illness, though, is that there’s very little you can do.

I think I’ve grown up to be a relatively functional person and a large part of that is down to the love and support of my amazing grandparents, who also despaired of Mum, but never stopped loving and helping us.

I also had a year of psychotherapy to help me set emotional boundaries for someone who can be an angel and a monster in the space of one phone call. She finds it hard to contain her bitterness and often becomes abusive, swinging from telling me how much she loves me to what a vile human being I am.

Thankfully, that boyfriend stuck around and is now my husband. He is endlessly patient with my mum, and he’s seen the worst of her behaviour, which I find a huge comfort because I have someone to remind me that it’s not normal and not OK.

When I got pregnant with my first child, Mum was initially thrilled, then wrote me a letter to tell me that I’d make a terrible mother. I have two kids now and they’ve given me a clear perspective on the boundaries I need to keep in place. I still want to show Mum that I love her, but I see my own sanity as even more important now that I’m responsible for two small lives.

We have sporadic contact and she’s met the kids a handful of times – she dotes on them, but I would never allow her to be alone with them for fear that she couldn’t control an impulse to hurt them.

Occasionally, I meet someone else who has a difficult mother and it’s a huge relief to open up and have someone relate to the conflicted feelings of love, guilt and fear and the desperate wish for a functioning parent. Even adults need their mum.

And that, essentially, is what it is to love her – a huge melting pot of emotions. What I have finally come to realise is that she’s not capable of true mothering. And with that sad realisation comes a kind of peace.