‘My mother was a child cheated of childhood’: how my broken family put itself together
My mother lay on her back in the water, pink amid mountains of foam, as steamed as a dumpling, dictating her thoughts to me. I was sat on the loo, taking notes with a biro, a secretary, a familiar, aware that elsewhere children my age were at their school desks studying Living Things and Their Habitats, glad I was not among them.
My mother said: “Write this down, la.”
Beans Milk Bread.Ask Grandad Jack to borrow twenty quid for the leccy.Use catalogue money to pay Sandra.Take hairdryer back to Boots for cash refund.That should do us for the rest of the month, if we’re careful.
She exhaled in satisfaction at having solved a problem more complicated than my Key Stage 2 algebra, and one with measurably greater real-world effects. “An’ put some waffles on for the kids, will you?” she added, sinking deeper into the bubbles, “I’m going out in a bit an’ I need a quiet half hour to get my head straight.”
For most of my childhood my mother treated me as a confidant, as an accomplice in the many necessary and nefarious subterfuges required to navigate around social workers, school teachers, debt collectors and through the welfare system. It didn’t ever seem unusual that as an eight-year-old I would be central to the discussion about whether to pay the phone bill or the gas bill that month, or that at 11 I would be out of school for weeks at a time, ostensibly to help my mother with the kids. I knew who not to answer the door to, how to fob off the milkman for another week, and exactly what to say to invasive case workers; you see, we shared the familial responsibilities, just as the Ribeiro kids from around the corner did whenever they were ditched by their parents for smack.
In essence she acted as though I were the kid her mother had left her to raise. She was my big sister, always frank, never embarrassed when discussing things your ma might be squeamish about – explaining sex and periods, sharing her mixed feelings towards Tony Blair, her desire for Marti Pellow. When her friends’ dating advice proved subpar, she’d run over the pros and cons of Mark versus Richard with me; she really was willing to talk about almost anything.
We would chew over women’s rights, the IRA, Madonna – often while she was shaving her legs or waxing her bikini line – because more than anything she hated to be alone.
* * *
She was a teenager when she had me, a child cheated of childhood, daughter of a father who lived between the docks and the pub, and a mother who blamed her children for depriving her of the career she might’ve had. Her brother, my uncle, was violent, delinquent, abusive and left home to join the army, rather than face borstal. Her sister, my aunt, was chronically ill and spent her early life in a children’s hospital six miles away, a distance my mother’s mother walked daily, back and forth, the family being too brassic to afford the bus fare. She grew up with a family she didn’t belong to but for whom she was responsible, some sort of indentured child servant. By the time she was 13 she ran the family home, including shopping for groceries, cleaning and cooking for her father when he rolled in drunk at 11pm. With this history you could say it was perfectly reasonable that she should ask me to help her out, drop the kids off at nursery and go to the supermarket on the way back, miss a morning of school to wait in for the window cleaner while she went to have her hair done.
She was such a young mother, a very good-looking, vernal woman, so that strangers regularly read us as siblings, which flattered her deeply and made me feel incredibly grown up. I was the embarrassing little sister she was obliged to cart about, who might miss the finer details of the conversation, but who made up for it with charming and naive questions, with precocious takes of the “Well, as they always say on the Sally Jessy Raphael Show … ” variety. Besides, all of her friends loved me – I was the youngest recruit to their girl gang, and as such they would baby me, tell me how cute I looked, let me know that if I ever needed any advice I could always come to them. And, naturally, when one of the girls was in trouble I’d rush over with my big sister-mother and a bottle of Lambrini to comfort the poor wounded thing.
We’d listen to Debbie or Sandra or Janet sob about a two-timing boyfriend, or the fella who’d robbed off with the Christmas jar, take her to A&E to get her face seen to, or help her pack his bags, call the social, share our condolences. My sister-mother would shake her head and sigh: “Yeah well, they’re all a bunch of bastards, aren’t thee though?” We’d seen it all, us two.
* * *
My mother was an inveterate collector of people, her numberless BFFs matched only by her endless fellas, and we often had a sozzled and sorrowful friend on our settee in need of succour, sometimes until very late at night. I remember her friend Lynn inconsolable in the living room, screaming: “He’s been seeing ’er again! I’m gonna kill ’im, the bastard,” mascara smeared from brow to septum. She’d come over with a bottle of Smirnoff and a kitchen knife in her handbag, to ask us to take care of her girls if she went to prison. “I’ve ’ad it this time,” she said, now stoic and focused. “He’s not gonna do this to me again.”
We were both shocked to see that she really meant to do it, really meant to kill him, and we spent the night scheming, coming up with new distractions to keep her on the couch, such was the nature of those friendships. In the morning, when Lynn was sober and more reticent, my mother, my big sister, said I could take the day off school if I wanted to. “An’ if you take the kids in for me this mornin’,” she smiled, “then we’ll go in to town later, do a bit of shoppin’, an’ we’ll have our lunch out, too.”
There was never really any compul
sion to go to school. I think my mother sensed I was unhappy there, as she had been, and besides, she liked to have company if the girls were busy with their own kids, or at the launderette. We’d go to the Debenhams cafe, or to Uncle Sam’s Pizzeria, where we’d share a calzone and a knickerbocker glory like two truants, bound up in complicity, sweating only slightly in the knowledge that the cheque we intended to pay with would bounce. I’m sure if she’d have been a smoker she would’ve bought my cigarettes; instead she was happy to flex the privilege of her majority and buy me the X-rated VHS cassette of Madonna’s Justify My Love from the secondhand record seller who wouldn’t otherwise let me have it. She was the best. She went with me to get my nose pierced, and I went with her to get her first tattoo, a pink unicorn on her shoulder.
It was a reciprocal sorority: I was a good-natured little sister, so I repaid her favours. I would babysit for her when she had a hot date, bottle-feeding my baby brother, separating my sisters who were forever brawling over the same damn dolly, waiting for the key to turn in the lock to see if the night had brought success or disappointment.
If things had gone well I would discreetly take myself upstairs, leaving my mother and her date to smooch on the sofa to Wet Wet Wet. If things had gone badly I would make her a cup of tea and listen to her heartache. More often than not the kettle would go on come midnight.
She lost her own little sister in one particularly acrimonious love affair, when her fiance, my brother’s father, left her for my aunt.
It was a stupendous loop-the-loop of logic, a betrayal as cruel as it was absurd; it transformed my mother into a rageful renegade, and my youngest sibling temporarily into both my half-brother and my step-cousin, as his father migrated from stepdad to uncle, and then mercifully into obscurity.
* **
The loss of my aunt, with whom she had been very close, compounded my mother’s need to be the best big sister she could be to me. She let me drink at home with my friends, something no other mother at my unsparingly Catholic high school would’ve dreamed of, she covered for me when I skipped class, and if there were any suggestion that anyone had been unkind to me – on account of my, let’s say, unusual comportment and self-presentation – she would also step up as my shit-kicking big brother. I always knew when she was really furious, because she’d start saying: “No, I’m not ’avin’ it. I’m not,” heading out the door perhaps on her way to decimate the staff at Kwik Fit, who had wolf-whistled and called me a little queer.
She was something of a She-Hulk in those moments. One morning I told her that my physics teacher had hit me with a textbook; the same afternoon she had him pinned against the wall, one glittering stiletto nail to his spasming trachea, with the deputy head beseeching her: “Please! Mrs Hughes, ah, Mrs Sullivan, sorry, Mrs Bryan!” She was viciously capable of remunerating my hurts, if not her own; she had been dealt such a cruel hand, and I was always aware of what it was she was trying to spare me from: namely the tyranny of men.
Undeniably she had bad luck with men, the worst. She dated conmen, married men, gay men, she married alcoholics, wife beaters and child molesters, each leaving her with little more than another dent in her credit score, a black eye if she were unlucky, another baby if she were blessed. The alloyed stresses of inescapable poverty, devastating breakups, and what seems obvious now as a series of mental health crises, took its toll. She very much fell out of love with life, for a while anyway, and started spending ever-expanding periods of time in bed, grieving a heartbreak, comfort-eating crisps, unable or unwilling to parent, on account of all those lousy bastards she tried so hard to love.
Her melancholy was exacerbated by the death of her own mother when I was 13; it was the blow that laid her lowest, and it made the needle jump from dejection to paralysis. She became a febrile ghost. She had seemingly strived all her life to make her mother love her, only to fail again and again. Each divorce was a greater disgrace to my grandmother, who was dogmatic in her conservative Catholicism, even if she did only ever trouble the pews for weddings and christenings, referring, with mild derision, to God as “’im Upstairs”.
Divorce was a great shame, abortion beyond contemplation, and when my grandmother died, my mother had not yet managed to prove herself reformed, of good standing, settled and married with any finality. I think that my mother only endured some of those men for as long as she did to spare my grandmother’s further obloquy, to earn some affection through blind devotion, and she was devastated to realise that there was now no chance to make herself loved.
With fiance, sister and mother all gone, she simply surrendered to the duvet and sank beneath years of despondency, at one with her wretchedness. She could do almost nothing for herself. She ate only the toast I brought up to her, and only changed between nighties, from Winnie-the-Pooh to Minnie Mouse, when I came in to help her.
I had barely entered my teens, yet she had become something like my baby girl. I even had to sleep next to her in the bed so that if she woke herself up crying, she wouldn’t find herself alone. When she did drift off I was always relieved that she’d found some peace, and I had this misplaced parental pride that she always slept straight through.
Nothing could rouse her, not my little brother calling from his cot through the night, not Janet from round the corner banging on the front door drunk and demanding that fifty quid back, not my sisters and me bouncing on the couch in her bras, monkeying the Justify My Love video, tickled, seduced, ribald and ridiculous.
***
Today I can see this transposition as both an uncanny foreshadowing of how my mother would later take care of my sister’s child, when she herself became psychotically depressed, and a bitter reminder of how my mother’s mother had taken herself to bed for weeks at a time in rejection of the burden laid on her, uninvited, as a parent. As a child, however, I was only aware that there were babies to dress, nappies to change, bottles to be sterilised, nurse’s appointments to be made and toddlers to be dropped off at kindergarten. When I took my baby sisters out in their double buggy to the post office to cash the child benefit giro, or to Home Bargains for a 12-pack of toilet roll, they were almost always presumed to be my own children. Where I grew up it wasn’t unusual to see a 15-year-old hauling their baby to the supermarket, you see.
Mercifully, I have a sister, two years younger, with whom I shared the chit. We were so close in age and height and looks that we had nearly always presented as twins, another of our strange familial modulations, and we now became teen mums in our own right, almost overnight. We coparented, as I had with my mother, divvying up the responsibilities. One of us did the kids’ homework and the other went to parents’ evening, one of us got up for the 2am bottle feed, the other took the baby downstairs at six. When someone needed to be dressed as Moominmamma for World Book Day, my proxy twin had to fabricate the costume; when my brother wasn’t keeping on top of his homework, his teachers held me responsible.
It was taxing, but I won’t say that it wasn’t also gratifying. We were both very proud of our domestic landscaping, and it always stung to see it trampled. Inevitably, unwanted father figures lumbered through this terrain, destroying, never helping. Our sistermother’s deadbeat boyfriends moving in, shacking up, shipping out, gifting us another baby, occasionally making wholly inappropriate advances towards other members of the family; we came of age like this.
My sister and I would sit up late at night wondering where our suddenly energised mother had run out to, with whom, and if it would require another change of name deed. I’d wash, she’d dry, we’d put the kids to bed, waiting up nervously for our maternal teenage daughter to come home. “I really don’t know what she sees in him,” I’d say of my mother’s current mistake, and my sister would concur, most likely quoting Maury Povich or Ricki Lake: “Yeah, well you have to let them make their own mistakes, don’t you?”
For nights out, my sister-mother dressed from my pseudo twin’s wardrobe; even into her 40s she could still pass as my big sister.
Sometimes when I came home at dawn, after sneaking out to those gay bars where I knew they wouldn’t ask for ID, I’d meet her on the doorstep. She’d be searching through her handbag for her keys, heels in hand, eyeliner smeared, lipstick altogether faded. We didn’t solicit details, just silently agreed to use the standard story on the offchance my current stepdad had been sober enough to notice that either of us had been gone. It was an I-won’t-tell-ifyou-don’t standoff; fear of violent men, like a borrowed halter-neck minidress, being among the greatest of equalisers.
The very last gradation of parental hierarchy was obliterated for good when my mother started dating one of my sister’s friends, a man she knew from the job she had cleaning glasses in a pub through the summer she sat her GCSEs. My sister brought him to a barbecue in the back garden, my mother promptly offered him a glass of sangria, and that was that. Of course, she fell pregnant by this bloke, some 20 years her junior, and fought with my twin bitterly. Long drawn-out arguments that grew increasingly acrimonious until they spilled over into violence, the kind of bust-ups only sisters can ever really endure, open-handed slaps across the face, fistfuls of hair, the two of them wild as cats until I prised them apart. My sister was apoplectic that my mother had been so irresponsible, she was lit up with disgust and disappointment, screaming: “Have you never heard of condoms?” and calling her a whore. It was a pure inversion of maternal power, though myself I didn’t have it in me to be so severe.
Maybe I was also aware of how my stake in the game was different. I said that I understood – these things happen – and was grateful that we still had the baby bouncer in the loft.
* * *
I have often since wondered, if my mother’s mother had’ve been slightly less repressive, would my teenage mother have aborted me, her first child, little sister, adopted parent? I sometimes think that would’ve been better for her, honestly, if for no other reason than she wouldn’t have been forced into a shotgun wedding, three months pregnant, with my otiose biological father. She had the grades, she was university material, she could’ve been the first one in the family to get a diploma. I think my grandmother would’ve forgiven her, eventually. I think she may have earned rather more love with an English degree and a teaching job than with eight kids and five troubled marriages, and maybe that’s what happened, elsewhere in the multiverse.
Of course, my twin and I both begged my mother to keep the baby. I mean, what else would you expect from a pair of council estate brats, raised on TV chatshow propriety and misunderstood moral theology? I promised to drop out of school, said I’d quit my A-levels and commit to life as a stayat-home mum, while my sister swore blind she would never again speak to my mother if she terminated the pregnancy. The histrionics were at an alltime high that summer: recriminations, accusations and supplications triangulating between the three of us right up to the very last minute, when my sister, really still a child herself, worn down with pity, took our sister-mother to the clinic.
My mother didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to accompany her to the clinic. She didn’t spell it out, but I understood, and though I know I would’ve been by far the more understanding companion, she decided that I should stay home instead. So, relegated by chromosomal differences to childcare, I waited, pacing the hallway sick with worry, sobbing, praying “O Mother of Perpetual Help” while Snoopy, Come Home wore on in the background. The children all knew something was wrong, they intuited it as little ones always do, they sulked and squawked and squabbled all day, and no amount of Disney or Petit Filous seemed to soothe them. My mother came home silent, my sister came back the more shaken up of the two.
She didn’t go in for her shift cleaning glasses that night; she said she couldn’t face seeing her friend. Then she moved out, went to live with her boyfriend at his mum’s house. My mother, being my mother, took over from her at the pub the next week, said it would do her good to be out of the house. She was such a natural fit for the job, nobody seemed to notice or care; it’s where she met her fifth husband, in fact.
The two of them didn’t speak for quite some time. How do you say sorry for splitting your daughter’s lip with a punch? How do you apologise for telling your mother she’s a slut? They’d crossed some indiscernible line and become abusive exes, though of course in a family as malleable as ours no role ever stayed fixed for long.
My sister was forced to call home eventually, by her boyfriend’s mother, when she herself fell pregnant. Expecting to be berated, she was little short of thunderstruck when my mother told her: “Yeah, me too.” Being pregnant at the same time, with baby number one and baby number eight respectively, made them drop their grudges like coins in the offertory, made them more like sisters than ever, the shared-joy bond of motherhood reforging a relationship that a year or so earlier had looked irreparable. And their children, being born only a couple of months apart, have grown up if not quite as siblings, then as some hybrid of cousin and aunt.
I would even say that my sister has taught my mother how to parent, which might well make her a grandparent, because with her own firstborn came the realisation that she hadn’t really been mothered herself. She has always been very self-aware, and having identified a problem she works doggedly to rectify it, so out came the baby psychology books, the sensory toys and the Classical Music for Newborns CD. My mother watched with admiration, and adopted, if not the techniques, then at least some of the attitudes. She has come into her own in her 50s, parenting the youngest of my siblings in a far more boundaried manner, with unexpected patience. She is also an indulgent grandmother able now to treat children as children – she doesn’t expect her tween granddaughters to cook or clean, and if she asks them to so much as pick up the wrappers from their Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups they’re flabbergasted.
* * *
Myself, I won’t ever carry my own children; that’s something which is sometimes hard to accept. I won’t ever give birth, it’s one mystery I cannot participate in, but that’s OK, I’ve been a sister, and I’ve been a mother. I’m the eldest sibling, the proto brother-sister, the transfemme heir to the throne, in a family that also includes non-binary siblings and now, niblings. I think it is largely due to our amorphous and overlapping roles as sisters and daughters, parents and children, that my family has been so accepting of my own gender and sexuality, and indeed that of other members of the clan. We fully honour that which binds us together, love rather than genetics; we are not half-this or step-that, we are incorruptible siblings. We have felt the cold shoulder of upright society, have pressed right up against the limitations of the nuclear family, found it wanting, and have built an alternative for ourselves. We are a body of interchangeable parts, we are pro-choice; sister-brothers, brother-cousins, would-be twins, sister-mothers, daughter-grandmothers and cousin-aunts, every role plastic, every role learned and relearned.
Plastic Mothers by Lauren John Joseph was first published in Granta 161: Sister, Brother. To subscribe to Granta with a 25% discount exclusively for Guardian readers, go to: granta.com/guardian25
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