Agony of being a MAD GIRL’S mother
By Jane Gordon
CAN you imagine — I doubt anyone can — walking into your local branch of WHSmith and finding, prominently displayed on the shelves that count down the latest bestselling books, a memoir penned by your own child?
A ‘self-indulgent, self-flagellating, self-loathing book’(her words) in which your — my — daughter lays bare her soul, her history of mental illness and, along the way, her family?
Out of loyalty and love and, of course, maternal pride, I snapped a picture of the book — Mad Girl — and posted it on social media, before buying it at the self-service till, wary that a friend or neighbour might see me and judge me for what I suspected it contained. Evidence, I felt sure, that would confirm I was Mad Girl’s very bad mother.
Because, until that moment, I had got no further in my daughter’s book than Chapter One, despite the fact that Bryony had sent me a copy months ago. Which is curious as, two years earlier, when Bryony’s first bestselling memoir, The Wrong Knickers, was published, I had no such reservations, regardless of the shocking revelations of her misspent 20s I knew it detailed.
As a mother, it wasn’t easy to read about the author who snorted cocaine off my daughter’s breasts (a man who I still want to kill if I ever come across him), or the incident that gave the book its title — in which a man sends Bryony home with another woman’s knickers, found under the covers of his bed after a perfunctory one-night stand.
Perhaps, on one level, that book was easier to read because, by the time Bryony wrote it, she had achieved a happy ending, having met the love of her life, married and had a daughter of her own.
But, on another level, it should have been so much harder for me to deal with than this latest volume because of the guilt I felt for not being present enough during her 20s.
Divorced from her father, in a new relationship that brought with it a new blended family, I was too preoccupied with events in my own life to pay attention to what was going on in my grown-up daughter’s ‘decade of chaos’. Indeed, my reaction on reading that first book was: ‘Where was her mother?’
What held me back from reading the follow-up, Mad Girl, was the fact I was aware that, this time, I was very much present in its pages. Because the story of Bryony’s mental health problems is my story, too.
And the main reason I was so reticent about going beyond that first chapter was the fact that I didn’t want to go back through the agonising experience of watching her suffer from the debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) that has had a grip on her since she was 12.
Parenting is, without doubt, the most difficult and important job we will ever do. I used to tell my son, now 24, that he was my ‘ masterpiece’ — not just because he was my only male child (Bryony has a sister, Naomi, who’s two-and-a-half years younger), but because he was my third stab at motherhood and I felt I was finally getting the hang of it.
But it was the arrival of my masterpiece that would, we now believe, be the trigger for the OCD that has been a blight on Bryony’s life.
Back in 1992, there was not much talk about OCD and precious little information or help available for those suffering from the disorder. We now know Bryony has a type called Pure O, which can make sufferers think they might be a serial killer or child abuser and have blanked it out.
She describes in her book how, in later years, she used to take her iron to work in her bag, just in case, and took photos of extinguished candles on her phone, so she wouldn’t worry she’d left one burning.
With hindsight, it’s easy to see how the circumstances in Bryony’s life at that time would conspire to turn a child who worried a little, but was essentially happy, into a girl tormented by irrational fears.
The onset of puberty, and the arrival of a baby brother whose bottles had to be sterilised, coincided with the Government’s AIDS awareness campaign, which prompted my innocent little girl to somehow believe that she had contracted the disease and was dying.
What halted my initial progress through the book was the haunting revelation in that first chapter of the reason why, that year, she no longer wanted me to hold her hand.
Out shopping together one day, she recalls, I reached out to take her hand only for her to snatch it away.
‘She must have thought I was embarrassed,’ Bryony reveals, ‘when in actual fact I longed to clasp her fingers in mine, to feel the warmth in them and the love. But I was too scared of my blood infecting her.’
Reading that sentence was so upsetting that I could go no further.
Not because I didn’t have some awareness at the time that there was something wrong — Bryony was obsessively washing her hands and had become withdrawn — but because I wished that I had realised the true extent of her mental turmoil and had done more than hope it was ‘just a phase’.
Knowing, as I struggled through the first chapter, that although her problem seemed to go away, it would, in fact, return with a vengeance five years later when she was about to sit her A-levels, I found myself unable to bear reading any further.
But this week, back home from WHSmith’s, I forced myself to go to Chapter Three and beyond. I travelled back in time with her to 1997 and the moment — when she was 17 — when I realised something was very wrong with my brilliant, beautiful daughter.
This was the year that the film As Good As It Gets, starring Jack Nicholson, brought OCD to the attention of the wider public and lead me to speculate that this was Bryony’s problem.
When she wasn’t obsessively revising for her A-levels, she was, I noticed, obsessively repeating inaudible phrases to herself under her breath. It’s still difficult for me to revisit the day our GP confirmed the diagnosis and stated that my daughter was ‘clinically depressed’.
If, as they say, a mother is only as happy as her least happy child, how do you cope with the fact that your 17year-old daughter is so depressed that, below the medically recommended age, she is put on Prozac?
As I struggled through her account of her battle with mental health problems, I constantly questioned my own role in her ongoing OCD and depression. Could I, should I, have done more?
In my defence, I did try. I took her to a man purported to be the number one expert on the condition in the country, but after two sessions (when he failed to remember anything about her case), she didn’t want to go on.
Later, I went with her to another ‘expert’ who turned out to be a very expensive quack.
Along the way, we tried alternative medicine, a quick burst of (not very good) cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and even acupuncture.
But it wasn’t until late last year, when she suffered from another severe bout of OCD, that Bryony finally got the therapy she needed.
I asked myself: ‘Could I, should I, have done more?’ Entire chapters are stuck together by my tears
Reading her words as she describes that day, I realised Bryony did appreciate everything I did, and tried to do. It provided small, but significant, comfort.
She wrote: ‘I wake to the sound of a key in the door. I don’t know how many hours have passed, but it feels as if I have been asleep for a day. “I came as quickly as I could,” my mother says, plonking herself down on the bed and putting her arms around my shoulders.
‘ “You need to get dressed and put some shoes on, darling,” she says, stroking my cheek. “I’ve got us an appointment at a doctor, a sort of posh one, because I couldn’t get an appointment at your GP for about three weeks I’m afraid.”
‘Later, I will wonder what happens to all the people who have breakdowns and can’t afford to go to posh doctors, the ones who don’t have anyone they feel they can call.’
I squinted at each word through tears. Mad Girl is the single most difficult book I have ever had to read. It was agony to revisit the alopecia that came on when Bryony was 18; the bulimia I failed to confront; and, when she was older and had slipped out of my reach, the low self-esteem that would lead to an abusive relationship and on to a cocaine habit and a period of frenetic, destructive partying.
My daughter’s memoir made me cry so much — a bit for myself, but mostly for Bryony — that whole chapters are stuck together by tears.
But I am so glad I finally managed to reach her emotionally uplifting epilogue. Not just because Bryony’s portrayal of ‘Mum’ was kinder than it might have been (I had imagined becoming a cruel, heartless ‘ Mommie Dearest’ figure), but because, in her brutally honest account of her ongoing OCD and depression, she has, with wit, wisdom and the occasional dash of pathos, made a real difference.
One in four people will at some point experience mental health problems, but few talk about it and there is still a lingering, ignorant stigma about mental illness.
In telling the truth about her condition, in opening up and occasionally ‘over- sharing’ (her words) how she sometimes feels, Bryony is leading the way in showing that people with mental problems are ‘not weird’, they are just ‘ completely normal’. I am beyond proud.
BRYONY SAYS:
WHEN I handed a copy of my book to my mother a few months ago, I should have been pretty pleased. A book — a whole book! — written by me, was about to be published.
And yet, as I handed it over, I was shaking. Any pride I should have been feeling was curiously absent.
In its place, I felt a sense of complete mortification, a burning sensation in my cheeks and a tightness in my throat. ‘I,I, I . . . I’m sorry,’ I managed to stutter, as I threw the book into her hands. That is because my book, Mad Girl, is a memoir of my struggles with mental health.
It is 80,000- odd words of me talking about a lifetime of mental illness — the obsessive compulsive disorder I have had since I was 12, the bulimia I developed in my late teens, the cocaine dependency and screwed- up relationships that dogged my 20s.
It was really hard to write, but I realised, handing that first copy over to Mum, it was probably going to be far harder for her to read.
Does any mother really want to read about her child lying in bed under a cloud of depression?
Does any mother really want to know about their first-born shoving drugs up their nostrils, or that her first boyfriend — that bloke you thought was really, really great — used to leave his mark on her in the form of his handprints in bruises on her arm?
It was my mother who first recognised my OCD symptoms when I was 17, taking to me to the GP and demanding treatment — a bold move now, let alone back in the late Nineties — but I always felt so embarrassed and ashamed by the stuff in my head that I kept quiet about the full extent of how I felt. Keeping quiet was, of course, the worst thing I could have don done, because it meant my OCD spiralled out of control, as d did the cocaine habit I pick picked up to try to quieten the voic voices in my head, and the bulim bulimia I developed in a desp desperate attempt to get some contr control over a body that seemed not to want to be controlled.
The hangovers, the moodiness, the distance:d God, what a nightm nightmare I must have been!
So I knew my mum would find the bo book tough going. I knew she would feel guilt. But the thing is: she ab absolutely shouldn’t. I don don’t blame my parents for anything that happened to me. How could she have ever have helped me properly when I wasn’t ready to help myself?
I grew up in a world where nobody talked about mental health — but that wasn’t my mum’s fault, it was society’s.
What I want to do now is thank my mum. For trying, for caring, for being there — for not giving up on me.
And what I want to say to any parent going through that now is that your child is not trying to be difficult. The best thing you can do, above all, is to love them. To love them and not judge them, and let them know that you are really, truly there for them.
Because that was what my mum did. And I turned out all right in the end. I still have terrible moments of bleakness, but I know I can talk to her and the rest of my family about those moments, and that, in itself, is incredibly comforting.
I wrote this book because I hope if my daughter grows up to have problems, she will feel similarly able to share them with me.
I hope that we have seen the last generation that feels they have to suffer mental illness in silence.
MAD GIRL by Bryony Gordon is out now (£14.99, Headline).