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AFTER A PAINFUL BREAK-UP, Emma Jane Unsworth RETREATED TO THE SECURITY OF HER CHILDHOOD HOME – BUT WHAT AWAITED HER WAS A FAR MORE COMPLICATED REL ATIONSHIP

Iturned up at my parents’ house with one suitcase and my cat. As well as the practicality of it, I think I wanted to feel lighter on my feet; different and new. Anyone who knows me knows I normally travel heavy. But this day, in September 2O13, I had the T-shirt on my back and the bare minimum to my name. Maybe on some level I hoped it might make my heart lighter, too. Because my heart was a lead weight. I was 35 and moving back in with my parents in the wake of a break-up. And not just any break-up. A break-up with the man I thought I’d be with forever. A man I’d lived with; grown with. Calling it a formative relationship was almost an understatement. I’d known him for a third of my life. Even if it felt right that it had ended, it was devastating. The fact he was in the public eye, a famous musician, only made the life-change more pronounced. Gone were the arena gigs and award ceremonies; here I was with a suitcase and a lack of real direction or any of those things I’d been taught that gave my life meaning and value: a marriage, a family, a solid career, a toned pair of thighs. I felt like chaos. I was staying in the room I’d had there since I was 18. It wasn’t strictly my teenage bedroom, but the closest thing I had to one. My parents have two bathrooms – one is their en suite and the other bathroom is the one my dad uses. (Like Joan Collins, my mum thinks one of the keys to a happy marriage is separate bathrooms.) Which meant while I was staying, hilariously, the person I found myself battling for the bathroom with was my dad. I see now how my mum and dad’s routine must have been shattered by my arrival. Suddenly, they had an adult baby in their midst. I was feeling wounded and, sure, the people you can let it all hang out with are your family, but there comes a breaking point, even among people who love each other.

It’s a cliché to say we revert to our teenage selves when we are around our parents, but I felt so cornered by life at that point that clichés were the only thing I was capable of. And so, it began. The slobbing around in my dressing gown. The staying out all night. The huffing over meal choices. Especially, in true teenage-girl style, to my mum. As the eldest daughter, my relationship with my mum is the most complex in all the family. Our love is deep and hard and primal. The boundaries of our identities blur and mix. She had reacted badly to my break-up as I knew she would – seemingly feeling it as her break-up, too. A failure on her part, somehow. She had feelings about it that I couldn’t handle. When she tried to broach the subject with me, I blew up at her. I didn’t want to talk about it. I was busy processing my own feelings.

Iwas also busy conducting a love affair from my bedroom with a man in the US. Just to go full teenager. What had begun as a random night of passion at a European literary festival had morphed into a daily (or nightly) sexty pen-pal situation. He was an American novelist living in California, hence the time delay of his responses. I’d wake up every morning, around 2am, and look at my phone. My heart would leap at the sight of his name, burning out of my inbox. An instant rush of adrenaline and dopamine. So addictive, so incompatible with sleep. I’d read and reread his email, then around 5am I’d get up, make a coffee, and compose the first draft of my reply, a reply that would be redrafted many times throughout the day before I finally sent it, just before I went to bed, and the cycle would begin again. It turns out I didn’t need a newborn to screw up my sleep pattern; I just needed an illadvised online romance. My body clock completely reset – I was chasing some kind of sweet vertigo, a kind of danger, that punch-drunk rush of feelings. Some semblance of youth, perhaps. But I was misled. Wilfully so. And when he told me, via email, a month or so later, that he’d been on a date – and proceeded to tell me all about that date – the scales fell from my eyes. I had a sudden flash of clarity. I was seeing other people, but I wouldn’t have told him about it. I was protecting something. He wasn’t. I didn’t take out my feelings of rage on him, I took it all out on my mum. It was an ordinary Sunday evening and the three of us were eating dinner. The wine was white and then it was red. A graphic, liquid representation of the shift in mood. She was going on and on about my ex, and it was driving me mad. I see now that she was still very emotionally attached to him. After all, she had known him as long as I had. It was a loss for her, too. I get that now. But at the time, it just seemed like an inappropriate obsession. So, when she brought him up and persisted that night, combined with my raw hurt about the American Boy, I lost it. We were both too drunk to be remotely rational or careful, even if there hadn’t been resentment building between us. What followed was one of the biggest rows in our family history. We screamed at each other downstairs, and then we continued upstairs, in my tragic teenage bedroom, as I started to pack. I’ll never forget my dad’s face on the driveway as I stood there with my suitcase, in the dark, saying I was going to a hotel in central Manchester. He had tears in his eyes and was pleading with me to see sense. But I was way past sense. Sense had checked out a few months earlier. I didn’t run away that night. I’d run out on everything by then. I guess there comes a point when you have to stop running and stare at yourself in the mirror – and if there’s not a mirror to hand, then sometimes the next best thing to look at is your mother. And as we stood staring at each other on the driveway, my mother and I had a moment of recognition. It changed everything. Up until that point we had been each other’s biggest threat to our own identities: we were so similar that I saw as much of myself in her as she did in me, including all the character traits we disliked most about ourselves. But here we were, faced with the possibility of going our separate ways, and we didn’t do it. To be clear, it wasn’t resignation, more of a thankful exhaustion. I saw how the email affair had been an anaesthetic to distract me and numb the pain of the break-up. But actually, my relationship with my ex had failed largely because I’d never addressed some central issues that were a lot to do with my relationship with Mum. I saw how my relationship with her had never been allowed to evolve, because I’d moved out to go to university when I was still a child, and we’d seen each other sporadically since then, and slipped into old roles. It needed something seismic to happen to shake us up and make us new. Standing there, standing my ground but not running, I was making a promise. I was committing to something being hard, but worth the work. There would be growth in this. Real evolution. After a few minutes, we hugged and let the tears dampen each other’s shoulders. And the next day, despite my sore head, I woke feeling lighter, after shedding kilos of outdated emotional baggage. I moved to London a month or so after that, into my own flat. My mum and dad came to stay and, slowly but surely, the love regrew stronger and truer. Now, I know how fortunate I am to have them in my life, and we are all grown-ups with a much clearer sense of what we need as individuals and braver ways of communicating that. As for that sweet vertigo I was seeking – that trepidation I mistook for romance – well, I give that to myself now, through my work as a writer. I’m not looking for it in a man. When I met my husband, mutual respect and honesty were far more important than witty missives. But I had to make peace with my mum, in a crazy spectacular blow-up, before I could get here. Adults by Emma Jane Unsworth is out 3O January

“My mum reacted badly to MY BREAK-UP. It was a loss for her, too. I get it. BUT I BLEW UP” ABOVE: A YOUNG EMMA WITH HER MUM