Changes

 

I’ll probably never publish this but it's been fermenting for a long time. It's difficult to know how to frame it. I’ll try this way.

There have been three times in my life when I've felt truly broken hearted, and they have had nothing to do with romantic disappointment. 

The first time was when I had an ectopic pregnancy. The second was when my father died and the third time is right now. 

Five years after the death of my father, my mum has been struck down with illness. I'm going to cut to the chase and say that several professionals have said that she has dementia, although she hasn't been formally diagnosed, and she's currently also suffering from delirium. The onset of this has been brutally sudden. From February to now - August. From seeming fine to having a rapid decline in health. My witty, erudite and ebullient mum has all but vanished. What started as extreme anxiety has deteriorated into something far more complicated.

I feel like I'm grieving. She's still here but she's not here, not as I’ve always known her. And I miss her so much. I miss having someone wishing us a safe journey when we go on holiday and wanting me to text her when we get there. I miss sharing the children's milestones with her. I miss swapping book recommendations and asking whether she's watched the new crime drama on T.V. I miss her regular text messages. Yet she's still here but she's not here. I know that people who have lost their parents may think this is insensitive but my mother, as I knew her, has vanished. I feel devastated about this. I feel cold and lonely. 

I haven't told anyone at work about this, mainly because I can't talk about it without getting upset. This is despite the fact that my mum was in hospital for six weeks. Despite the fact that I had to leave work one day, in the middle of the day, to attend a meeting with the social worker. I had to get a colleague to swap responsibilities with me at the last minute, because the meeting had been called at the last minute, but I still didn't tell anyone at work about what I was doing. 

I feel like a lot of the time I'm painting on a mask of serenity. But yeah, like I know a lot of people have it worse. I can only go by my own experience. The world starts from my brain and my consciousness. 

My husband has been unemployed for over a year and is worried that he'll never get another job. I have two teenage children who don't cut us any slack and my heart is broken. We watched a TV drama where a character walked into the sea, fully clothed and screamed. We turned to each other and said that we both felt like doing that. 

But I also have a lot to be enormously grateful for, including those teenage children and that husband. My friends who I have spoken to about it have been lovely.

I realise that I might come across as whiny and selfish and where is my mum in all of this? She is holding on. Terribly anxious and much thinner. Other people have been affected by this but, as I said, I can only really speak from my own experience.

It's always been easier for me to express myself in writing, rather than talking about it, so this is why I have written this now.

Thanks for reading.

Tuesday Club

Tuesday Club

As a child I had a burning ambition to be an actor. I begged my parents to send me to stage school to no avail. I languished, invisible, at my primary school, waiting for someone to recognise my star quality. When I auditioned for the school play they were so impressed by my talent that they put me in the choir.

My opportunity to shine appeared in an unexpected place. I’d started attending something called Tuesday Club, with my friends, after school. This was a youth club run by a well-meaning bearded man and his two teenage daughters, Cheryl and Hazel. My friends favoured Cheryl, who was chatty and ebullient but I preferred her younger sister, Hazel, who was softly spoken and shy. The club took place in an inauspicious, low red brick building at the end of our road.

Tuesday Club involved a lot of energetic games, the most memorable one being ‘Ladders’, where you had to run in and out of the other kids’ outstretched legs, hopefully without stamping on them. I didn’t enjoy the games - I was a reader, not a runner.  I was only there to hang out with my pals and partake of the weak orange squash and custard creams that they passed round at the end of the evening. They read us a story at the end of the evening too, but I didn’t pay too much attention to what it was.

Around Christmas time Cheryl approached me to ask whether I’d mind taking the lead role in that year’s festive play. No, I didn’t mind - I’d be absolutely delighted, I told her gleefully. 

My character’s name was Lee, she and her family had to escape from an unspecified, dangerous country and seek sanctuary in England. I think I was aware, even then, of why they had asked the only brown skinned child at the club to portray this character but it didn't bother me. Whatever gets you the gig, eh?

‘Lee’ didn’t actually have that many lines but the most memorable one was, ‘Please, what is Christmas?’ The English kids (within the play) then educated her on Jesus and the Nativity. 

A girl called Vicky*, who I found deeply annoying, had problems with some of her lines and fudged up the word ‘refugee’. Despite this the performance was a glowing success and I was congratulated on my part in it.

*not her real name.

A man in a suit asked me if I went to Sunday school. I answered, bemusedly in the negative. Sunday school was a church thing, we didn’t go to church. In fact, my Sri Lankan, Hindu father was so paranoid about my brother and I being converted to Christianity that there was a period in infant school, when I wasn’t allowed to attend assembly. Me and this blonde kid called Benjamin(his family were Jehovah's Witnesses, I later discovered), had to sit outside the hall while the assembly took place. My Welsh mother had been gradually shedding her Catholic upbringing, when she moved to London, and totally jettisoned it when she married my Dad. 

My Dad lived in a state of constant vigilance, lest my Irish Granny or any other ‘religious nut’ got their hands on our soft, vulnerable brains and forced us to take Holy Communion. I’m not sure why he allowed me to attend Tuesday Club but my presence there was tenuous. One day, one of the club leaders gave us a huge piece of white card, on which we were instructed to draw a shepherd. I looked forward to this task as I was much better at drawing than I was at ‘Ladders’. I would have preferred to be drawing an Elizabethan woman, with puffed sleeves, but you can’t have everything.

I laid my card on the kitchen table that evening.

‘What do you have to draw?’ My dad asked.

Before I had a chance to reply, my mum, who has always had an irascible sense of humour, said:

‘Jesus, they have to draw Jesus.’

And that was the end of Tuesday Club.