The Comfort Food Café #2
I mean, it is complicated. I miss my dad but I also despise him.
I love him but I also have no respect for him.
Because of him leaving, we had to sell the house I grew up in, and now live in a much smaller place.
Our whole lives have been tipped upside down, especially Mum’s.
She’s made the best of it, but the best isn’t exactly awesome.
So now he’s run off, and Ben’s away, and I’m at home seeing her very quietly and very slowly fall apart.
She’s even doing that in a kind way, as though she doesn’t want to inconvenience anyone, and she probably thinks she’s fooled me.
Anyone who didn’t know her as well as I do would think she was fine.
She’s one of those people who always says good morning to random strangers, and knows everyone’s life story on the dog-walking route, and always has a smile ready.
On the surface, she’s Little Miss Sunshine—but I know better.
I hear her crying in her bedroom late at night, and see her looking at her own body as though she can’t believe it’s hers.
She stays cheerful until she thinks I’ve left the house, and then sinks into blank-faced misery.
I know this because I forgot my headphones once, and came back in without her knowing.
It was horrible and I snuck straight back out because I knew she’d be upset if she knew I’d seen her.
She’s doing her best to put on a good front, but her confidence has gone.
It’s one of the reasons she hasn’t applied for a new job yet, and is living off her redundancy.
It’s like she can’t see her own value anymore.
She’s still a great mum. She forgets her own issues as soon as I have one, and sometimes I even make them up to give her something to fix.
But I can tell she’s completely grey inside, when she used to be rainbow, if that makes sense.
It’s like she’s become the Invisible Woman, and I want her to be seen again. I want her to see herself again.
I know I’ve gone on a bit—you did say ‘heart and soul’ to be fair—and some of this has been a bit heavy, and probably all of it is inappropriate.
So I also wanted to tell you some of the positives, which might even be relevant.
Well, the empathy bit and the good listener bit are definitely covered—those are her defining characteristics.
Dad used to wind her up and call her the ‘empathy sponge’, because she got so involved in the way other people might feel—except he saw it as a bad thing, obviously, because he was like an empathy void instead.
She’s a good cook; she’s raised a family, and we always ate well. She can bake, and do a mean Sunday roast, and seems to enjoy feeding people. I love cooking too, and sometimes there’s a scuffle in the kitchen about who gets to make dinner—so you might even get a BOGOF deal.
My mum is really hard-working, and one of those irritating people who lives that whole ‘if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing right’ ethos.
And she’s really good at making a home. I don’t know how to describe this—she just has a knack for it.
She’s always up a ladder doing the decorating, and she loved giving our rooms a new look, and her idea of heaven would be taking a blank canvas house and making it into a home.
When we moved into the new house, it was pretty grim.
It belonged to an older man and it hadn’t been painted since about 1902.
Everything was really ugly and grimy and it felt like the place where hope comes to die.
She got to work straight away and transformed it—and within a month it didn’t feel like that.
It didn’t feel like somewhere crap we’d been forced into because of Dad’s roving penis.
It felt like our home, where we’d always lived, clean and fresh and comfy.
Not sure that’s any use in a café, but it’s a really nice thing about her, and something she genuinely loses herself in.
Anyway. That’s that, I suppose. Except, full disclosure, it’s probably not just her who needs a fresh start.
It’s me as well. Everything that’s gone on has affected me too, plus I split up with my boyfriend and messed up my A-levels.
Maybe they were all connected, I don’t know, but everything seems to have gone massively wrong.
I didn’t feel ready to leave Mum and go to uni anyway, and I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to do, but it’s never nice to fail at things, is it?
I might do resits at some point, and my school said they can set me up with some online courses as well, so all is not lost—I could rediscover my inner genius in Dorset!
I just know that maybe a change of scenery will be good for both of us, away from the past, and everything that reminds us of all that stuff that’s gone massively wrong.
So, that’s it, Laura. If you have any questions—like ‘who is this crazy person?’—then feel free to ask! Even if I never hear from you, it felt weirdly good to get all of this written down. Cathartic, to use a fancy English A-level word.
Sophie Connolly xxx