Chapter Four #2
I suppose my interest in medicine stemmed from those early experiences.
The glimpses that I got walking through the department to the tea room looked lively, dynamic and fascinating.
And my favourite memories of home were when Mum would tell us stories of things she’d seen that day: someone collapsing in the waiting room, or someone swearing and carrying on and needing to be held down by a team of six security guards; a kid with a broken leg; a man who’d cut off the end of his finger with a circular saw.
There seemed a never-ending parade of weird and exciting things coming through those doors and it fuelled my fascination for what other peoples’ lives were like.
When I was a child, I had a habit of trying to find the normal by comparing my life to others and my observations of the emergency department helped me feel that maybe there was no normal. Maybe other people lived just as unusually as we did.
Mum was loving and cared for us deeply. I never had any doubt about that.
But she was very stretched financially and emotionally and I felt that from a young age.
I was thirteen the first time I realised just how upside down our dynamic was.
I was hitting puberty and my hormones were all over the place.
My body was changing, my eyes were opening to boys, my friends were becoming two-faced and my life felt suddenly all-important and consuming.
I remember one evening after something bitchy had happened at school and I went to my mum’s room because I was upset.
I didn’t know it at the time, but she’d been drinking.
When she gave me a hug, she started crying and I remember my whole body froze.
I’d needed to cry to my mother, but suddenly I couldn’t.
Suddenly I was the one comforting her. It was like falling backwards and trusting someone was going to be there to catch me, but they weren’t.
I was free-falling. I felt the vulnerable core inside me harden over, as I realised there was nowhere to land.
It seemed I had to skip my adolescence before it had really even started.
I couldn’t let myself be a moody, self-absorbed teen because there was no safety net, no barriers or boundaries to push.
If I veered too wildly, no one would be there to pull me back.
I was responsible for myself. And on top of that, I felt responsible for Ebony.
As I learnt about alcoholism, my mum’s problem became more obvious.
She hid her addiction well, and for the most part, she functioned almost like normal.
But I came to recognise the traces and the signs and I made it my job to protect Ebony from seeing it.
And because I knew there was no such thing as normal, I didn’t wallow in feelings of unfairness.
I learnt to keep myself held very tightly – if I could control my emotions and my actions, then we would be okay.
Mum sometimes went through better times, but unfortunately, the uncertainty of her wellbeing meant that I could never again be the child in our relationship.
I could never let myself go for fear that she wouldn’t be there.
At school, I threw myself into the work and I discovered there was satisfaction in academic success.
If I applied myself, effort was measurable and the outcome predictable.
I realised it was easy to get perfect marks and the fascination I’d already developed for the hospital environment provided a natural path for my future.
‘Anyway, darling. Were you just calling to say hi?’ My mum’s voice cut through my thoughts, which had started to wander while she’d been telling me about the watercolour painting.
‘Yeah. I just wanted to say hi.’
‘Thanks, sweetheart. I better run now, okay?’
When I got off the phone, I should have felt relief – Mum was well.
She sounded bright and as though she hadn’t been drinking.
But instead of relief, I felt a sickly sort of dread.
Maybe reflecting on my experience of my mother through my childhood hadn’t been a helpful thing to do.
It made me more aware of how precarious it all was.
How every good time was laced with the knowledge of what was to come.
It had happened so many times in the past that the eventuality of her spiralling into drunken oblivion again was inevitable.
No matter how enthusiastic she was about her latest hobby, the depression and the corresponding alcoholism was just around the corner.
I understood that her mental health wasn’t something she had control over and I didn’t blame her for it, but it was still so torturous to watch the way it resulted in self-destruction and, in turn, more self-loathing.
I saw it at work all the time, those cycles of addiction.
From the outside it was easy to make sense of: if people could just stop the addictive behaviour, life would get better.
If only there was a way of getting inside the brain of the person affected and clicking the off switch.
No more alcohol, no more methamphetamines, no more self-harm, no more starvation – whatever their form of addiction.
As I sat on the ‘Granny Flat’s’ futon couch after our call had ended, I felt an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, familiar and hollow and achy.
Humans did stupid things. And then they did them again, and again, and again, and again.
My trust in people was rock bottom, and I realised, with a poignancy I’d not felt before, just how dispirited that made me feel.
The hospital would always be full of people whose lives were ruined by drugs.
Mum would always return to drinking.
Felix would always cheat on me.
And I would always go back to him.
My stomach caught and a sickly feeling grabbed me.
It had always been so easy to see what my mother needed to do, but I’d never really been able to have the same perspective with my own life.
The stories I’d tell myself about my worthiness to be in a relationship, or whether I had the right to demand faithfulness, seemed suddenly ridiculous.
I was an intelligent person, yet I’d been spinning the same nonsense in my brain as people with any other addiction.
I’d let myself be pulled into its destructive cycles.
A deep heaviness seemed to sink through me and I felt the bitter taste of disappointment in myself and the weakness of my character. I’d always prided myself on being strong, pragmatic and level-headed. Maybe I wasn’t.
I sat there for some immeasurable time, the shame building, gaining traction.
Self-loathing rose in me at my own ineptitude to follow through with change.
But before it could fully take its hold, I felt it morph into anger, fuelled not just by my own behaviour, but by all the behaviour of addicts I’d ever witnessed.
And with a surge of disgust, the flickers of doubt that had been growing about my decision to leave Felix were stamped out like the last embers of a burning fire.
I was done.
There was no way I could ever go back to Felix again.