The Great Below

living the feeling life

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Post-natal

This week I watched a TV programme where Louis Theroux spoke to women in a mother- and-baby psychiatric unit about their varying experiences of post-natal psychosis and depression. These women were on the most severe end of the spectrum, hence their being admitted to full-time care, often under section. I found the programme upsetting to watch because it chimed with what I know of my mother’s experience, although at the time her condition was largely unrecognised and almost never treated.

Though even less understood, there are as many women who suffer from depression during pregnancy as post-natally, and frequently both. My mother was first officially diagnosed with clinical depression in 1958, when she was pregnant with me. She was in her early thirties and had been married to my father for six years, during which time she had been trying not to get pregnant, always insisting that she did not want to be a mother. But my father’s persistence, along with the vagaries of the ‘rhythm method’ contraception they used, meant that she had already conceived once, losing the baby at three months. I don’t know how she felt about that miscarriage – perhaps because of her ambivalence it was a a relief, though she was very angry with my father for abandoning her in hospital to go off on a business trip the next day.

My mother always blamed the hormonal changes of pregnancy for triggering severe depression, as she experienced it every time she became pregnant, but I doubt it was purely a physical or chemical process. Being effectively co-erced into motherhood against her will, with the underlying social expectation that being a mother was the most, if not only, fulfilling life choice for a woman, must have been a grim experience. Of course if she’d had her way I would not have been born, which I can’t wish for, but it’s clear that our whole relationship and the course of my life has been marked by the fallout from this unhappy time.

What is it like to be a baby in the womb of a depressed mother? There is some evidence* that such babies are more likely to experience depression themselves in later life, though it’s not clear whether this is genetic, environmental, or due to changes in foetal development from the mother’s depression. I also got very depressed for a time during pregnancy, even though I had spent five years being treated for infertility, so my son’s conception (through IVF) was much longed-for.  Perhaps my brain chemistry was triggered in a similar way to my mother’s, or perhaps external events – my relationship with my husband was very difficult and distant at this stage, which meant I felt very alone – contributed to feeling low when I might have been expecting to feel very happy.

Things didn’t get any better for my mother after I was born: the birth was very traumatic as I came out three weeks’ late, very large and she had to be cut in order for me to be born. The gas and air she was given for pain relief made her hallucinate and this, combined with her own anxiety and terror, convinced her that there was something seriously wrong with me and she refused to see me for the first twenty-four hours. Even when my father persuaded her that all was well and I was a healthy and beautiful baby, she still believed that I was somehow damaged. She later described it – to me – as ‘the worst day of my life’.

When I watched some women in the programme say that they were able to feel nothing for their babies, even though they seemed to be caring for them perfectly adequately, I understood that I had probably been on the receiving end of this maternal indifference. How terrible must it feel not to love your own baby? Luckily for me I bonded instantly with my son and loved him to distraction. As a small baby I at least had my father and grandmother, who we lived with, both doting on me, and I look perfectly cheerful in all the photographs. My mother was obsessive about my physical care, especially cleanliness – apparently she bathed me and washed my long hair every day. However I never felt that I had bonded properly with her until towards the very end of her life, when she became like a child herself. It’s not her fault, or mine, but there’s a loneliness inside me, a sense of never having been properly received on earth, that I have never managed to assuage.

*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3710585/

 

 


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All about my mother

A couple of years ago I started trying to understand my mother by writing about her life.  It came out of a conversation with a friend – I was telling my usual story about how I had been emotionally neglected as a child because of my mother’s clinical depression. “Why was your mother depressed?” she asked. At first I thought it was a strange question: depression is an illness that can befall anybody and to me it was simply part of who my mother was – a woman whose state of mind ranged from low-grade gloom to downright suicidal misery, with a throbbing undercurrent of unacknowledged anger. As a child, you breathe in the the emotional atmosphere of your family like the air – no matter how damaged or damaging it seems normal, its variations and troughs part of the weather-system of home. Mummy and meBut why was my mother depressed? I began to think about her life and her family history a bit more closely. To begin with, there is a susceptibility to mental illness that runs directly through my maternal line. My great-grandmother sufffered from what was called at the time ‘religious melancholia’ – she would prostrate herself in prayer for days without sleeping or eating, until she began to hallucinate and hear voices. Perhaps in an earlier age she would have been considered a mystic, but in Victorian London she was hospitalised and died young in an asylum; her children barely had a mother. That thread runs down the female line: the youngest daughter of the youngest daughter of her youngest daughter – my cousin – has schizophrenia.

Mental illness may be partly hereditary, but so is trauma. My mother’s father spent four years in WW1 on the Western Front as a stretcher-bearer, whose job was to scrape up wounded and dying men, carry them across mud-and blood-drenched battlefields to the dressing stations, all the while trying to keep them alive long enough to get treatment. It must have been one of the worst jobs in wartime and of course, like most soldiers of that terrible war, he never spoke of it. Whatever trauma he had suffered – and I’m assuming there was plenty – was buried deep inside and only manifested in occasional outbursts of temper. But we now know that buried trauma does not go away, it resurfaces throughout the generations until it is fully dealt with.

My mother’s early childhood, although she always remembered it as a golden era, was no doubt overshadowed by this trauma of war, not to mention a strict upbringing with little tolerance for expressing personal feelings. Then when she was twelve, Europe went to war again and her world was shattered – in a sense literally as living in London, she was at the heart of the Blitz bombings. This war blighted her teenage years, destroyed her school and thereby her chance of a decent education, depriving her both materially and pyschologically and leaving her with a lasting sense of foreboding and fear.

She became a young adult during the 1950s, probably one of the worst decades to be a woman, when in addition to contentedly performing the role of domestic goddess, women were supposed to be sexually attractive at all times and even seek personal fulfilment through pleasing men. Their choices in life were severely circumscribed – my mother got married and had children almost despite herself, possibly as one of the only ways open to her to leave home.

Depression seems to have set in with a vengeance at the point where she became a mother – she suffered from both pre- and post-natal depression which went untreated. When she finally sought help, the only treatments on offer to her were strong anti-depressants, tranquilisers or electro-shock therapy. At no point did anyone suggest, or she know to ask for, psychotherapy or counselling. How different might her life have been if someone had been able to explore with her what was wrong? On the other hand, having been brought up not to express or even acknowledge ‘bad’ feelings, it might have been impossible for her to open that Pandora’s box.

Taken altogether, then, there are many factors that make my mother’s depression unsurprising. We still have a tendency to view mental illness as an individual pathology, divorced from personal history or life experiences; a chemical imbalance which can be medicated out of existence. Even psychotherapy, while focussing more on the early life of the individual, rarely looks further back into family history to trace the threads of who we are and where we come from And who we are is, inevitably, bounded and to an extent created by the society within which we live. What started out as a personal exploration turned into a work of forensic research into the social, emotional, and political history of our past hundred years.

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Intensive Care on Radio 4

I’ve been listening avidly to this week’s 15-minute drama on Radio 4 about a man whose wife suffers a brain haemorrhage. Usually I avoid these kind of programmes, particularly on the BBC, because they quickly irritate me in how unrealistic/over-dramatised/or just plain worthy they are. This one is different – it is so well-written and clearly based on someone’s (though maybe not the writer’s) direct experience. I am re-living every moment of Michael’s last few days as I listen – the bafflement, the fear, the absurdity of it all: daily discussions with well-meaning doctors in the ‘bad news room’, fraught with the contradictory desires to clearly understand what is happening and yet not to hear anything awful; the juggling of relationships with friends and family members in their reaction as events unfold. The sheer sense of unreality, of having been abruptly thrown into a parallel universe.

One thing I learned from the first episode, is the extreme unlikeliness that Michael could have recovered from what happened to him. Half of everyone who has an ‘intra-cranial bleed’ dies, and of the half who survive there is only a minute chance of complete recovery. The rest will be left somewhere between ‘able to live independently’ and severely brain-damaged. This comforts me a lot; I think I have always felt guilty (and I know that guilt is part of the landscape of bereavement) that I didn’t somehow fight harder for him to survive, that I too easily let him go – as if it were ever up to me what the outcome would be. I miss him every day and mourn his absence in my life and my son’s, but it would have been far far worse had he lived on without the capacity to be himself in all its weird and magnificent manifestations. A nightmare for him, and the end of our life as we knew it.

The big difference between this drama and our story is that Cath, the wife, does finally wake up from the coma induced after her brain is operated on, which of course Michael didn’t. I haven’t heard the last episode yet, and I suspect the ending will be somewhat upbeat but that’s OK; lucky them.


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The loss of keening – singing for the dead

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07npx1fkeening

Good programme on Radio 4 this week, about the old Irish tradition of ‘keening’ (literally ‘crying’) for the dead. Particular local women were known for their skill in keening at funerals – a way of expressing and helping others to express their sorrow. By the mid twentieth century, it was seen as a bit primitive and had been edged out by the more ‘modern’ habits of biting back your grief and ‘bearing up’.
For me, the saddest comment in the programme was that perhaps we are no longer so affected by death in general, because of our overexposure to it at a distance in news broadcasts, films etc.
Of course, when you are deeply affected by a death close to you, it’s a different story, but it seems we no longer know how to express our feelings of grief and loss, and there is little encouragement to publicly mourn. (Or sometimes even for writing about it!).


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The Somme centenary and taking sides

My grandfather, Frederick Hawkins - stretcher-bearer at the Somme

My grandfather, Frederick Hawkins – stretcher-bearer at the Somme

I’ve been trying to think of a way to write about this momentous World War I centenary – a hundred years since the beginning of the disastrous battle in which more than a million young men would lose their lives.  All the British soldiers involved in the Battle of the Somme had volunteered to join up: they were fighting out of patriotic duty, for king and country – motivated by an abstract ideal of heroism which likened war to a game of sports. To die for one’s country was still seen as a glorious death.

Yet these were ordinary men, wounding and killing other ordinary men over the control of a few miles of muddy ground. Of course they fought at the behest of governments and military leaders, but also backed by a groundswell of public opinion which had roundly rejected any idea of a compromise peace with ‘the Hun’.

A hundred years later, I feel we are still being exhorted to ‘take sides’. Are you with us or against us?  is the prevailing sentiment and I have been caught up in it too – in the Brexit vote, in the realignment of political parties, even in my local neighbourhood. At times this year I have felt very angry, despairing, betrayed, fearful.

I am usually more of a fence-sitter, trying to hold onto a sense of (what I see as) the middle ground while the extremes pull in both directions. I’m often astonished by the strength, ferocity and above all certainty of other peoples’ beliefs and opinions.  Maybe I’m just woolly and indecisive, but I prefer to think of it as  a kind of noble doubt.

If I believe something passionately and you believe the opposite – where do we go from there? Am I ‘right’ and you ‘wrong’, or vice versa? When Nigel Farage (erroneously) stated that the battle for Brexit had been won ‘without a shot being fired’,  he was alluding (somewhat threateningly I think) to the violence that such passionate beliefs stir up in people, such that they might be willing to kill and inflict harm on fellow human beings for having a different opinion.

Somehow we have to find a way to work with our differences, not to get ‘entrenched’, stuck in the mud of our own side’s supposed superiority. Otherwise, how far can we really say we’ve come in the past hundred years?


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Death of a young mother

This morning another young family woke up to the sickening knowledge that they have lost a parent. My heart aches for them, for the painful and terrible journey of bereavement which is just beginning and will take them into the years ahead. I feel the same every time I hear that a mother or father of young children has died; it reverberates with my own experience twelve years ago, which while devastatingly sudden and unexpected was in no way as horrific and shocking as this senseless killing.

Jo Cox’s husband and children are beginning the journey in a glare of media and public attention. It will be a comfort to them in many ways to know that she was so loved and valued, that her short life – if not her death – was not ‘in vain.’ But it can also be extremely difficult to locate your own grief in the tsunami of everyone else’s feelings.

Grief is anyway a very complex emotional landscape – it doesn’t fall neatly into ‘stages’ as some psychologists would have us believe, but meanders and weaves and crushes and occasionally uplifts us in unexpected and often shattering ways.

One thing I’m sure of is that this poor family will remain frozen in shock for a long long time – a sudden and unexpected death, especially a brutal or shocking one, is not easily assimilated into the mind and the adrenalin of survival, which kicks in to protect us, also shields us (mercifully) from the full truth of loss for a while. Yet until the reality of a death begins to sink in a little, it is almost impossible to start mourning.

Salt will be rubbed into the wound again and again as the country debates the ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’ of this tragic  killing; there will be an inquest, a trial, a constant dredging up and rehashing of the details. The children will forever be children of a murdered mother – this is their story now, and with the resourcefulness and strength of children, and the deep love of those around them, they will make it their own.


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The first year of bereavement

I had an article in the Daily Mail today about surviving the first year after bereavement, inspired by BBC2s new comedy/drama “Mum”, about a 59-year-old woman who loses her husband. The programme, being a slightly ‘grotesque’ comedy about an askward subject, considerably overeggs the pudding. But it does get some things exactly right – the way people don’t understand what you need, feel too awkward to ask, and end up sometimes saying or doing something clumsy or unhelpful. It’s great to see a middle-aged woman as the heroine of a drama, and Leslie Manville plays the part superbly: she is the still centre of the mayhem, trying to put a brave face on things, but occasionally letting her true feelings show, especially in poignant conversations with old friend Michael who clearly carries a torch for her.


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The persistence of memory

Like this, only a little grander...

Like this, only a little grander…

My family used to own a caravan in Dorset which we visited every summer. It sat on its own in a woodland glade at the back of a mobile home site out in the country. Built in the fifties, it had plenty of character but few modern comforts – you had to haul water in a large barrel, and connect up the two-ring stove to a gas canister outside. It was a peaceful place to stay, even with rain drumming on the tin roof as it often did.

The last time I went there was with Ruairi, the year after Michael died. Soon afterwards we were told that the site was being sold, and the caravan must go. After fifty years sitting on its rusty wheels, moving it was out of the question even if we could have found a site to take it, so it had to be demolished.

The other day I realised that in my head, our caravan is still there. I didn’t actually witness it being broken up, but I haven’t been there in a decade and I know it’s gone. But in my mind I can see as clear as day the white and green painted exterior, the rickety steps, the tall trees all around. As if it’s all still waiting there for me any time I care to turn up.

I think this is what it’s like when someone dies. With your rational mind, you come to accept that they are no longer on this earth. But in your head, they persist as clearly as ever, albeit frozen in time. It does sometimes seem as if they could just walk back into the room and have a conversation with you – although of course if such a thing did happen you’d jump out of your skin. But the fantasy of their continuing presence is very strong.

This is why it is nonsense to talk of ‘moving on’ or ‘putting it behind you’ after bereavement. We don’t just live in the here and now – we are composed of all the memories and experiences and, above all, people who have been part of making us who we are. They’re like the many strands of fibre woven into the thickness of a large rope – they cannot be extracted and discarded as they are integral to the whole. Feeling as though a dead loved one is still around isn’t madness; it isn’t even supernatural or spiritual. It’s just being human.

mournersI’ve had some interesting conversations recently about funerals. A friend went to the funeral of a neighbour who died in his forties, and remarked how well the man’s wife ‘held it together’ – particularly since the couple’s two young children were there. This rang a bell with me – I, too, held it together when we cremated my husband Michael ten years ago. It was important to me that the event, which felt like a sort of performance I was hosting, ran smoothly and met everyone’s needs and expectations. Late in the evening of that day, sitting with close women friends, I managed to squeeze out a few tears, but even that made me feel at once terribly exposed, and at the same time almost as though I was playing a part which everyone expected of me.

Grief is complicated and unpredictable – sometimes you simply don’t feel sad when it might be ‘appropriate’ to do so, sometimes a very tiny thing can overwhelm you with a wave of blinding tears. I have tried always to be true to my feelings as I was feeling them, but now I wonder if it could have been rather different.

The friend who went to the funeral – she is Scandinavian – thought it a good thing that we manage to be composed at funerals, in order to, as it were, ‘hold the space’ for everyone there. But there are other ways of holding the space. I was talking about my book last week to a group of social work students, and a Kurdish woman told me that when someone in her home village dies, there are a group of women whose job it is to lead the mourning. They gather in the home of the bereaved, dress the windows of the house in black cloth so that passers by will know immediately that there has been a bereavement, and  then sit and cry together with the family. I saw something similar on a documentary set in Papua New Guinea – a village elder had died and women from all the surrounding villages  gathered in the family’s house, where they sobbed and wailed almost non-stop for several days. I found it very moving to watch – it made me want to cry along with them.

Imagine you had the chance to sit in a room full of people crying for you, crying with you for your loss?  It might feel embarrassing and overwhelming at first, but my goodness wouldn’t it encourage to you get all those feelings out – all the grief, the despair, the anger. And what of the women (and it is usually women) who come to cry, the emotional ‘helpers’? Seems like this would be a great cathartic opportunity to sob out their own sadness, their frustrations with life, their fear of dying.

I can’t imagine it catching on in Britain any time soon, although this article about ‘mourners-for-rent’ suggests the beginnings of a new direction (albeit as a way of padding out the genuine funeral goers to make the deceased look well-loved.) And of course I can think of many people who would shun such a public sharing of their pain, seeing it as distasteful, or simply be constitutionally unable to participate – I include myself in that latter group. But I can’t help feeling we have lost something very fundamental with our insistence on maintaining a good front, while secretly we are dying inside.


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On writing about feelings

Every time I have published an article in the past few months in which I talk about my feelings, I get a range of responses. By far the overwhelming majority say that they are glad that I have expressed my own experience of loss, grief etc so clearly and often that it resonates with what they have felt, but have either not had the words to talk about, or in some cases have felt afraid to. They thank me for opening up and discussing topics which are still little talked about in our society – Princess Diana and sobbing X-factor contestants notwithstanding, as a nation we are still very uncomfortable with the realm of difficult feelings.

So far, so good, but there is often – and especially online where people seem to pounce with bitterness and anger on anything that seems ‘personal’ – a contingent who express their discomfort at my writing in terms such as “Get a life!” or “Don’t fill up my newspaper with your emotional ranting.” I do wonder why they bother to read articles with words such as ‘grief’ in the title, and then get angry when it talks about…well, grief. But what is clear to me is that there are still many people who think we should not talk about our feelings publicly – that to do so is to show weakness and self-obsession, is even shameful.

So is it ‘selfish’ to talk about your own feelings? True – there are terrible things happening to people in the world wherever you look. Surely the thing to do is feel compassion for them and just put up with your own pain in private? But what I’m afraid of is that ultimately, if we don’t have compassion for ourselves, if we don’t have respect for the depth and power of feelings, we lessen our ability to empathise and feel compassion for others.

When I write about grief, loss, an unhappy childhood, I am not soliciting attention for myself, nor pity. I am saying ‘Look, this is what it was like for me. How about you?’ I want to start a discussion which I hope will make it easier for everyone to express their feeling experience openly, and for others to be able to witness compassionately and kindly, without needing to rush in and try and ‘fix’ things, or turn their backs in discomfort and disgust. I think this might be what’s called ’emotional intelligence’, but I think of it as a kind of wholeness.