Sins of the Mother (29 page)

We had worked so hard to protect Jennifer from our pain but in the end we became like strangers to each other. In 2010, just after starting her medical science degree at Manchester University
she moved into her own flat. I was so proud of her and proud of everything she had achieved. I thought we had done it – we had managed to break the cycle of our past. She had achieved
freedom. Only it came at a cost . . .

21

JENNIFER

Understanding
MANCHESTER
, 2010

‘Will you meet me in town?’ It was rare for Mum to call me up, but even more unusual for her to ask to meet me anywhere. I had been living on my own for the past
five months and it irked me that her and Dad had only visited once.

Now nineteen, I lived in a small, one-bedroom flat with my boyfriend Arnie, just on the outskirts of town. It had been exciting moving out but the day itself was tinged with sadness. Dad had
refused to come and help me with the move so in the end I had made three journeys in Arnie’s car to get all my stuff and I hung all my own pictures. Now I was constantly on the go, trying to
keep up with my studies, and waitressing nights and on the weekend to pay the rent and the bills. Most nights I fell into bed completely exhausted. There were no wild freshers’ parties for
me, no drunken nights on the town – I didn’t really drink and, in any case, I needed to save every penny to pay the bills.

‘You’re so boring!’ complained my friend Kim one day after I turned down an invitation to her house party. ‘You never want to do anything!’

‘I can’t help it!’ I shot back defensively. ‘I’ve got to work. I don’t really have any choice in the matter.’

I was rattled by her accusation, but also resentful. I couldn’t afford to be exciting. I didn’t have wealthy parents supporting my years through college like Kim. Her parents gave
her enough money to live off in the term time and then she went home in the holidays where she picked up her easy part-time job to buy herself nice clothes. In Kim’s world, going to
university was normal, expected even. But to my family it was amazing – nobody in my family had ever been to university, most of them hadn’t even finished school. I knew my parents had
been very proud of me when I’d got into Manchester University to study medical science, they just didn’t have the money to help me out. Both on benefits, they struggled to make ends
meet.

I was desperate to leave home as soon as I turned eighteen. I wanted to live my own life, away from my parents and their strict rules. I had bought myself driving lessons and passed my test
first time, and now that I was with Arnie it felt like we needed our own space. Dad had spent so long forbidding me to have relationships that he couldn’t get his head around the idea of my
boyfriend coming to spend the evening with us. Just sitting in front of the TV with them both was unbearably awkward and I knew Dad didn’t trust Arnie. He made his feelings perfectly clear,
even if he never spoke. So I think it was a relief to everyone when I told my parents I was moving out.

They couldn’t say anything – I’d done everything they’d asked of me. I had stayed in school, out of trouble and worked hard, achieving two As and two Bs in my A levels.
When I got my results through, I was ecstatic. I showed Dad and he gave me a half-hearted pat on the shoulder. I couldn’t remember the last time I had hugged either one of them. Arnie said I
wasn’t a cuddly sort of person and it made me realize that he was right. Growing up without physical affection from my parents had made me that way, and even though my sister had liked to hug
me, she’d left home years before, so I got used to keeping my distance. I shied away from touching people and loathed public displays of emotion.

Now I sat at a window seat in McDonald’s, sipping at my tap water and watching the busy street thrumming with activity. It had taken two buses to get into town and it
annoyed me a little that she hadn’t wanted to come to the flat. After all these years controlling my every move, it was like I had moved out and they had forgotten all about me! I glanced
impatiently at my watch – another three hours before I had to start work in the hotel restaurant near my home. I was on late shift so that meant I wouldn’t get in before midnight
tonight. I sighed – I’d already done a full day of classes and now I was looking at doing another full day’s worth of work.

Mum was ten minutes late and, when she found me by the window, she seemed edgy and nervous.

‘I have to go to a therapy session with a nurse,’ she explained. ‘They need to assess me for my disability allowance. It’s not far from here – would you like to
come?’

‘Okay,’ I shrugged. I hadn’t planned on spending my only spare hours this week in a therapy session but then, this whole meeting was odd and out of character. Mum never invited
me to go anywhere, let alone her therapy. She still didn’t like to talk about her past, despite having a full-on breakdown after we got back from Ireland in 2007. She didn’t even like
to mention the fact that she’d had a breakdown at all, though of course I knew she had got money from the Redress Board for the things that she suffered in the orphanage. I didn’t know
anything more than that, though. I just guessed it must have been serious because they gave her a lot of money and no organization gives away thousands of pounds for nothing.

At the time, Dad had played it down, telling me Mum was going away for a rest and she’d be back when she was feeling a bit better. He made out that this was all very normal and I
wasn’t to worry because he wasn’t worried. He drove me mad sometimes – I had
seen
her! She was a complete wreck! And of course I worried about her. I didn’t want to
lose my mum – I knew that people who were depressed did stupid things like try to top themselves. I also knew that Mum was worryingly thin. But no one talked to me about her illness and their
refusal to include me made me feel like an unwelcome intruder in their lives. In the end I didn’t bother asking for information, I just counted the days until I could leave home and start my
life on my own.

Mum and I chatted on the way to the clinic for her appointment – she asked if my coat was new and I told her pointedly that I hadn’t bought any new clothes in months. She brought me
up to date on Dad’s latest successes in the garden and then said he was thinking of getting another shoal of discus fish.

‘Why does he keep getting those stupid fish?’ I asked irritably. ‘They only die on him!’

‘I don’t know,’ Mum sighed. ‘But he won’t give up. He’ll manage it one day.’

We walked into a clean and well-ordered reception area and Mum gave her name to the woman at the desk. There were pot plants in one corner and, in another, out-of-date magazines on a low table.
I shuffled through the selection – the latest one I could find was already nine months old. We sat in silence as I flicked through my well-worn copy of
Reveal
.

At around 4 p.m. we were shown into the small, tidy office of a psychiatric nurse who had the job of assessing my mother’s suitability for disability living allowance. The nurse was a
plump, breathless woman in her mid-forties with a kind, if tired, face. She invited us both to sit down and then introduced herself as Cynthia.

‘I’m so sorry to have to bring this all up again, Mrs Kelly,’ she addressed herself to my mum. ‘I know this is incredibly hard for you but it is necessary for the
purposes of this assessment. Are you okay with that?’

Mum folded her arms stoically and nodded.

‘And you are . . . ?’ Cynthia’s voice trailed off as she looked at me. She wore round wire-framed glasses and a smile of professional sympathy.

‘I’m Jen,’ I told her simply. ‘This is my mum.’

Ah, okay.’ Cynthia’s eyes creased and she made a little note on the top of her form. ‘Jen – are you familiar with your mother’s background?’

‘I . . . eh . . . er . . .’ I didn’t know how to answer. The truth was that I didn’t know much at all beyond the basic facts. But it was uncomfortable to admit this to a
stranger, like I didn’t really know my mum.

‘No,’ Mum jumped in. ‘She hasn’t heard much. I haven’t told her.’

‘Okay.’ Cynthia turned back to my mum. ‘Well, look, let’s get going, shall we? I understand this goes back to your earliest childhood . . .’

Mum breathed in hard through her nose and looked up to the ceiling as if steeling herself for a long, uphill climb, then she started: ‘They called me Monkey Face . . .’

And that’s when it all came out. For the first time in my life, I heard about my mother’s truly appalling childhood. I heard about her abusive mother and her absent
father, the poverty, the overdoses watched by her and her siblings, the spells in various orphanages until the time the children were made wards of the state and sent to St Grace’s. Then I
learned of the terrible abuses that went on there. I heard about what they did to my mother and other children in horrible, graphic detail; the beatings, sexual abuse, the daily ritual
humiliations. Then I learned about the children returning to the family home, the way my gran forced my mum to work at thirteen, the way she beat her with a metal chain. And then the rape, my
mother’s abusive first marriage and how she finally escaped to England with my dad to get away from my gran.

All the way through, I sat with my hand over my mouth, unable to take it all in: the broken arms as a baby, the abuse with the nappy pins, the suicide attempt at seven . . . it was too much. My
head swam and my heart broke. I had no idea how much time had passed when Mum stopped speaking. She was just in the middle of describing her breakdown after the Redress Board, telling Cynthia about
hearing her mother’s voice coming out of my father, when suddenly I was aware of an oppressive silence hanging heavily in the air. I wanted to move but I was hyper aware of disturbing the
awful stillness.

Then Cynthia spoke: ‘And how long after that episode did you hear the voices for?’

All this time, she had been scribbling furiously in her notebook so she didn’t see my mother’s face when she asked that question.

Mum’s eyes filled with tears and she swallowed hard.

‘How long?’ Mum repeated, her gaze fixed somewhere far away.

‘Yes, how long?’

After another pause, Mum answered, ‘I still hear them sometimes. Not as much as before. Not all the time and they don’t come from Matt any more. But they’re there. They never
really went away.’

Cynthia put her pen down and looked up at Mum, who had pulled out a hanky and was dabbing at the underside of her eyes.
She still hears voices?
I couldn’t believe it.

Cynthia turned to me then and, in a soft voice, she said, ‘This must be very hard for you.’

‘I didn’t know until now,’ I whispered and then I broke down sobbing. The things my mum had been through in her life were terrible, so shocking. All of a sudden I was consumed
with guilt. How could I have been such a horrible daughter? She didn’t deserve the way I had treated her! She didn’t deserve any of it. I wanted to say something but I didn’t feel
it was my place. This was a psychiatric assessment, I was only really there as an observer.
Why? Why hadn’t she told me any of this before now?

Cynthia asked a few more questions about my mother’s current situation and she explained that she was still taking antidepressants and seeing a counsellor regularly. She also had monthly
appointments with her GP.

When it came time to leave, I felt as if I was walking out of that office a different person. Just a couple of hours before, I had known nothing about my mother. I almost held
her in contempt for being unable to function in the normal world. Now I was reeling from the revelations about her life, and full of remorse for how I had treated her all these years.

We left in silence, but the moment we got out of the building I turned to her and, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I gave her a hug. I needed to touch her, to make her know
that I loved her. And again, the tears sprung to my eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

‘No, it’s my fault,’ she replied in a low, trembling voice. ‘I should have told you earlier. It was just very hard to say.’

‘No, Mum,’ I insisted. ‘I’m sorry for the way that I treated you. I’ve been a horrible daughter.’

And then I started to sob.

Now it was Mum’s turn to comfort me – she pulled me away from her so that we were face to face. She looked me in the eyes and gripped my shoulders firmly.

‘Don’t be so silly,’ she said. ‘You’re just a normal teenage girl. Every daughter has arguments with her mum. None of this was anything to do with you. I would have
told you sooner, I just didn’t know how.’

From that day on, things changed between Mum and me. For the first time, I understood what had made her the person that she was and I started to gain a new respect for her. She
had survived the worst that life could throw at anyone and yet she had broken the cycle of abuse to bring us up in the right way. The resentment I’d held against my parents for not giving me
the childhood I craved melted away. I had been so desperate to get away from them and felt so aggrieved at all their strict rules, I had no idea they had fought so hard to give me the childhood
they had been denied!