A Good Enough Mother Read online

  I’m aware of a strong urge to help. To not let him down. It’s my job to notice this feeling. Pick up on what’s going on in the room between us. Why can’t people do their jobs properly? This is the time to comment on his disappointment in ‘the system’, the unit, and to wonder whether he’s worried that I, too, might prove a disappointment. But in that moment, the counter-transference feels muddied and unclear. So I don’t say anything.

  We sit together in the silence. I can hear the quickness of his breath, and as he looks down at his now-still hands, I peer at the yellowing bruise on the side of his face, the stitches on his lip and the grubby bandage on his left hand. When he next speaks, his voice is a whisper. I need to lean in to hear him. As I get closer, I see Tom’s mouth, the way his lips make a shape around his words. The way he chews on his bottom lip when he’s nervous. I watch his mouth tell me how the world has changed for him. The panic attacks, the flashbacks and the sleepless nights. However, he skirts around what actually happened, ‘the thing in the park,’ is what he keeps saying. I don’t press him for details. I know I must wait; asking patients too soon can feel like another violation.

  I ask other questions, perhaps more than I would do ordinarily. I ask about his family – ‘Parents? Siblings?’

  ‘No family,’ he says and his tone is dismissive. ‘Father’s dead. No brothers or sisters. And I lost my mother.’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  He shakes his head. ‘It’s not what you think – she’s still alive. As far as I know,’ he shrugs. ‘I lost her to someone else.’

  ‘To someone else?’ I say, both intrigued and confused by his choice of words. He shuts me down.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about my family.’ His tone is brisk. Then, in a softer, almost apologetic tone, he adds, ‘I just want to get better. Put it behind me and move on. Learn some techniques, some tools perhaps?’

  ‘We don’t offer tools,’ I say. I tell him we offer a place to talk. ‘Talking therapy. And given you have come, perhaps there are some things you’d like to talk about.’

  I ask him for the questionnaire – ‘The one we sent in the post?’

  He looks blank. ‘I didn’t get a questionnaire.’

  I fish another one from my drawer and ask him if he can fill it in and hand it back at reception. He takes it, folds it in half and puts it straight in his bag. Clearly, he has no intention of completing it. After a moment, I lean forwards. ‘Many people who come here want a quick-fix,’ I say. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. The questionnaire will help me understand the meaning of this traumatic event for you. That’s why there is no set of tools. It’s all about getting to know who you are.’

  He looks stricken for a moment.

  I tell him that the people we see have come here because they are unable to get on with their lives. ‘They have been invaded by something that is often shocking, violent or brutal, often in the form of flashbacks and invasive thoughts.’

  He doesn’t move.

  ‘It’s as if the event has torn something,’ I say. ‘Like a protective layer. The trauma has become a kind of wound, one that won’t heal on its own.’

  ‘A wound,’ he repeats, ‘yes, it feels like that.’

  ‘Sometimes this wound gets opened because it triggers something else – an association or an event in the past, and it is this,’ I explain, ‘that needs facing, in order to move on.’

  I have his full attention, his eyes not moving from my face.

  I explain that it’s common for trauma to leave people with a sense that the world has become a dangerous place, ‘random, disordered and unsafe’.

  For the first time, he’s nodding as I speak.

  ‘I feel like someone has taken my world,’ and he mimes placing a ball on the tip of his finger, ‘and spun it upside down.’ His voice speeds up as he talks about feeling powerless, ‘out of control’.

  ‘Have you ever felt like this before?’ I ask. ‘In the past?’

  ‘Have I ever felt like this before?’ he replies, nodding again. ‘Yes, I have. And it feels awful,’ and he goes on to give me more details about the dizziness, the lightheaded feeling. ‘Things go all fuzzy,’ he says, ‘like I’m going to faint.’

  It’s the first time I’m aware of it. This habit he has of answering a question about his past, by not only repeating the question, but then failing to answer. It gives the impression of being both focused and vague and, at the end of the session, of a hollow intimacy – like I know everything and nothing about him. There are other things too: the desire for the ‘quick-fix’, the reluctance to talk about the past. It feels like there’s a chasm between his need and my capacity. Like he’s hungry. Ravenous, and I’m left with a feeling that I won’t be able to nourish him. At the time, I put this down to his difficulty with trust, common in patients who have been traumatised and let down. None of these things are unusual. They are simply things to note. Some indication of the landscape that is to come. And yet, of course, our session is not a normal first session. That day, after he leaves, there’s no blank canvas to sketch out the beginning of our work. The tabula rasa? – it was a scribbled mess before we began.

  It’s only later when I’m writing up my case notes that I notice something else. It happens when he’s talking about the world, how it has tipped on its axis. ‘The world is not safe,’ is what I write down, but as I look at what I’ve written, I realise this is not what he said at all. His actual words could mean the same – or something very different.

  ‘I don’t feel safe,’ is the phrase he used. I know this as I stare at the words on the page. But for a reason I can’t explain to myself, and much later to my solicitor, I don’t make the alteration in my notes.

  Two

  It’s said that the way babies come into the world is like a small blueprint of how they go on to live their lives. My daughter Carolyn was first – and she proved every bit as punctual and determined as she grew up. After a red-faced and indignant entrance into the arms of Beatrice, the midwife, she swiftly composed herself, in a way I’ve gone on to see replicated many times over the years.

  After the slippery rush of my daughter’s arrival, a quiet lull descended on the labour room. Beatrice moved around the bedside; the sounds of rubber soles on lino, the gentle bleep of the monitor, and the small popping breaths of the newborn in my arms. There were no worries or concerns about her expected twin brother, no medical explanation for his late arrival, and so his reticence was put down to choice.

  ‘He’s happy in there,’ said Beatrice, laughing and patting at my arm. She had a strong Jamaican accent and long eyelashes. ‘He wants you all to himself for a few minutes … wants to stretch those little legs. And who can blame him?’ she said, smiling at me and my husband.

  As the minutes ticked by, my husband grew worried, and any fanciful thoughts to shape a narrative about this second baby did nothing to assuage David’s anxiety. ‘What’s happening?’ he fretted, desperation in his voice. Every so often I’d catch the flash of blue from his shirt as he paced up and down the room. He was solid and handsome. It was the first thing that attracted me to him. His height, his physical presence. The very shape he made when he came into a room. But when tense or anxious, he seemed to cave in, becoming small and loose-limbed. Gently, Beatrice suggested he get a coffee, ‘or a walk outside to get some air.’ As for me, I knew what was to come and I shut down, closing my eyes, like an animal going into hibernation.

  Perhaps it was this self-preservation, or simply the presence of Beatrice, who hummed as she moved wordlessly around the bedside, but whatever it was, I felt calm. It was David, shrinking fast, who called for the doctor. Beatrice smiled as she leant in with chips of ice for me to suck. ‘Your boy will be along when he’s good and ready. Just you wait,’ she said, squeezing my hand, ‘he’s a chap that likes to do things his way. He’s not a people-pleaser this one.’

  When Tom did finally emerge, he did so with an angry, scrunched-up face, into bright white lights an
d a bustle of green and blue gowns. ‘All those people. All that noise,’ Beatrice clucked as she gathered him up, and sometimes I wonder if it was a shock he was to spend the rest of his life recovering from.

  Afterwards, I would learn that it was twenty-eight minutes between the birth of my babies. That the average length of time between twin births was seventeen minutes. Years later, when I thought about those twenty-eight minutes, I imagined Tom quiet and alone for the first time in nine months. And although there is much written about twins and their kinship, there’s very little attention given to the fact that they are rarely alone. From conception to birth and through the early years, they are always together, rubbing along side by side with a sibling.

  My mother swept in that afternoon, glassy-eyed and desperate to see the babies. As always, she was mid-sentence as she appeared in the doorway, and when she leant in towards me, I caught the whiff of lunchtime gin and the tell-tale twitch of anger on her forehead. But I was shiny with drugs and hormones and her words slid off me.

  Perhaps she finished, perhaps she took a breath; either way, I launched right in.

  ‘Carolyn was out,’ I garbled, ‘just like a bullet. But Tom,’ I said breathlessly, ‘he wanted to hang on. He wanted his space. To take his time—’

  In my post-birth euphoria, my guard was down. As I continued to fashion the modes of their births into aspects of their personalities, I forgot the rules of our relationship.

  ‘It was almost as if he wanted to stay with me,’ I rambled on, ‘before the onslaught of the big wide world.’ My mother tried to listen. Her head cocked to one side. After a while, I realised her face was frozen.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she scoffed, like I was a toddler misbehaving at the dinner table. ‘It’s the amniotic sac. It’s not about free will.’ Then, in a final act of restoring order, she reached across to smooth out the ridges on the hospital blanket. She sat back in her chair, her face serene, satisfied that all thoughts of a fanciful nature had been chased from the room.

  It wasn’t just the drugs and hormones that made me immune that day. It was me. I was different, holding my two babies, one in each arm. As she continued to scratch out the details of her journey; the incompetent taxi driver, the difficulties of coming into London at rush hour, the cancelled charity lunch, I felt so full and plentiful that her roar of desperation failed to touch me. I was battered and bruised, but I barely heard it. I watched her mouth move. Letters that formed words that curved into twisted sentences. Heavy traffic on the motorway. All so last minute. No time to prepare. Wished I’d known earlier. These words. These small angry pellets simply bounced off me. As she swelled with fury, I swelled with love. And as she sat at the side of the bed, with fingers that itched to press and prise into the flesh of my newborns, I felt a surge of power. I smiled and hugged my babies close like a shield. I grew in stature, in the knowledge that for the very first time, I had something that didn’t belong to her. Something she couldn’t have.

  After she left, David climbed onto the bed next to me. The colour had returned to his face, as he held the babies shyly, one after the other, grinning like a fool. When he went to the café to get drinks and snacks, I laid them carefully in the cot, and sank back into my pillow. The April sunshine caught the trees outside as it shone through the window. I watched as the patterns of leaves danced and fluttered on the blanket of my bed. There were still some visitors on the ward and I felt lulled by the sound of the surrounding chatter. One conversation caught my attention. It was the two women opposite. I’d watched them earlier. The woman in the bed gently handing her new baby over to what I guessed was her own mother. The new grandmother. As the woman reached for the baby, her face lit up with such pride and joy. I listened as they spoke about someone called Alex. About a fence that would need fixing. ‘Will you have a christening,’ the older woman asked, ‘or have you not decided?’ ‘Not sure,’ her daughter replied. The older woman nodded and the conversation flitted back and forth. The tiny fingers. The long eyelashes. His peachy skin. It was so simple, easy and uncomplicated. I was in awe. Envious of that ease. That normality.

  ‘Why?’ my mother said, her face a twist of displeasure when I mentioned my plans to breastfeed.

  ‘I never did,’ she said, decisively, as if this would somehow be the end of it.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Both of them?’ she said, incredulously.

  And in those early weeks, my mother became obsessed with feeding. Even the smallest cry or murmur from either of the babies was confirmation that they were grossly undernourished. ‘Hungry,’ she nodded, peering over at whichever one was clamped to my swollen breasts. ‘Ravenous,’ she’d conclude, her fingers poised to rip open the box of formula milk that she clung to like a handbag. It was David in the end who engaged more directly with her own insatiable hunger. ‘Come along,’ he said, hooking his arm through hers. ‘Let’s go and buy some cake.’

  My daughter took to breastfeeding in the manner she would take to pretty much everything in life, applying herself studiously and vigorously until she was a model of efficiency. But almost as quickly as she’d mastered the task, she got bored, and refuelling soon became a duty, something to complete, while her gaze wandered around the room to other more exciting things. ‘Penelope Pitstop,’ we called her in those first months.

  Tom was the opposite. He struggled to make sense of it all, but when he did ‘latch on’, as they say, he was utterly focused. In contrast to his sister, he’d look up at me, small grey-blue marble eyes fixed on mine, his tiny fingers clutching onto the edge of my cardigan.

  What I remember most about those early years was the sheer physicality of it all. Small fingers on my cheek. A belly on my hip. Legs climbing onto my lap. A hand slipping silently into my own. And all this amidst the haze of sleeplessness. It was Tom who slept badly, but they both had their moments. And for what seemed like months, mornings would shock us awake, finding the three of us, and very often the four of us, sprawled across the sheets, like battered objects washed up on the shore. Yet there was such joy in that physicality. Bodies entwined. Pressed up against each other. Safe.

  As they grew from babies into toddlers, I’d watch their different approaches to life. Carolyn was quick and bright, and she only had to watch me do something once and she’d soon be trying it out for herself. She had an innate understanding about the world, a knowingness, together with a fierce independence that often made me feel redundant. It wasn’t so much that Tom couldn’t do things, but his default position was always one step behind. Just as he was turning his attention to something, she was away, and on to something else.

  I remember those family occasions when your child stands up, takes a step, or draws a line on a page for the first time and the whole gathering is in rapturous uproar. Carolyn would look up, dip her head and beam, then repeat the act as her whole body lit up with the electricity of approval. Tom, on the other hand, seemed immune to the external applause. He was often startled by the attention, and he’d turn away, with a furrowed brow, embarrassed by the fuss.

  Some parents of twins go out of their way to reinforce their separateness and their individuality. We were not those parents. For us, they were always ‘the twins’, from the second they were born, and even long beforehand. I used to love those moments when a stranger on the high street would peer into the pram. ‘Ah – twins,’ the look seemed to say, and was a mixture of surprise, admiration and wonder all rolled into one.

  In those early years, they looked alike. We have so many photos of them, with the same wild curly hair, almost indistinguishable. Tom was always happiest outside. He loved wide-open spaces – beaches, mountains and fields – and he’d run about with joy, climbing trees and collecting sticks. Even when at home, I’d often find him at the back of our garden in London, digging in the dirt or making a den in the bushes. Carolyn, in contrast, could sit for hours at a table, working on small intricate drawings with coloured felt tip pens. She drew clothes mainly: patterned dresses and
skirts and funky shoes that she’d carefully cut out and arrange into beautiful outfits. I look back fondly to that time, before the structure and rigidity of school. They were our Golden Years, the years when they were small. When we knew exactly where they were and what they were doing. Our worries then, were about identifiable hazards; traffic on the road, the jagged edge of a slide or a deep garden pond. As they got older, their ‘twinship’ suited me more. I continued to reinforce their sameness and probably encouraged joint play dates and outings for longer than I should have. I’d say it was because they liked it, but now I know it was for me. That it served to mask the differences between them that I didn’t want to see.

  *

  One of the last happy memories of my son was a year and a half ago, several days before the accident. We were in the garden. It was a warm afternoon on the last day of July; a clear blue sky and small wisps of cloud, and after the rain the previous week, the lawn shone a bright jewelled green. The foxgloves were in flower, perky and upstanding with their flutes of purple and white. Tom had completed the first two terms of his carpentry course and we’d grown accustomed to the smell of wood shavings, and the fine dusting on his clothes and hair and eyelashes when he got back home. He’d been working weekends at the canoe club since the spring.

  It was a while before then, when he’d first mentioned Julie. ‘She’s one of the full-time members of staff,’ he said. ‘She organises the volunteers. She’s really nice,’ he grinned. ‘She’s got pink hair. She gives me the funny kids to work with,’ he laughed. ‘And she always makes me cups of green tea when I get back.’ He pulled a face. ‘Says it’s better for me than all the black coffee I drink. It’s actually growing on me – though I can’t tell her that.’ It was the first time I’d ever heard him mention a girl. There were so many questions I wanted to ask. What’s she like? How old is she? Perhaps you could invite her round? Pink hair? I opened my mouth. Then closed it again. As time went on, he talked about her more. ‘Just friends,’ he said when I asked. But his cheeks coloured whenever he mentioned her name. I met her once, at the centre when I came to pick him up. They were huddled together at the front desk, laughing. I fought the urge to look too interested. What mattered most was how happy he looked. It was obvious the outdoor life suited him. He seemed different, older somehow. His shoulders had broadened and his body had lengthened and grown into itself. His hair was long and bleached by the sun. He tanned easily, and his skin was a deep burnished brown. The horror of the past year seemed long gone. Erased by the sun, the job and his newfound confidence. I remember feeling smug. A little self-congratulatory. I allowed myself to relax. Perhaps that was my mistake.