Pearl

by Siân Hughes

The midwife asked if there was family history of post-partum psychosis. I said, no. Only grief. There’s a family history of grief. You can pass it on. Like immunity, in the milk. Like a song.

Most of them were kind. Some had the same look I remembered from schoolteachers, police officers, searching my face for the fault line, the wrongness.

to stand up for my right to a positive memory of my mother.

When someone takes their life, they don’t only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold on to the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those five minutes turn out to be their last.

matter can be neither created nor destroyed. It has therefore not disappeared from the face of the earth.’

And even the things you held on to, kept in your sight, might change unrecognisably into something else.

Suddenly your father, who was of no particular age yesterday, is an old man.

You never used to think about him dying, but now it’s something you have to consider. Every matter can be destroyed. Everything that matters.

People tell their children all kinds of stories. It’s fun. When they grow up and you are still there, you can laugh together about it. But what if your mother disappears into the middle of one of her stories? What if she is taken by the fairies? That was one of her favourites, the story of the changeling.

understood the daily miracle when your child wakes and climbs into your arms, still present, still herself.

Even though the past is folded over and over like puff pastry and my mother, of all people, would understand just how I am wrapped up in its layers and cannot find my way out.

She came from a long line of working women, women who never questioned their right to earn money. They simply had to. Childcare was a luxury that rich people paid for. Children had to join in, shut up and keep out of the way.

Like water tastes wrong away from home. Not bad, just wrong.

Now we can think of other things we could have done instead, now that we are no longer too exhausted and miserable to think of other solutions.

It’s very hard to think of good ideas when you are sad.

Later, when you are less

sad, the ideas look obvious, but you need an imagination, or something else. You need to belie...

but like the stubborn horse in the adage, we would not drink, would not let our instincts take us the way they longed to go.

Shame is the black sticky stuff that fills the pipes under your sink. It backs up all your worst dirt and leaves it clinging to the sides of the sink for everyone to see. There’s no way round it. The water won’t run clear until you’ve dug out every bit of it. And I want the water to run clear. I want to see right through it.

Sachertorte!

The hallway smelled of fresh mint, and old wood, and new bread. Perhaps Mark was right about my mother being a pagan, if this is what a pagan house smelled like.

Sometimes I think I have lived my life as an observer, saving all the best bits for her by looking very carefully and trying to remember the details she would have liked. Was my mother a practising pagan?

She read the I Ching and the Old Testament. She read the Tao-te-Ching and folk tales.

didn’t find Susannah in a telephone box. But I did look for her in some unlikely places before I found her. I looked for her in relationships with people who had no interest in me, let alone any child I might conceive. I looked for her in one-night stands. I looked for her on the pages of adoption agencies who would never consider an application from a single young woman without full-time employment. I persuaded a friend at university to provide a film canister of donated sperm once a month in return for a round of drinks and an agreement handwritten on the back of one of his art history essays that I would never ask for any child maintenance payments.

By becoming a mother I had become untrustworthy, borderline crazy. Everything he feared.

I went home to cry my way through the remaining months of intermittent bleeding and terror on my own. So I can’t even blame him for leaving. It was me.

How easily she fits under his arm, how they like the same music,

laugh at the same things. How easily those same things could have added up to a far better life for us all. But they didn’t. And now they never will. Because Susannah became the way he learned not to lose a daughter. When his next one came along with a different mother, he knew to stick around and ignore the temporary hormone-soup-strangeness.

have a pretty sensitive trip switch too. It can flip over from reality to invention in a heartbeat.

Common causes for the trip switch to cut out are sleep loss, high temperature, fear, shock, jump scares, stress. Sleep loss is number one. And

Every human has a trip switch. Built into everyone’s brain is the point at which the information from the senses becomes totally unreliable.

Sometimes it has felt to me as if all the other pathways are more difficult, more twisted and indistinct. Sometimes it has felt as if the only path is the one lit up for me by that sign.

Even then, I couldn’t switch it off. I could only make a deal with it.

espaliered

have blamed my mother for handing on the exit sign, for making me feel unworthy of my life. I felt ashamed that I was not enough to keep her here, that she could turn away from my voice, and Edward’s, and Joe’s.

If you are a mother you are always to blame. I know that now. If you did not give birth to them too slowly or too quickly, underfeed them, overfeed them, pick them up, set them down, push them forward, hold them back, love them too little or too much, you are to blame for their very existence. You loaded them with your own dodgy genetic package and sent them out into the world

to deal with its particular set of time bombs.

Feeling to blame makes you snappy and irritable and inadequate and defeated.

the rift that opened in my own heart, would be passed down to the next generation, through my own damage if nothing else?

I thought my child would heal my broken heart. I didn’t stop to ask if this was asking too much of her. I didn’t stop to think about what was passed on in my milk, the hurt, the loss, the anxiety. I remember feeding her, looking around for my own mother, crying as I hadn’t for years, the tears falling on my baby’s head, and I never thought those tears would leave a trace. I

post-natal depression risk. If such a thing existed at the time.

I prefer the word accident. Or the official one. Misadventure. Death by misadventure. Because I like the word adventure. That describes her well. My mother’s life was an adventure. But it went wrong.

She appeared like a vengeful wraith on the landing, feverish in her white nightgown, hair spiralling out of her overnight plaits lit like copper in the landing light, a stream of vitriol and viral particles falling into the stairwell and evaporating over my head.

That was when I began to think about Edward’s career. How had he managed to keep his job when I was refusing to go to school? How had he managed all those appointments with the Adolescent Mental Health Unit? And all of Joe’s visits to the eczema specialist in Liverpool? How had he done it?

Back when hardly any fathers did any looking

The nearest he came to mentioning it was when he said, ‘Do what you can to hang on to your own work. It will keep you sane, in the end.’ In the end. Meaning, sometime past the point where you are too brain-scrambled to know what you are doing. In the end. You’ll be glad you kept your work.

They lived a long time under my mother’s care. She rounded them up each twilight before the foxes were out, and counted them in by name before she locked them up for the night. She saved them scraps of food. I was never forced to eat things I didn’t like. What was left on my plate went into the chicken bowl.

I used to have fantasies about our return to the Old House. How one day the new owners would wake up and realise they had not signed all the paperwork, and there was a secret clause

donkey called Clive of India,

Sometimes I forget all about my mother. Whole days go by and I think about other things, things that leave no space for her absence. I do it on purpose: I fix my mind on other things. When I am drawing or painting I forget all about her. I forget about everything. I have to set alarms on my phone to tell me to stop and go to collect Susannah or put the dinner in the oven. And when the timer goes off, and I return to the world around me, there she is again, somewhere out in the margins, a shadowy emptiness, guilt, a door closing just out of sight, the breath of it, something like the smell of the garden, an empty, straw-like taste. Nothingness.