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.

I never again tried out the line about matter neither being created nor destroyed. My father had stopped saying it. So I worked out it had been a lie. Like so many certainties of the world before she left, it turned out to be a trick. Matter most definitely could be destroyed. It was entirely possible to lose something. Permanently. Remembering where you last saw it was no help at all. 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. He used to be Daddy, but suddenly there are lots of new people in the house and they all call him Edward, so you start to do the same. 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?

If I suffered enough I could make her reappear.

There’s a word for it, I know. Minimising. It is easier than total denial. Denial requires the ability to override your primary data. Minimising merely requires you to see it, hear it, and then move it into a less critical category.

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

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 believe that what you do matters.

I have always been very bad at practising anything. As in doing anything regularly and with intent.

No matter how I tried to explain that I was no kind of pagan and hardly any kind of artist, Mark and Marie listened as if I made perfect sense, as if I might even know what was happening in the pictures.

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.

So all the unfinished handwritten versions I tried to say were for Joe went into the attic to be eaten by mice. Then I moved on to word processors, and discovered a whole new set of ways to lose everything I wrote.

Poverty is a risk factor. For all kinds of illness.

Feeling to blame for someone’s illness does not help you to keep your temper or keep your patience with the medics or stop you from crying when you are in a queue to talk to your bank about your medium-to-long-term borrowing requirements and your phone runs out of credit. Feeling to blame makes you snappy and irritable and inadequate and defeated. None of those is on the list of desirable attributes in a parent.

The worst thing is when you have forgotten, and then you remember. It catches you out. You forgot for a moment, a day, a week, a month, but the effect is the same each time you remember. You feel it rushing back around your lymphatic system, and you remember the hurt. And there is a part of you that thinks, perhaps the pain is optional now? What might it be like to live without it? This is treachery. You hate yourself for it.

There is no intention at all. There is simply the horror of forgetting, and then remembering.

She was happy. That was the trouble. She was so happy that she forgot to be sad.

She lost track of the days and she lost track of her sadness. So when it came back at her, it caught her off-guard. It reared up viciously and tore into her with its accusation: how could you forget me? How dare you be happy? And she was too tired and too unguarded and joyful to have any defence against it. It tore her from her happiness and sent her to the river and held her face under the water.