Another thing I hated about school was that it meant being away from my mum, which was something I wasn’t used to, although that was true for most of the other children too, I suppose. I don’t have many specific memories of my mum when I was a young child, but I know she was almost always there – in body, if not in spirit – and that I never spent a single night away from home when I was a little girl. In fact, Mum and I had a very close relationship at that time, and even though it might have been odd and dysfunctional in some ways, at least it was familiar and comprehensible to me. I could tell when she was angry, for example, and I usually knew why; while she knew how to talk to me in a way that I could understand and that didn’t trigger a meltdown in my weirdly wired brain.
But I didn’t understand my teachers, and because the lack of comprehension was mutual, they would often back me into a corner, literally as well as figuratively, so that I felt trapped and panicked. As a result, it wasn’t long before a hostile relationship began to develop between me and my teachers, which, far from trying to rectify, Mum sometimes seemed actively to encourage. After being happy to let other people take care of me since we’d moved into the flat that was always full of her drunk and drug-addicted friends, I think the time when I started school coincided with a phase when she wanted it to be just her and me against the rest of the world. So maybe she resented the influence she thought my teachers would have on me, or perhaps it simply felt as though she was getting her own back on all the teachers she used to tell me about who she hadn’t liked when she was a child.
I didn’t want to be in conflict with anyone though, and as well as trying – and usually failing – not to annoy my teachers, I longed to be like the other kids, who seemed to be able to follow instructions that, to me, seemed impossibly complicated and indecipherable. I hadn’t been at school for very long before I realised that there must be something wrong with me, which I assumed was the fact that I was ‘retarded’, as Mum often told me I was. And that made me even more anxious to learn to behave the way the other kids did, because I really didn’t want to have to go to a ‘special school’ like the one Mum described to me, where they sent children who weren’t ‘normal’.
Even when I was diagnosed as having Asperger syndrome, which was something that apparently couldn’t be ‘cured’, I think Mum still preferred to believe I was ‘retarded’, because that was something she thought I could recover from, if only I tried hard enough. Perhaps her intentions were basically good, in that she was hoping to push me towards normality by refusing to accept that I had a problem. Or maybe she was just hoping that, whatever the problem was, it would go away if we ignored it.
It didn’t go away though. It just got worse, until, eventually, I was so confused, lonely and unhappy I would have done almost anything to feel that my mother loved and approved of me, or that I had just one real friend. And then that became the real problem, because being desperate for affection puts any child in a potentially dangerous situation, particularly a child like me, who was already vulnerable for other reasons.
It wasn’t until I started school that I realised I didn’t have a dad. Even then, it didn’t seem like a huge deal, because I wasn’t the only child whose dad wasn’t around, although I think most of the others at least knew who their fathers were, whereas I didn’t know anything about mine.
I’ve never met my dad and Mum has never talked about him, except to say that he left before I was born. Perhaps he didn’t even know Mum was pregnant and so has no idea that he has been a father for the last 21 years. I sometimes wonder if things might have been better – for Mum and for me – if he had stuck around while I was growing up. I don’t wish he had though, because he might have made things worse, especially if he was an alcoholic or a drug addict, like most of Mum’s friends when I was a child. And, in my experience, getting the thing you wish for doesn’t always turn out well.
Mum was living with someone else when she met my dad, and when she got pregnant he threw her out. So she moved in with her mum, and that’s where I lived, too, from the time I was born until I was two years old.
Grandma was in her forties when she had Mum, and Mum was in her thirties when she had me. So Grandma was well over 70 by the time I was born, and was already suffering from whatever it was that killed her when I was five. I don’t have any clear memories of my grandma. I don’t think she played a very active role in the first few years of my life, because she was ill and because she and my mum didn’t get on.
My only other close relative is Mum’s cousin, Cora, who lived in a flat in the house next door to Grandma. Cora suffers from depression and often finds life a bit of a struggle. But she has always worked hard and has done quite well for herself – which was fortunate for Mum and me, because when Grandma threw Mum out, Cora let us live in another property she owned. I don’t know where we would have gone if she hadn’t helped us, because, unlike her cousin, Mum has never worked or owned anything.
We are the sort of family that doesn’t talk about anything important. So I don’t know what caused Cora’s mental-health problems, or why Grandma and Mum didn’t get on, or why Mum was only able to deal with life at all when she was separated from reality by a haze of cannabis smoke. I do know that I was very difficult as a child. At least, that’s what Mum always told me, and I have to assume it was true, because I was certainly ‘difficult’ a few years later. Even so, maybe it’s something no child needs to be told, and certainly not repeatedly.
Growing up knowing that your mum is having a horrible time and hating every minute of her life is bad enough. Believing that it’s all your fault can provide the momentum that keeps the vicious circle of stress and bad behaviour spinning. It didn’t do much for my confidence or self-esteem either. What made it even worse was the fact that I can’t read or interpret people’s expressions and body language, which meant that, as a child, I simply accepted whatever I was told as fact. Taking everything literally can be confusing at any age, but particularly when you’re a child trying to make sense of the world for the first time. So, as far as I was concerned, I was difficult and I was the sole cause of all Mum’s frustrations, disappointments and anger. Otherwise, why would she have said I was?
Fortunately, after we moved out of Grandma’s place and into Cora’s other property, Mum made friends with a couple who lived in the flat downstairs and who enjoyed smoking weed almost as much as she did. The fortunate bit about it, for me, was the fact that they were happy to help her look after me. Someone who’s pretty much stoned from shortly after her first cup of tea in the morning until she falls asleep at night does need some help taking care of a two-year-old child and, as it turned out, three pot-heads are better than one.
It wasn’t long, though, before our flat had become a doss-house for numerous alcoholics, drug addicts and petty thieves. Having grown up in the 1960s and 1970s, Mum saw it as a sort of hippy commune, which, to her, was something positive. And it did have some positive aspects. But, even taking those into account, it wasn’t a good environment for any child to grow up in, for lots of reasons.
Despite all the pitfalls and potential dangers, however, everyone was very nice to me and I was never abused or neglected while we lived there. Mum’s friends might have been doing irrevocable damage to their own lives and mental health, but they were mostly more ‘peace and love’ than intent on kicking anyone’s head in. So the atmosphere was usually quite relaxed and there was rarely any aggression – as there might easily have been with so many dysfunctional, ultimately self-destructive people living together in one room.
Having so many people dossing in the flat also meant that on the many occasions when Mum was too stoned to remember she even had a child, there was always someone who was clear-headed enough to be able to put me in the bath, get me a drink from the kitchen or take me out to McDonald’s and buy me something to eat.
From the little I know about Mum’s life before I was old enough to understand things myself, I think she was already quite heavily involved with drugs by the time I was born. She told me once that she stopped taking speed and ecstasy when she was pregnant, but that she still smoked a lot of weed. I remembered that recently, when I read something about smoking weed in pregnancy possibly having a negative effect on the development