The Apple That Fell Too Far From the Tree

Dear Mum,

When I think about you, I think of a young woman lying in the dark in a narrow, thin-mattressed bed in the hospital psychiatric ward with a cot beside you. I think about your eyes opening in the darkness, watching a baby breathe. I think that you could have been a good mother if you had been given the chance, and I think, most days, that it's a blessing you may not remember those nights very well.

Ever since you told me how the nurses wheedled and begged and made arrangements - they turned the world a few times so a 25-year-old woman, forcibly sectioned, could have her baby beside her while she healed - I think about you like that. I think about you and wonder what you thought about, because I can't imagine this is what you imagined for us. Did you think your baby would grow up to be something special, or were you worried we would be the same? Did you fear I would become like him? You've never told me anything about your relationship with dad, never blamed him for anything, but at 28 I can read between the lines of how he treats his girlfriends, his mother... me. I can see through the gaps. I know, or think I know, what your life was like. I can take a sharp stab at what drove you deeper into the pit, and it wasn't self-indulgence. We'll leave it there. That's all I can say.

It must be a terrible pain to want a child and never have one, I know. But I can't help but think it must be worse to have had a child then be denied the right to a healthy relationship with them when the fault is not yours. We love each other through a pane of glass and I know you can see the ways in which I have failed to grow because of it. It's not your fault.

*

Dear Mum,

It's 6 pm and I am still working. I haven't seen you in four days because we don't talk much. So here I am, ice woman - both cold and fragile, working at 6 pm, at 8 pm, at 1 am because I'm planning to get you a new pair of Doc Martens, Cherry Red, like you used to have when you were in your teens. Because it's the only way I can bridge the gap between what should have been and what is.

I want to think of you like that - 18 and happy, with a heavy backpack on your shoulders, at a train station in Ypres, or Brussels, or on the trail to Skye. I want to think of you with a full head of hair, like mine, and all your teeth. With bright eyes and a happy laugh. I want to think of you the way you were before we met and I can't - that's what enforces the silence. I do not know you. I do not know the happy youth in your pictures, or the nervous storm that hunches in the dark, trying to find peace through a haze of smoke. I knew the quiet, distant woman but she melted away, buried by names I can't spell or pronounce. Was it thirty pills a day? Or thirty-two? I can never remember, now. It was too long ago.

*

Dear Mum,

I know it wasn't easy for you to get to know me because I was always a quiet child - I stared, that's what the family say, I stared all the time. I rarely spoke, rarely cried. Rarely did anything but read. I was a little snowball, frosty and prone to melting if anyone tried to squeeze me. I grew into this ice woman, hard and brittle but still likely to melt in the heat. This is unfortunate because you are a fire. A bonfire. A big, crackling, bright flame that I like to see but can't stand to be near.

It's not your fault and it's not mine, but that's the way it is - I could be trite and blame dad, but I'm not sure it's his fault either. I am the apple that fell too far from the tree, and your kindness, your tenderness, never really touched me, and I wouldn't accept anyone elses.

But I remember one moment, one flash in my memory, where we were the same. Gran took us to Edinburgh Zoo, and though the day is mostly a haze I remember the polar bear. I remember how we hated to see it there, both of us, and how your upset and tears made me feel less small and silly about my own. There is a seed of you in me, and though it never grew too much I can feel it when I hear animals whimper on TV or when the thought of frightened children and scared mothers, caught in wars thousands of miles away, move me to tears without warning.

*

Dear Mum,

I'm frightened. I can't feel the things inside of me that I should be able to. On days like this I worry that I am actually like him. I wonder if he wouldn't love us the way we deserved because this is how he felt all the time.

I worry that I'll never thaw.

I worry that I'll never be able to give you what you need when you get older. Most of all I worry that I won't want to; he hasn't visited Gran in over two years. He doesn't care. He's incapable of it, and that is my worst nightmare.

*

Dear Mum,

When I see the ratty old tartan blanket you drape over your couch, I think about the past. I don't know how much, if any, of this you remember but when I was small you would come home from the hospital for Christmas. I remember the first year they let you do this - it was the year Uncle D gave me my first PlayStation. 1998 or 1999, perhaps.

You slept alot - you always slept when I was small. I know now that it was because of the tablets and the stress. I know that you slept on the couch because the bedrooms in this old house remind you of a time when you were sick but you didn't know it. The bad memories live in the walls. Sweet things made you happy, though, always. When you can't drink, can't party, can't stay awake for too long, chocolate is about the next best substitute.

I never told you that I tried to play tooth fairy, in a way. When you were sleeping I would tuck brightly coloured chocolates, wrapped in their plastic, into small places near you. Sometimes they fell into the recesses of the couch and you never found them, but I learned to tuck them next to your books or beside your medication folder. I always chose the ones you liked best - strawberry cremes and caramel chocolates. And you smiled when you found them, and immediately shelled them and popped them into your mouth.

Loving you has always been awkward for me, not because you're hard to love but because I find it hard to love openly, but I do love you. I really do. I like to make you smile - I just don't like to show my hand when I do it.

*

Dear Mum,

I have a box full of the cross-stitches, paintings, scrapbooks, and fucked up crochet animals you made me in all your art therapy endeavours. I'm not very good at being your daughter, but I like being your friend.

I love you.

S