Today I said goodbye
I wrote a card and bought a gift of my favourite book (Siddhartha by Herman Hesse)
And I wrote a letter that said something like this.
Twenty years ago, two deeply troubled little boys barricaded themselves in the hallway of our house and stockpiled shoes to hurl at me through a door cracked open for that purpose. A single mum navigating an ending with my children’s father that was worthy of the worst case scenario in a therapeutic textbook, I was at the end of my wits.
I called a number I had been given – a psychoanalytic therapist – and said ‘my children need help’. She said – come in and we will talk about it.
Of course, it was me that needed help . . .
I hung out in desperation for our sessions every week – for someone to talk to who was intelligent and compassionate and highly skilled, who over the years led me to find insight, compassion, understanding and deep self-awareness, and taught me so much by example.
The boys and I made our way through many difficulties – the younger was suspended from school for an entire term, aged 6. The other struggled to find his place. They were as different as – as – as their father and I were! There were many injuries, they couldn’t be left unsupervised for five minutes to play together – I cannot count the number of times we ended up in Emergency for stitches because of an accident between them.
Once, when they were ten and twelve years old, I deemed it safe to pop out alone for some milk, and came back to a broken glass door and the older one needing a dozen stitches in his forearm.
Thank god for my ever-present and long-suffering neighbour, who was there to clean up the mess even before I could get back from the shop.
If I had been a different kind of mother, and if I had known what I know now, perhaps I would have home-schooled. But I was struggling to make a living, and still hoping to find a sense of personal fulfilment at a time where being ‘just a mother’ was considered a cop-out (Hah.) With a degree in language and literature and the performing arts, and consequently experienced in many things – teaching, hospitality, arts admin, retail, reception, house renovation, airbnb, wheeling and dealing, renting out rooms . . . I turned my hand to anything I could, and kept acting and singing.
We were poor for years and years.
I regularly gave thanks for the single mother’s pension, and for legal aid. I knew all the loopholes to get free essentials. Once an acquaintance found out that I was struggling and put a cheque for $500 under my door. Other friends bought me groceries and gave me money – which I refused at first, but then accepted with relief. I have now, finally and happily, twenty years later, begun to pay those debts forward.
But I always found money somehow for the therapist saw me through it all – through supporting the self-harming 18 year-old who walked all night along the highway and was picked up by the cops. Then he was on 24/7 suicide watch and in and out of hospital . . .
Through the 16 year-old being taken to court by his own step-father, and the second divorce.
There are many more stories – but the point is that those two troubled little boys are now fully grown men who have lovely partners and jobs and higher education and aspirations. Who can manage their money and their house and cook – boy, can they cook – and last week they spent twenty-four hours giving me a birthday party to remember – they shopped and cooked and decorated and served drinks and were charming to everyone . . and I couldn’t be prouder.
So today I made a textbook best-case scenario ‘thank you and goodbye’ to that therapist, who taught me so much over the years, and who eventually helped me to find a place of improved Self-Worth which has been the turning point in my life.