For those unaware of my old matthewmatical blogspot blog, for the last eighteen months I’ve been undergoing psychoanalysis. This follows a severe mental breakdown in November 2011. I’ve had a complex mental health diagnosis for the last 16 years, mainly compromised of Anxiety Disorders, several breakdowns, depression and Obsessive Symptomatology (OCD). The good news is that I’ve managed to keep my sense of (perhaps, mordant) humour, and I’ve also realised after years of care under the psychiatric system, that those who serve it are madder than their clients and patients.
I was adopted just prior to my third birthday. My birth mother, who I never refer to as “Mother” or “Mum”, I already have one of those. A decent one. My birth mother remains, a highly abusive, manipulative woman who over the course of mine and my older sibling’s early childhoods, meted out what can only be described as Cruel and Unusual punishment. None of us escaped unscathed.
I was taken into care as an extremely malnourished, underweight toddler who had been effectively abandoned in the cot. I was so emotionally “backward”, the paediatrician that attended to me after being taken into care at first assumed I was brain damaged. I also had severe scarring from septic nappy rash. There were also issues of abuse. I’d had two older brothers, one of whom died of meningitis, the other, when I was taken into care, was fostered by relatives. He recounted this as unsettled and unhappy existence.
My three much older siblings (between six and nine years older), strangely, were not removed from my birth mother. However, months after my removal, my birth mother tired of my biological father, and moved onto a new man, to whom she quickly fell pregnant. Aware of this, and wanting to start a new life, not encumbered by her three remaining daughters, she drove them to a Children’s Home in Leicester, as it was snowing in winter, and dumped them outside the door. She then drove off to Yorkshire to begin anew, seemingly with a clean conscience.
I was very lucky, as I was the only child to be adopted. The three daughters had been so traumatised during their short lives that they held on to one another for what support they could find, and because of this they were never allocated either foster or adoptive parents. They spent their childhood’s in children’s homes. All of us were damaged by my birth mother’s remorseless selfishness, neglect, abuse and lack of conscience, but one sister never came to terms with what had happened to her. She also suffered with mental illness, but it spiralled out of control and she took her own life at thirty eight years old.
This is one the main reasons I am receiving psychoanalysis – to try and come to terms with the past.
Years 0-2 are critical to a child’s development, and mine was severely arrested by my birth mother’s behaviour. It is also the main driver behind my mental health issues.
My birth mother is also dying. She has bowel cancer which has metastasised to her lungs, lymph nodes and other areas of her body. I know this due to contact with one sister. I also know because until recently, it was all over her Facebook page, which is now not accessible.
My birth mother has been a shadow that has cast a darkness over much of my life, and much discussion has gone back and forth between my psychoanalyst and I over whether I will find release in her death. To some, this will sound harsh. It sound’s harsh to me as I type it. But I have tried in every which way to forgive my birth mother, and I have been unable to. The collateral, collective damage caused to six children is too much to forgive. I had an abortive correspondence with her, giving her a blank slate, without prompt to apologise, or even hint at remorse for her behaviour, and nothing from her side apart from “me”, “I”, “mine” came forth. Not for one nanosecond was there even a glimmer of a conscience. I showed the three emails to my psychoanalyst (who is also a psychiatrist) and he came to a loose conclusion that she was probably a Sociopath. If you have no conscience, you have nothing to say sorry for, which is a hard truth to hear. Sociopaths don’t own a thing such as a conscience.
Whilst this woman gave birth to me, she gave to each and every one of her offspring a terrible legacy. A legacy I will not accept as a life sentence. Whilst I do not wish any human in this world suffering, or to suffer pain or distress – I do not want my birth mother to suffer. However, she represents that Albatross around my brother’s neck, my sister’s necks, and my own too. In her passing there is hope of rebirth for us all. This is something my psychoanalyst acknowledged has occurred many times with those who are responsible for the neuroses that eventually mould the characters who are damaged and frozen in time, unable to move left or right, or essentially forward and onward.
I may well grieve for the birth mother I could not comprehend or understand, but I will not be grieving for a mother lost. I was the lucky one, which in itself has caused spirals of guilt, to be given the gift of a mother and a father who adopted a child they knew would be a challenge. And my mother, my mum, my Moomin, is very much alive, loved to bits and along with my father are the moon and stars to me.
Here is a track I wrote about my birth mother. It is harsh, but it is the truth. As a musician, my psychoanalyst suggested I do the equivalent of writing a letter I would never send. So I did it in song. It is called Life Support.
