Past pain: present paralysis

Today

I was planning to resume the story of Bink’s life in 2010 today... but instead have decided to tell you why I am late with my post.

After all, what is the point of a blog if it’s not… well, a present log?

So: where does mental illness come from?

Genes. And circumstance.

Bink was dealt some pretty s*** genes. A mental miasma lards through my family history. We didn’t really notice it until we were living with it, but now it’s as clear as day. So some of these angry little gene-thingies must be bouncing around in my head too, somewhere.

(Actually, I know nothing about genetics whatsoever so perhaps it’s like female ginger cats or the wrong green eyes or whatever it is which can leapfrog generations and jack-in-the-box out whenever you least expect. Be that as it may...)

Bink also beats herself up – or beats us, usually me, up; probably a lot less damaging but absolutely no more helpful – about incidents in the past which from time to time some therapist or other convinces her have contributed to her illness. Her current torment derives from the fact that, in order to get off the SSRIs, she took tiny traces of cannabis (5 grams in total over eighteen months) which she is sure is responsible for the loss of the last six and a half years of her life: years which should have been glorious.

In vain does one point out to her that she came off the stuff as soon as she realised what it was doing to her, which is a lot more responsible than most people manage. Or that being abused on a daily basis is possibly even more damaging than cannabis. Or that there is no point whatsoever in dwelling on the past.

She is in agony about it, and it’s hard to see how to move her on.

Therapists and their ilk often say, she must have had some trauma in her childhood. And then go on to say don’t feel guilty because she must have been predisposed anyway. Neither of which are in the slightest helpful either.

So, coming back to why my post is late this morning…

Generally speaking, I enjoy pretty robust health. Physical and mental, both. But I have experienced enough depression – what I would call “circumstantial depression” (give me a winning Lotto ticket or a well-daughter or my dear first agent alive and well and back in my life, and I’ll be fine) – to have a tiny bit of understanding into what Bink goes through.

In her case many hundreds of times more debilitating and devastating and just plain awful.

Oh dear… now I’m beginning to feel pathetic, faced with confessing the utterly trivial reason why today’s post is late...

Yesterday, as reader Diana discovered when kindly solving my Very-Teensy-Weensy-Bit-1st-Wld-Prob Pavlova Dilemma, Shaun was licensed to a new parish.

A new beginning!

A lovely fresh departure for the Atkins clan! We have a church again!

In that very tentative, understated and not-wanting-to-put-the-slightest-pressure-on way of his, he happened to ask a few days ago if I’d like to be there for the bish to do his biz. Which is the nearest Shaun ever gets to saying it would mean a huge amount to him if I were.

I did all the right things. I thought, anyway.

It wasn’t unexpected or sudden. I changed into a swooping spring skirt I like. I bicycled there towards the lovely sunset and along the river Ouse, so I wouldn’t be cooped up in a car and polluting the atmosphere. 

(True, googlemaps hasn’t the slightest idea how long it takes to bike six miles, and my lovely long skirt isn’t ideal for that particular bike – the romantic nearly-floor-length coat Shaun gave me, even less so –my folding bike is rubbish anyway, and worst of all my iPhone battery is clapped out so my satnav ran out before the journey did – and as always I got lost even with said satnav half a doz times – so I was just a tad late and missed half the service... but it was a lovely journey.)

As soon as I was in the pew and the bishop welcomed me half way through his sermon and we started singing one of the songs I’d chosen myself (and the band even got the very tricky rhythm right) and I could completely see what Shaun meant about what a lovely church and congregation it is... I just wanted to cry and cry and cry and disappear and when I prayed all I could say, over and over, was that I was sorry, and I just can’t do this church thing any more and I’m really sorry, sorry, sorry. God. Sorry.

And the first moment of relief I experienced was after the service was over during tea and cake when I felt a reasonable period of time had elapsed and I could escape to the loo and be alone... And breathe. Calmly. Deeply. Alone.

I also see what Serena means. It’s not the memories of the awful church we went to in Oxford, which treated us so badly, that hurts.

It’s going to a lovely church. And remembering the church we loved so much in Parson’s Green.

And lost.

It’s realising how much I would enjoy starting up a choir in this dear village church (no idea whether they actually want one: but most churches don’t say no to a choir if you offer to do all the work) … and haven’t the heart any more.

I don’t often feel like this. Not now. Not since we left Oxfordshire.

But it helps me understand.

Waking up throughout the night: four; six-ten; turning on the Today Programme; realising I’ve overslept and it’s nearly eight-thirty; asking Shaun please, please can I have a cup of tea but not being able to answer when he says is that conventional tea or Lenten tea; not wanting to write my blog then or now or ever again; having a dragging headache that isn’t exactly pain but certainly isn’t any energy at all... unable to do anything... helps me understand.

It helps me understand why Bink didn’t manage the one very simple goal she and I agreed for her yesterday.

And just spent the day in bed.

With a migraine.

Clean socks or a Bible?

January 2006

That meeting, between the vicar and me in Oxford, spelt the end of the peace and tranquility I’d experienced at our friend Louis’s beautiful house in Scotland. From then on I was overwhelmed by a raging, roaring vortex of drowning depression.

(Warning: never interfere with quick-fix simplistic panacea for complex ongoing issue. Particularly pertinent on subject of mental health.)

I longed to stay in Cambridge, the city of my so-happy childhood and teen years. Near my children (Serena and Alex were at the university) after their recent experiences. And my parents, now nearly ninety and increasingly frail. But our only chance would be for Shaun to find another post with accommodation…

Meanwhile we needed somewhere, anywhere, to live. The Oxford church was still determined to buy, not rent for us. Over the New Year, Shaun had taken us to view a new-build some miles out of the city.

Almost immediately I’d had to run out of the house again and sit in the car. There was a room right in the middle of it with no windows at all. Even if I never entered it, simply knowing it was there – like Bink’s illness, a black hole at the centre of our family – would suck all the light from our lives. 

I said nothing to the others. How could I? But as we drove away, Shaun pointed out a sweet little thatched cottage, right on the pavement, also within the budget but not yet available to view.

“Stop the car!”

“Please,” I asked the woman at the door. “Will you let us see round?”

“Not now. It’s a terrible mess.”

“Please.”

It was a terrible mess. Cat food on the carpet; dirty laundry sprawling off the sofa; teenagers in bed; filthy plates everywhere. About a quarter the size we needed.

“This one,” I told Shaun. It was far, far too small. And miles from his parish. But oh-so pretty. Next to the gracious Manor House and just up the lane from the little church.

I don’t consider myself particularly fragile in other ways, so I wonder how unusual this is: my mental health being so dependent on place and environment? (I’d be interested to know if any readers are the same.) When I first bicycled past our Parson’s Green Vicarage, long before Shaun was vicar there, I’d experienced a falling in love, just as with a person…

The meeting was some time after this. And a disaster.

The friend who’d so fiercely promised justice for us suddenly shifted ground without warning, and simply asked the vicar and me to tell each other what we’d done wrong and say we forgave each other. I had no difficulty with the forgiveness: I didn’t wish him harm, nor any evil on his head.

I just wanted us to escape. Since we now knew the church wouldn’t house us in any way that would enable Shaun to do the job properly.

And meanwhile, urgently, somewhere for my children to live. 

I didn’t care about his forgiveness one way or the other, not knowing any way I’d wronged him. It was our children we’d sinned against, by being so recklessly trusting, and leaving their previous home.

He asked if the cottage we’d suggested was right for us. It had come back with the kind of survey you’d expect of a thatched seventeenth-century cottage, and was no use to the church for anything else.

What could I say? I’d made all my much more sensible suggestions a year earlier, when I’d found two large Oxford vicarages, one already empty and with a peppercorn rent. I knew buying the cottage would spell the end of Shaun’s employment with the church: gorgeous though it was, it was miles out the parish, and tiny. But the last time we’d said a house wasn’t appropriate we’d been put out on the streets.

So I said nothing.

And that was the end of the meeting. All I heard afterwards was that they were all shocked at how wrecked I looked. The most useless insult I’ve had in my life was the vicar (who had apparently expected to breeze in, all charm and bonhomie, and give me a kiss) advising Shaun that I didn’t seem at all well and should see a doctor.

I went back to my parents’ in Cambridge. Rose and Bink and I. And the dogs, to live in the car.

Sometime later my clergyman friend, who had called the meeting, sent me a Biblical verse to be helpful.

“Can’t look it up,” I replied. “Lost my Bible many moves ago.”

He told me to do myself a kindness and get another.

Well, yes… Up to a point, Lord C.

But believe me, when you’ve lost all your socks apart from the ones on your feet, which you wash in your bath every night so you can leave them to dry for the morning, it’s not a Bible you need.

One lasting blessing to come out of that Christmas was our friendship with the doctors from Malawi who’d lent us their new home. She, too, had suffered years of debilitating depression and spotted it immediately. I barely knew her, but every day she sent me a text, from her home in Oxford, asking how I was, in Cambridge.

Her kindnesses became unbelievably precious.

As, however, did my sleep. When you’re depressed, it’s one of the first things to go. You might, if you’re lucky, fall asleep at the beginning of the night. Then wake at one. Or two. Or three. Or all of them... if you’re fortunate enough to sleep in between. Or you might be awake for hours... and, again if you’re blessed, fall asleep around breakfast time.

The telephone I had at the time would bleep when it got a text. And go on bleeping. Every few minutes. Until it was attended to. Something which is quite challenging – depressed or not – is sleeping through chronic, persistent, continual bleeping.

“How are you?” came another solicitous message.

“Well, I was a little better... Until a text message woke me up.”

On one of Shaun’s weekly visits we walked past David’s Bookshop (secondhand). I nipped in and asked for the cheapest Authorised Version he had.

Sadly, he didn’t sell socks.

Losing it

New Year 2006.

After Christmas, the three homes we’d borrowed had all run out of time, the people who’d so kindly lent them needing them back.

One of the many blessings God gave me was wonderful parents. Their house wasn’t big, but we were more than welcome. Bink and Rose and I, none of us having anywhere else. And, of course, our two dogs.

At Rosie’s baptism two years earlier, Serena’s Great Dane had knocked my mother over, galloping into the garden after Serena finished bathing him for the occasion. He didn’t even know. He put my mother in a wheelchair for six weeks. We obviously couldn’t risk this again. So poor Hamlet had to live in the boot of our car.

For three long months.

It was too low for him to stand. I would watch him, from my bedroom window, trying to turn around to get more comfortable, at a crouch. It was pitiful. And yes, of course I explored alternatives. I’d done so a year earlier, when he wasn’t wanted in our rented accommodation, and the church suggested getting rid of him. Several Great Dane charities told me you can’t lend your Dane to a foster home: it wouldn’t be fair on him. You have to give him away permanently.

I couldn’t do that to Serena. Not her dog as well as her home.

Besides, I couldn’t have parted with him either. We don’t “get rid of” members of our family. (If we did, wouldn’t we have “got rid of” Bink? I’ve known families do this with the mentally ill, to protect the others… I can’t find the smallest iota of myself that could.)

Small wonder the experience changed him too. He’d always been extremely well-trained and obedient, though of course far stronger than me. Afterwards, I was never entirely sure he wouldn’t take his frustration out on another dog. Animals, too, suffer mental trauma. Once, after our homeless period, he dragged me on my belly through the woods for ten or twenty feet. The other dog-walker shouted that he knew where we lived and was coming after us with his shotgun.

The police did nothing. And I never took Hamlet for a walk again.

Members of our previous church at Parson’s Green had bought a large house near Wycombe, and most generously took Shaun in. He appreciated it greatly – if not the commute forty minutes to the flock he was called to live among. And being apart from his family again.

Once a week, on his day off, he drove to Cambridge to spend the night with us.

Three years earlier, when I’d told him I was pregnant with Rosie, his first thought had been of the broken nights. When the gods hate us they give us our desires… and God’s love can show most when He overrules our fears.

What kept Shaun going through that dreadful time was knowing he would see Rose’s sweet smile of pure joy at the end of each week.

The friend, mentioned earlier, who’d promised to get justice for us, wanted me to attend a meeting with Shaun’s boss, the vicar who had made us homeless.

Shaun said I needn’t. I wasn’t well enough.

No good has ever come of my going against Shaun’s word. But I considered this cowardice. The friend had known me since I was a teenager, and had been praying for my family for twenty years. Surely I owed it to him? (Er, no... God tells us to submit to those we’re married to. Not random friends who pray for us.)

My friend repeatedly told me there was nothing to worry about. What did he know, I wondered?

“I might forgive a rapist,” I tried to explain. “But that wouldn’t make it wise to meet up with him.”

Six months earlier he’d rebuked me for being tearful at having no home. Now, for using over-dramatic and emotive language.

(And he was a clergyman...)

It was easy to say no, living eighty miles away in Cambridge. But that January I was due to speak at a women’s breakfast near Oxford. It was hard not to agree to a meeting straight afterwards.

The night before, for a treat – not something clergy can often afford – Shaun took me out for a meal.

Poor Shaun! I wept, and wept, and wept. I could barely speak. Except “Sorry”, repeatedly. The Indian waiters were attentive and kind, and showed no embarrassment. Eventually they packed my untouched meal in boxes to take away. That night, although with Shaun – another too-rare treat – I barely slept.

I have no idea how I got through that talk... about the love of God.

Except that my style tends to openness. I probably told them what we were going through.

At the hands of God’s people.

Guilt

2003... and 2006

I’ve just remembered another go I gave to counselling, for the struggles I’d had since my entire family imploded into Bink’s illness.

Talk about hope over experience...

I’ve indicated already that the kind of “mental illness” I’ve experienced, on and off for the worst part of twenty years, is so different from what Bink suffers that the two are barely on the same spectrum.

Mine was a disease of malnourishment, starving from without. Bink’s, one of cancer, devouring from within. Both make you feel pretty lousy. But their diagnoses and treatments, properly miles apart.

Nevertheless this is a blog about being nuts. And for a long time, thanks to our circumstances, I qualified.

Our Parson’s Green GP’s surgery would fund up to six counselling sessions. Given what I’d discovered when researching psychotherapy a few years earlier – after our devastating experience of marriage counselling, when I learnt what scant hard proof there is of its effectiveness – I found this curious. Doctors are scientists, used to assessing evidence. After all our surgery wouldn’t pay for the osteopathy, or indeed hypnotherapy, I was advised to procure for myself.

In the interests of fairness I should say Shaun found his six sessions very helpful, being able to offload what we were going through onto someone who had nothing to do with our parish.

Mine were dismal.

Many years earlier I’d been pronounced 100% resistant to hypnosis. (This was because I didn’t like the hypnotist: he told me a fork was hot when it was very obviously not. Now, if he’d asked me to imagine it was hot I would have done, probably better than most.) I seem to be equally impervious to counselling. I find reiterating sorrows usually makes them worse.

The first session, naturally, was spent filling my counsellor in on Bink’s illness.

“Do you feel guilty?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you feel very guilty?”

I was shocked. “Do you think I should feel guilty?”

“Your daughter has a severe mental illness. As her mother, you might be expected to feel this is your fault in some way.”

Know what? Until you put the idea in my head, it had never occurred to me.

I expect I will now, though…

New Year 2006

So by the time we became homeless in the summer of 2005, the Black Dog and I had become old sparring partners.

What was curious was that all the time I was living in Louis’s beautiful house on the Findhorn Estuary, I seemed mercifully free of symptoms. Looking back, I strongly suspect I should have been diagnosed as depressed: I was barely functioning, except to get my children through each day.

But I felt almost nothing.

That was the mercy of it. No joy, true. But no wild despair either. No helpless hours of sobbing.

Just a numbness, in the beauty of my surroundings.

All that was to change, at the beginning of 2006.

What tipped me over the cliff was do-good-interfering.

From the moment Shaun’s employing church put my children out onto the streets for us to fend for ourselves, various members of the congregation had been exhorting me to forgive.

Reader, I know as well as the next sinner what Jesus taught on the subject. Why would there be any place for me in God’s wide and bountiful mercy, given all my transgressions, if I can’t find a place in my heart for those who have done far less to me?

I have no issue with this. I can’t afford to.

What I did have considerable issue with, was a cheap and simplistic form of Christianity: painted by numbers just for the look of the thing. 

You forgive me. I forgive you. Hunky-dory.

No repentance. No justice. No addressing of the wrongs.

Far less putting any of them right.