by Naomi Jacobs
He turned from the screen, gave me a sweet smile and shrugged. ‘You know, weird funny.’
‘Oh, okay.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m at Sim’s now so I’ll come and get you when we’re ready to go,’ I told him.
‘Okay.’ He turned back to the screen and continued to play.
By the time I had walked the breadth of the gated complex, the fear I felt had pulled memories of betrayal from the dark recesses of my mind and pushed me over the edge into rage. I stormed into Simone’s living room. ‘Have you been drinking?’ I shouted at Eve.
‘Nay, calm down,’ Simone interjected.
‘Calm down? Calm fucking down? Are you kidding me, Simone? The one chance . . .’ I turned to Eve. ‘The one chance I give you and this is what you do? How dare you get drunk while looking after my child!’
‘Nay.’ Simone stepped closer to me.
Eve stood up. ‘So?’ she shouted back, slurring a bit. ‘You don’t understand. I didn’t even want to babysit, I wanted to come with you two.’
‘What? Why didn’t you say something?’ Simone asked her.
‘You didn’t ask,’ she said, tears welling in her eyes. ‘I don’t even want to be here. I fucking hate this place!’
‘So why the bloody hell are you here?’ I said. ‘Pack up your suitcase and go back to London.’
‘I can’t.’ She moved over to the window and started to cry. ‘They don’t want me there anymore. They said that I’m an alcoholic, that I needed to come here, but I don’t even want to be here.’
‘Oh, boo hoo for you.’ I saw red, taking what she had just said as a sign of ungratefulness for all that Simone had done for her. ‘I’m so sorry that you have to come and spend some actual real time with your family.’
I then went into a tirade, yelling that I’d been telling her for years that she had a drink problem, and that it was a sad state of affairs that it took her boss’s family telling her to make her act, rather than her listening to her own children. Simone tried to calm things down, but I went ballistic at her. I had finally reached my limit and everything I had ever wanted to say flew out of my mouth, backed by an awful rage.
‘You’re irresponsible,’ I screamed at her, ‘and selfish, and for years it’s always been about you, while me and Simone have been left to defend ourselves!’ I slapped my chest hard, accentuating every word.
‘Well, you don’t understand! The life I’ve had, the things I’ve been through, my mum . . .’ she cried.
‘Oh my God, get over yourself, woman. We’ve all had fucked-up things happen to us, and I can match you on dysfunctional mothers,’ I yelled, ‘but there comes a time when you have to take responsibility for your actions; you can’t keep bloody blaming everyone for the choices that YOU make.’
We went round in circles, for hours, me accusing her of playing the victim and how tired it was getting, her defending herself in true Amy Winehouse style, stating that she didn’t want to stop drinking or go to rehab (no, no, no) and Simone trying to calm the situation down.
Eventually Simone rubbed her forehead in exasperation. ‘Nay, Mum, there’s no point us going over the same stuff again and again. You’re both hurting, we are all hurting, but we need to find a way to move forward; we need to find a solution. Mum.’ She turned to Eve, who at this point was crying and smoking a cigarette by the window. ‘I understand you don’t want to be here, and yeah, it’s not ideal living with me, but I am trying to help you, and what’s the alternative? You go back to London and then what? They are not going to give you your job back. They love and care about you and want you to get better; at least think about getting better first and maybe you can go back to London then.’
Simone took a deep breath and turned to me. ‘Nay, I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be, and not just about tonight. I’ve seen how stuff Eve’s said and done has affected you, you’re valid in how you feel, but it’s late and we aren’t getting anywhere. Why don’t you get Leo and go home.’
She was right. Arguing with someone who was drunk didn’t make any sense and I couldn’t see a resolution; I just wanted Eve to leave. But I realized at that point that I was exhausted and remembered it was a school night. It was way past Leo’s bedtime.
I drove home, and after putting an already sleeping Leo to bed, I sat downstairs until the early hours of the morning, finally seeing the connection between my fractured relationship with my mother and my fractured sense of self. I tried to smoke but it just made me feel really sick. In the end I realized that what I was feeling was a deep sadness. I hadn’t felt good about any of the things I had said. In fact, I just felt sorry for all of us, and the whole painful situation. We had all been trapped in a powerful triangle for years and the roles that we had played had crept back up on us: Eve the victim, Simone the rescuer and me the villain. Over the years we had exchanged roles, but I knew one thing for sure: we had all been stuck in a situation that was no longer working for any of us and it had finally come to an explosive end.
As I was getting Leo ready for school the next morning, I received a text from Simone telling me that Eve had run away the night before and had gone on a drinking binge. I was angry. And underneath this anger was fear, and this fear battled with the underlying guilt I felt for saying what I had the previous night to my mum. After years of feeling bad about speaking my mind to her, and feeling that I was doing something wrong and that was why she drank, I so desperately wanted to feel different – different about her, different about myself. It was too painful. I wanted things to change for the better. Perhaps that explains what happened next.
28 February 2009
Dear Teen Nay,
I’ve just had a blazing row with Simone. I don’t even know half the things I said to her; I was just crying and shouting down the phone at her.
After the argument the other night, Eve ran away on a drinking binge.
Late yesterday she was found fallen down drunk on the ground by a couple. They went through the small phone book she had on her and phoned Simone. She tried to prepare me but I was still mortified when I saw her face. I swear she looked like she had gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. I half expected to find her ear bitten off, she was so unrecognizable. Her top lip was bloodied and cut and had swelled to twice its size, a deep purple and red colour ringed her left eye, and one side of her face was grazed red. It looked like the pavement had tried to take the top layer of her skin off. The couple had said she was very drunk and incoherent and they thought she had been beaten and left for dead.
You know what? There was a part of me that wanted to burst into tears and run to her side, hugging her and apologizing for what I had said the night before. But instead I stood and stared at her, searching for a hint of insincerity behind her swollen eyes while she cried and apologized. The ever-compassionate Simone tried to encourage me to hug her but I just looked at my mum incredulously and drank my tea. A disgust that she would do this to herself and a despair that my sister had brought her and her drama back into our lives coursed through me, and you know what? I felt no compassion for her. Empathy has evaded me. All I could think was, I want her to go home. I want her to leave and go back to her little bedsit in London and drown in her drink and misery and leave me, and my son, out of it. Simone said under no circumstances was she sending her back and she had every intention of helping Eve get sober and encouraging her to stay in Manchester.
This morning, I woke up thinking I just couldn’t take it anymore and I have just got off the phone to Sim and told her I would never forgive her for bringing Eve here.
I think somewhere deep down inside of me I know I have created this situation, created the argument, because I need a way out of feeling responsible for Eve and her alcoholism.
I just needed a way out.
Love,
Adult Naomi x
To try and make sense of all of this, I turned to the dissertation I had written when I was in the homeless hostel. It was about adult children of alcoholics and their
coping strategies or, in my case, their lack thereof.
According to a source quoted in my dissertation, ‘Adult children of alcoholics often have dysfunctional childhoods which provide them with few or no “normal life” experiences, so they guess at what correct behaviour is to stop others from discovering that they genuinely don’t know how they should act, react, talk or simply be. Their feelings about themselves are the opposite of the serene image they present – they generally feel insecure, inadequate, dull, unsuccessful, vulnerable, unlovable and anxious.’26
Apparently, because of my ‘maladaptive coping strategies’, I was destroying any adult ability I possessed to develop a healthy mature identity. The narrative went on to say that adult children of alcoholics were often self-protective people-pleasers, who sought approval from others while risking the loss of their own identities in the process. This also made sense to me. I was this adult child and I had lost my identity. I lacked the coping resources for dealing with life events, which, according to what I read, was me modelling the alcoholic parent’s strategies, which included avoidance and escape-related tactics. I couldn’t help but see the irony.
The following weeks I closed off, became more withdrawn. I also stopped speaking to Simone. After our argument, I didn’t want any contact with her or Eve. I was too angry, hurt and upset by everything that had happened.
I retreated into my cocoon and placed my mind in that warm, safe, imaginary world I had known as a child. I became Edna the Storyteller again (minus the frillies on my head) and I wrote stories where I created characters who did and said what I wanted them to and where I could invent all the happy endings I wished.
I was so conflicted and confused that at times I felt like I wanted to lose myself. My mind wanted to repeat the same pattern of splitting again, to take on the familiar role of the abused and abandoned child, and then split again into the adult who wanted a better life. Except this time something was different – I had Teen Nay and I could feel her willing me to stay where I was.
To my surprise, Dean, Katie, Marcy and Nat were supportive of me not seeing Simone or Eve, encouraging me to talk to them whenever I needed to.
I felt trapped in a pattern from childhood, which translated into me believing with such conviction that I didn’t matter. That no matter how I felt or no matter how much a person claimed to love me, in the end something would always happen (the violence or the abuse) that reinforced the premise of the story of my life.
I don’t matter.
So I swapped joints for Krispy Kremes and wrote about my past and my life with Eve and Simone. The more I wrote, the more I indulged a part of my psyche that emerged through the written words on the page – that of ten-year-old Naomi. Ten years of age was the second time in my life I was sexually abused and when I had my very first cigarette.
I felt as if my life was like a long Tennessee Williams play. A memory play, in which the character experiences an occurrence in the present that dredges up an overwhelming trauma from the past and causes time to form a kind of loop so this character cannot escape the present until they escape the past.
Then the film production company emailed me and asked me if I could work on the last of the four films I had signed up to help with.
Immersion was an abstract short film about the loss of languages across the world, exploring how each generation was speaking less and less in their mother tongue and losing the connection to their history and their ancestry. The main character was a French girl, Angelique, and the director, Roberta, was an artist by profession who was very focused on the cinematography. I loved her passion and her infectious need to realize her own vision. We shot the film in Liverpool, the city where I was born. And as I watched it being filmed, I realized Immersion was essentially about death.
In one scene Angelique had to stand with her eyes closed so that Roberta could create the illusion that the crowd walking past her was walking in fast motion while Angelique was completely still in real time. It was a cold March day, so I stood off-camera, on hand with coats and blankets to provide some warmth when filming stopped. During one break, as I approached the actress, I noticed something on her tights. It was a beautiful green and speckled blue butterfly, a strange sight for a cold winter’s day. The butterfly allowed me to take it from her leg and place it on her hand. Miraculously it didn’t fly away. We called Roberta over and she immediately captured it on film, the butterfly, sitting peacefully in the palm of the actress’s hand. It completed the scene and we could not see it as anything other than fate, because when she finished the shot, she tried to pick the butterfly from Angelique’s hand and it flew away.
A comforting peace descended on the crew on the drive back to Roberta’s apartment, where she provided lunch. I couldn’t stop thinking about the butterfly and I didn’t know why until later, when we were shooting a scene in Roberta’s small kitchen. We didn’t need a full crew, so there were only four of us there, waiting for Angelique to get ready. Billy, the boom operator, was setting up the microphone. Chris, the cameraman, was fixing the tripod and I was placing the necessary culinary items on the table. Roberta was looking through the camera, talking through her angles and shots. All of a sudden she shouted: ‘Oh my god, my mum!’ We all looked to where she was pointing the camera. It was a beautiful black-and-white picture of a white-haired, slim-faced, pretty woman, an almost angelic light captured in her eyes.
Roberta burst into tears and slumped to the floor. I knew instantly that her mother had died and although the picture of her had most probably been there all this time, looking through the lens of a camera meant that she had somehow seen it for the first time. Everyone froze. I stepped to her, crouched to the floor, and hugged her, telling her everything would be okay.
I felt her grief. I thought of all the people I had loved who had either disappeared from my life or died, and I knew that loss could hit you in the most unlikeliest of places at the most unlikeliest of times. It turned out Roberta had lost her mother only weeks before and as professional and composed as she was, the grief eventually spilled out.
And as I hugged her, I understood that we were all immersed in a time of loss and it became clear what the butterfly was telling us. Life is short, relationships end, you lose people; you go through a lot of pain and hard times. everything changes; it’s a given. You grow, only to experience everything fading: your memories, even your language, and the connection you have to the people you thought would be in your life forever. But you have to be like the butterfly on Angelique’s palm, fighting for your place, fighting for your purpose, standing strong against a harsh, cold wind. And in order to truly live your life, you have to experience the loss, the death itself, to realize your true self, who you really are.
I felt as she watched from the house of my mind that this experience had helped Teen Nay understand the future world that she thought was a tragedy She began to see that in order to embrace the new, the world had to experience the death of the old. Lose a language today, and create a new one tomorrow. Create a global language. Make it digital. For some it would be painful; for others it would be progress.
Was Immersion telling me I needed to do this to make way for the new? Was Eve’s appearance just another indicator that it was time to let go of the other parts of me that had got stuck in the past? If so, then maybe her turning up wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it was time. If I could handle seventeen years of memory loss, then maybe I could handle anything.
Maybe.
Roberta was a stranger to me, but for that split second, I experienced her vulnerability and loss, and wanted to comfort her. As I held her to me, it finally helped me to feel compassion for Eve and all the grief and loss she was experiencing. I knew then that if I truly wanted change, if I wanted to let go, I had to let myself experience my pain rather than trying to escape from it, even though it was going to hurt. Firstly, I had to stop it being all about Eve and stop waiting for the mother I never had. I had to accept that I was my own mother and I
could give birth to a new me and raise her to be the emotionally strong, healthy woman I wanted to be. Secondly, while I knew giving birth was painful, this time around, I had to do it without any drugs.
13
Au Revoir, Paris
It’s not how everyone
looks at you,
but how you look at yourself.
How are you looking at yourself?
With eyes in blindness or eyes of kindness?
I. J.
‘Transient Global Amnesia?’
‘Yes.’
‘Transient Global Amnesia?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘For how long?’
‘Well, eight weeks.’
My memories had fully returned, and given the level of change the amnesia had brought, I felt like I needed a few months for it to all sink in. But once it had, I knew I needed to go to my doctor and see if he could help me. He listened intently and then turned to the computer. My last visit had been noted: ‘Patient presented with memory loss, due to pressure from exams; reassured and sent home.’
He didn’t say a word, just rose from his chair, opened his door, and left the room. He returned a few moments later with a strained smile on his face.
I didn’t know where he had disappeared to; it could have been to the toilet. But I told myself it had something to do with that Doctor Davies’ complete disregard for me. You don’t just tell a patient who is sitting opposite you telling you they are fifteen again to go home and have a cup of tea. Not with my history!
Doctor Rahman was apologetic and assured me that he would do everything in his power to make sure this didn’t happen again. He wasn’t too alarmed because my memories had by now mostly returned. I told him that I was determined not to go through this again and needed to understand exactly what had happened to my brain. I asked him to refer me to a psychiatrist and he recommended we get in touch with the social worker who had helped me when I’d been homeless two years earlier. As a consequence, I left the surgery feeling more in control of a situation that had controlled me for far too long. As soon as I got home, I binned the prescription he had given me. I wanted to show Teen Nay that I could learn how to be my own antidepressant.