Haunting in reverse

Coming off antidepressants has been comparable to ‘coming off’ Mum, which I have been doing concurrently.

As I write this, I have been moved out for a month now. The weeks since have been a maternal withdrawal period. Coming off antidepressants has been comparable to ‘coming off’ Mum, which I have been doing concurrently. It is an ache in my heart, a sting in the nose. A haunting in reverse, an emptiness in the hands. I wish to share what it’s like to leave home as an only child to a single mum, with all of its inescapable, throat-gulping guilt.

My family was an equilateral triangle. It was never ‘the kids,’ with their cyclical milestones. Frilly dresses handed down to the next little body, teddies' lives extended by a few years, cuddled by different arms. It was us. There was one before me. He rests in a little gold lion box. A Leo baby, born in between Mum and I. We moved forward through life together. Dad’s gappy-toothed smile and adventurousness, mum’s blonde magnetism and emotional intelligence. Dad’s leaving welded mum and I together. Arm in arm through the terrain of teenagehood and single motherhood, we strode forward. We weren’t a family that tended to ‘activity’ on the weekend. Dad grew up in a nuclear family, healthy relationships to him were ones that did. The doing of things together has never been the way that I conceptualised familial love.

I was with her when the front door slammed shut, severing him from us forever.

I squeezed her, trembling and riding the aftershocks. My dark room rattled, the makeup that filled the dresser top, the clothes on the floor, the photos which covered a whole wall. I peered through the crack of light and at the door. Intact. In my memory, it had been slammed so hard the frosted glass shattered. The wooden frame burst spontaneously into flames, leaving nothing but a pile of ash and shards in its wake — unchanged but forever singed into my memory.

I went to school the next day.

After a while, she dipped her toes in the waters of dating. The guy who kept mum around for free childcare. The Star Wars head with exclusively thonged feet who made spaghetti that left a ring of orange oil around your lips. Lockdown not yet announced, the decision to blend families made over salad bowls with the magician and his irish daughter. At first it was card games, and trying to get the fireplace to stop coughing black smoke into the living room. Patisserie croissants and rating Gladys Berjiklians’ OOTDs in the morning COVID updates. Then it was green smoke floating from under the door of the bedroom that I gave up in the morning. Finding a bag of not-cocaine on the tiles by the toilet. Being informed that I didn’t see what I saw. Mum searching for the cause of her missing money, everywhere except the guy right beside her, sleeping in jeans. We moved away from the house with the frosted glass door after that. We lent them my grandmother's quilts, never returned.

We lived in a two-bedder, close to the old place. For a few months, I tried to suppress the urge for flight that one gets at 19. Soon, my best friend offered me a room in the little but light-drenched Art Deco apartment that I helped her move into a few months prior. I shuffled into mum's doorway, and began the conversation. Her eyes widened. The alarm finally ringing, this day would always come. Her face relaxed, brave. We had a chain connected to each of our pinky fingers. It managed to stretch just far enough to Manly. It tarnished and rusted in the salty air during those eleven months spent away. Eventually, I came home, lightly bruised. She pulled me back to safety and de-rusted our chain. I collapsed for a couple of months. It was only as my body had fallen through the air and onto the soft landing she’d laid out, that I realised how very tired I was.

They say that the meds are working when you start to feel like you can stop taking them. Sometimes, you have to stop taking them to see if you still need them. It is advised by healthcare professionals to meet with your doctor and work out a dosage reduction schedule. I didn’t do this. Just bit the pills into smaller and smaller pieces each week, spitting out the powdery bitterness that coated my front teeth. For lowering my reliance on mum, there is not yet a medically-recognised dosage reduction schedule. Mum discontinuation syndrome can cause intermittent electrical zaps that make your brain and the world around it pulsate.

The regression is simple. Resting my head back on her chest, becoming a part of its rise and fall. The progression is complicated. Climbing out of that safe, warm burrow and up the stairs into a room of my own. I need a tight swaddle, a warm bottle of whole milk and a twinkly mobile to lull me into slumber. In the room of my own, I try to read. Try to write in my journal. Except I cannot concentrate like Joan Didion’s extrapolations need, or see like John Berger wants me to. Journaling means thinking about mum. So I just lay there. The sheets feel loose from the mattress. It's a little crumby. Should I adjust the pillow? The right side feels good for a bit, then the left. A couple more times around and the fitted sheet is well and truly off one corner. I finally get comfortable, ignoring a panging bladder. That never works out well. But no one is coming to hum to me and rock me if I wail into the dark. God. Straining to the lamp switch placed inconveniently underneath the bedside table. Trod down the stairs, plonking onto the toilet seat in the dark. I need some blue light..

Before leaving I felt consumed by my mothers emotions. I mistook my own hypervigilance with having outgrown living at home. I don't think that was it. Her energy follows me, like dandelion seeds in my hair. I stand in the kitchen, mopping furiously towards the dark living room. In the corner are the flowers that mum brought me the day after my birthday party. A week ago now. Dusty roses, dropping snappy dragon heads, winded baby's breath. I was hungover and grumpy with her. I plonked them haphazardly into a plastic water jug. Bought to hold vodka diluted with home brand orange juice. That afternoon at about twelve-thirty, she walked through the door of the back patio to a tableau somewhere within the realm of wholesome. We sat at the old wooden table with a spread of pancakes, strawberries and potato rostis. She sat on the corner next to me, dragging up a camp chair strewn to the side.

“This is not how my sharehouses looked the day after a party, that’s for sure.”

When she came to see me that Sunday afternoon, I saw her afresh. Perhaps enhanced by my not-so-fresh state at that moment, she was so lovely. My lovely mum. My only mum, who is only my mum and no one else's. Just us two. When she came to see me, the back of my mind was preoccupied with imagining when it would be time to leave. For her to leave and for me to stay here. Her grey car gliding away from me, down the lane. Turning the corner of the alleyway, vanishing.

Raising me was like raising the daughter that she wasn’t allowed to be. Her parameters of motherhood were based on what not to do. When I was in Manly, she kept the apartment with the two bedrooms because she hadn’t had the choice of coming back when she needed it. Closed my bedroom door until I came back to open it. We both know that I am ready this time. If everything falls to pieces, she reminds me, “Just chuck your stuff in storage and come crash with me.”

There is no point in falsifying closure. Leaving is a part of life. But when you have seen and felt what it feels like to be left behind, it is devastating. Also exciting. What will fill the child-shaped hole? That is something only for her to work out, for the first time in twenty-two years.

Call her every day if you need to, she probably needs it too.