It's All My Fault

Decisions, single-parenting and feeling trapped by the sea

It is the last day of our sojourn in Cornwall. We were meant to be up early so my son could do a day of adventure activities - his choice. I have been up, quietly padding around, relishing the thought of a day to myself. A few hours deep rest and then time to pack.

“Do I have to go surfing and everything today?”my son asks from the bunk where he is still holed up warm and snug in the duvet.

“Don’t you want to go?”

I am immediately on edge.

He is too tired and it is all my fault because I let him stay up late to watch Pirates of The Caribbean. I feel sick and angry and I am tetchy with him. I am not going to force him to go but the safety and peace of my day ahead has been pulled out from under me. I don’t blame him really. He is tired, the weather is grey and miserable again. But I know he would have fun. He demands the Switch that I wasn’t meant to bring on holiday with us and I give it to him with a warning that we “are not spending the whole day on screens”. I feel sick and fuzzy-headed. I can’t deal with conflict at any time and especially not now so early in the morning. I don’t have the energy to be firm.

The panic rising in me is palpable. I can’t think straight and I am subsumed by Mum guilt. We are both going to have a rubbish day and he will never want to surf again because he will have bad memories about today and how I made him feel. I am reminded of the discomfort of my own childhood when I was reprimanded or shut out for somehow making the “wrong” decision or choice. My heart is beating rapidly and I have to close my eyes to breathe, my thoughts are catastrophic.

This is a visceral example of how a dysregulated nervous system works, my body and mind showing me they are struggling, they don’t feel safe. But the lack of safety is from times gone by, not this exact moment in time. This is not a ‘normal’ process. What would ‘normal’ people do I ask myself? Probably get him up and send him on his way. It is my fault that I can’t. All of it is my fault. The fact that I am ill and unwell is my fault because of the way I think. Because of the way that I view the world. The fact I have no energy to set a boundary is my fault. Yesterday when my parents left I apologised to them that the weather had been so terrible.

Even that was my fault.

I thought that I had managed to rid myself of this insiduous belief in one of the many healing ceremonies I have undertaken over the years. Certainly that particular refrain had distanced itself for some time, back now with a vengeance. Taking hold when I am tired and vulnerable. The next layer of the onion coming up to be peeled.

The problem with being a single parent is that you have to do it all by yourself.

The wins are fully accredited to you but so are the losses and there is no one else there to soothe the thoughts when they come, to find solutions, set boundaries and a positive spin. This microscopic moment of a day just begun unleashes a tidal wave of grief. The grief of being a single parent, of being unwell and not having the energy to do more with my son. The grief that he is an only child, forever without siblings to play with and argue with. The grief that I can only choose ‘budget’ holidays and even they have to be paid for by my parents because I am not working. Grief that I don’t know when or what or how I will work again.

I chose this holiday because a couple of weeks ago at the beginning of the summer I was child free and on a mini adventure in Cornwall (you can read about it here ).  The sun shone brightly, the sea was warm and skies blue. My time was completely and utterly my own. I was so buoyed and excited by this experience that I decided to book another adventure but this time with my son and for a week.

We need time together I thought, time alone to chill, we can hang out by the beach, travel around and visit new places, leave the Switch at home. My fantasy mind was captivated by a Romany Vardo in someone's garden on the North Coast. A tiny little red and green painted wagon with tight steps and stable doors next to a day room with fridge, microwave and a sofa. It would be perfect.

What I had failed to take into this equation, what I have been determinedly pushing into the dark recesses of my mind is that I have not been very well and being with my son is a very different story to being on my own. Being unwell has changed the way I think about holidays but I am still learning. I wanted to go to France but feared that would be too distant in case anything happened. Too far from help. Too tiring driving on the other side of the road, airports, navigating travel on my own.

Just too much.

So I plumped for the romanticised Gypsy Vardo and its accompanying day room instead. The day room is small and square. It has a double fronted glass door at the front overlooking the expansive garden and two small side windows. Everything is painted in a light turquoisey green, it is insipid against the grey sky. The cabin is too small. It makes me feel trapped, like I can’t breathe.

The cabin is full of fabrics, patchwork curtains and pillows, faded floral throws on the sunken sofa, lace edged cloths on the table and covering the fridge, a misfitting brown rug on the floor. Every inch of space is filled with stuff: a red microwave, kettle, coffee maker, washing up bowl, a tray full of tea bags, coffee, sugar, pots and jars, books, games and nik naks.

I cram our stuff on top of it.

Try to make space.

Everything is a little grimy. There is no way the floor can be properly swept or hoovered with all this stuff. It is impossible to eat at the table which is covered in piles of pink and blue and gold Spode china. Cups and plates and mugs and glasses of every size you can imagine. The walls are covered in Cornish Art, pictures of cats and couples and a woman in a bed, the sea outside her window. Another blue beds floating in an urban seascape against a night sky. They are slightly surreal, the faces large and angular. The owner of the cabin is the same as her space. Covered from head to toe in large accessories, pastel pink sticky lipstick, bleached blonde bob, thick mascara, one thousand layers. My son spills sticky orange Fanta across a gold brocaded cushion cover and I feel bad, like I am going to be told off. A disappointment, a bad guest.

The bedroom next door is a tiny red and green painted Gypsy Vardo wagon. There is a tiny TV in the corner, a ‘levitated’ bed as my son calls it covered with quilts and pillows. A tiny window opens out the back letting cool air wash over us through the night. Damp smelling cushions, an electric chimney fire. There is nowhere to go and stretch.

I thought I would find comfort in these small and cosy spaces but instead I feel crammed in and overwhelmed. I feel like I am having to make my body even tighter and smaller than it already is. Constricting what is already constricted. My body needs space and flow, gentle movement. It needs to be able to stretch and move about with ease.

I realise that these tight constricted spaces make me feel panicked and uncomfortable. This theme of being trapped coming up for me over and over again like a reminder, a nagging tug on my sleeve – here look at me, this is where the answer lives, look over here. Trapped in a white picket fence home as a child. The perfect family on the outside. Inside a story which confusingly to a young girl, did not fit with the veneer being portrayed to the outside world. And where could I go? Where could I stretch and run and make noise, be fully present in my own home? Nowhere.

In recent years I felt utterly trapped as a single parent with a child that did not sleep. A child that constantly needed my presence and closeness to be calm. The huge responsibility of keeping this precious and powerful being alive, content, and on my own. Trapped because I was too tired to do much beyond the vast confines of survival.  Keeping house, making food, doing the things that people with young children do. Trapped because my son would shout and scream if I mentioned going out, going on a walk, only bribery would do and then doing everything on his terms. Stopping to race cars and trains when I just wanted to walk, walk, walk.

Until I gave up.

My nervous system shredded by kicks and punches and screams of no, of lack of support and I stopped my body from moving, shrunk my life down even more. Trapped with the thoughts and feelings in my head because I was taught from a young age that these thoughts and feelings were too much, not to be seen or heard. No one wanted to listen. I hold my feelings in now for fear of scaring people away. For fear of being shouted at or abandoned or disbelieved and all this holding is making me  ill. 

My body, tight and trapped and toxic. And this tiny cabin a reminder of it all.

There is an antidote however, there is a reason that we are here. It is huge and wild and expansive. It is blue, white, grey, green, blue black in turns. It takes our breath away and causes us to grin from ear to ear in excitement.

In the sea I feel no pain. The cold water holds me whilst I am slapped and pulled by strong waves.

Push, pull, push, pull.

All our efforts, all our senses focused on plunging and keeping our feet by turns. Salt pulling the inflammation out of my bones, my mind a pinprick focus on this moment, this present. The roar of the waves, my son shouting next to me, his black shiny wetsuit slick with surf, hair tightly curled as he charges into the tide, throwing himself under. A seal with arms and legs bright eyed and exuberant, fierce and dopamine charged for all the right reasons.

He truly is my son.

Mama Selkie, I’ve always loved the water. The freedom, the depth, the holding, the vast, vast expanse of it all. A sea like this one, a wild Northern sea pulls me into my body, into the present. I am here and only here with my Selkie child. I don’t feel trapped, I am free.

A few days after we return home, my son asks if we can go back to the same place again next year. “Of course!” I reply smiling, “What bit did you enjoy the most?”

“The sea pool” he says and later I hear him happily regaling a friend about the day we swam in the sea pool when it was cold and raining, “the water was warmer than the other days!” he exclaims like this is some special kind of alchemy.

End note: I would like to give a special mention to Amber Horrox who’s ‘Healing Through Writing’ space helped get me through the week and where indeed some of these very words were penned and to her piece on grief, which brought me face to face with some of my own. Thank you.