Lost In Care:02: My Father's Lost Love.

Lost in Care is a blog series charting the early life of a young man who spent his first 15 years in Institutionalised Care in London, England, and often contentious relationship with the outside world.

Over the years I’ve talked with my father, James, about my mother Neslynne. My father’s stories tend to cover the same subject: his romancing of my mother, his great love for her, the intense shock and lingering trauma he experienced when she unexpectedly passed away, his inability to look after his large grouping of children as a single father, and his continued love for my mother. My mother’s surviving brothers, Brother B. and Uncle Kenrick, have told me that my father was a good husband and that my mother was very happy with him when she was alive. My uncles were close to my mother and take great succour from her happiness while she was alive; and I do too.

My father was at work when he received a call from a hospital. My mother had unexpectedly fallen ill after complaining of an intensely painful headache. James’s boss drove him to the hospital. Neslynne was already in a coma. Neslynne did not emerge from this coma and died within a couple of days. My mother was young, my father too. He was left alone with four children, Calvin 4, Gloria 3, Samuel 2, and a recently new-born baby son, Earl.

 James tried to care for his children but, unable to find suitable help from friends and relatives, eventually handed his boys over to the local authority who placed them in age appropriate Care facilities. Gloria stayed with James, because a close friend of the family was able to offer support for Gloria. James’ intention was to place his sons in care for a short period until he was in position to take them back. James remarried and had children. My brothers and I remained wards of court until we were eighteen.

 I don’t feel any bitterness towards my father for my time in care and never did. I was more or less born in care and it was all I knew. As I grew older, I met many children who had come from broken families and their deep shame at being in care was intense and immutable. I would sit with these kids as they cried their eyes out while talking about their parents and their former homes. They would earnestly beg me to never ever tell anyone we lived in a home and threaten to kick my head in if I broke my promise. Often when I met these kids outside on the street our eyes might meet and they would silently beg me not to acknowledge them and give the game away. I never understood their shame or what they were missing. I’d had no experience of growing up with a mum or dad or being in any community outside the Children’s home and thus could not conceive of any different life to the life I knew and lived.

 For much of my life I cannot actively remember missing my Mum and, if I did, I parked the pain away as an unfixable emotional inconvenience. I even came to believe the pain was a false construction, nothing but learned behaviour I’d picked up from the television while watching dramas or comedies featuring England’s most beloved nuclear families. As I grew older and began to piece my life together my mother’s absence grew more stark and obvious. When I hit thirteen the pain of missing her became undeniable, bucolic and bitter. Knitting together the pieces of my mother’s life has become a fitful if uneven process. All my life I’ve suffered from powerful migraines. I used to (understandably) fear and hate them. As a youngster I found the only cure was to lie down on my back in complete darkness with a cold flannel over my eyes and temples and wait the migraine out. I was eight years old when I was told how my mother died from a brain tumour. When my next migraine came on, after learning of my mother’s brain tumour, I lay within the darkness with a lot more serenity. The pain of the migraine felt like an honest, viable connection and provided me with a means (albeit crude, painful and ridiculously fanciful) of beginning the long process of drawing authentic, recognisable markers on the great blank canvas that served as my mother’s persona.

My mother remains the greatest mystery of my life. Sometimes I’m okay with this, sometimes I’m not. I suppose everyone’s mother should have an element of mystery to them. My Uncles still miss my mother, and I’m always touched by the respect and love they still hold for her. When we occasionally miss her together, the emotion is muted and shared, and no more than what it should be. She’s gone. And she’s resting. And we’re all glad that when she passed away she was in love with her husband and knew he loved her greatly. This feels good. Appropriate. And enough.