Loopy, Lonely and Lost

I’ve been sitting at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping. Like a flashback to being a child, listening in secret because to my face I only get half-truths.

My mum’s been crying. Sobbing her heart out. She’s depressed, she says – again.

It’s snowed. Our street is quite icy. I have to get to work tomorrow – one or other of my parents usually takes me, and my dad’s working tomorrow. I know it might be difficult getting out of our street, so I said if it’s still bad in the morning, I’ll get the bus.

She’s weeping and shouting because, she says, she’s worried about me. Worried that I’ll have to get up half an hour earlier, worried in case the bus has an accident, worried I might miss the bus home and have to spend £4 on a taxi. She’s crying and angry because she’s under so much stress because of me. She says she’s depressed because she’s so worried about me.

Do you see? Do you understand why I’m so desperate that she never finds out about any actual problem that I have? These are such tiny things, aren’t they? I hate that this house is such a magnifying glass, that a minor inconvenience for me means she doesn’t sleep and cries all night and accuses my dad of being an uncaring bastard (she tells him he doesn’t love me. She tells him he wouldn’t care if I died).

I cannot ever be anything less than perfectly alright (only, not too happy, because laughing and jokes are “silly” and “ridiculous”), because she’s so stressed and upset over things that are just everyday life, and any hint of me actually struggling with anything would probably break her.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to make her happy. She finds stress where there is none, and it’s almost always because of me. If it was genuine problems, I could fix it. I could hide it more, minimise it more, find a way to stop it being an issue, maybe. But she seems terrified by the fact that I’m alive.

I could quit my job, I suppose (I went to that meeting, by the way. They want proof I was at uni. I don’t really know what to do, they asked for a certificate [I wrote on my CV that I hadn’t achieved the degree yet, but somehow that’s different than actually having to say it, actually having to explain]. I’ve been thinking about taking in the details of my course co-ordinator and telling them to get in touch with her, but maybe if I just avoid everything until they have no excuse but to fire me, it’d solve a lot of problems. If I didn’t have a job then I wouldn’t have to leave the house and my mum would always know where I was). Except then she’d start worrying that I was at home all the time, thinking there was something wrong because I wasn’t seeing my friends or looking for jobs or being a normal human being (except, it’s me trying to be a normal human being that makes her so worried all the time).

I know, in a detached sort of way, that this shouldn’t be my responsibility. That I’m not doing anything to make her worry, I’m not doing anything dangerous, that the problem is hers, not mine. But she doesn’t worry like this about other people. I see and hear her crying and shouting and panicking, and almost all the time, it’s my name on her lips. It’s me who makes her feel so bad. And it doesn’t matter that I don’t do it deliberately, it doesn’t matter that I’m not even sure how I do it. She’s my mother, and I hurt her.

You do what you can to help the people you love, don’t you? To stop them from hurting. I wish I knew how to make her feel better.

I feel so fucking powerless. If I knew what I had to do, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

I know it sounds so selfish, but I just don’t want it to be my fault anymore.