The Elephant House

The subtle shifts of tone and sentiment over the years have been crazy making; you remember the time when your father expressed a desire to come and visit on a week night to help you celebrate your son’s birthday . You asked him to come at the weekend, but said that it would have to be the following weekend because your son would be at his father’s on this particular weekend. Your father was puzzled because the birthday was on a Thursday.

For years, your father has been late to arrive and to be at home when you have arrived; due to work, or domestic tasks, and so forth; so much so that you and your son deliberately tell him an arrival time that is an hour before the actual event. Over the years, you have some to accept the things you cannot change, as per the Serenity Prayer, and to make adjustments accordingly.

You remember an occasion, when your son was very young, on which you were walking to the local Pizza Express – about a 20-minute walk with little legs; your telephone had rung and it had been your father, saying that some work or traffic issue had meant that he was unlikely to arrive for another hour or so.

You continue up the hill and you are aware of a sense that he doesn’t care; you already feel tired and fatigued because, in the course of your stepfather’s decline with multiple sclerosis, your mother has gone off on luxury cruises with a friend in an elaborate manifestation of the limbic ‘flight’ response. Alone with a fading stepfather to visit, and a child whose behaviour perhaps seems more challenging because of a brain injury that you sustained some years before, which ranked as “severe traumatic” you are struggling to keep your head above water psychologically and emotionally most of the time, whilst not quite being able to articulate why.

You can’t remember (it is years ago now) whether you arrived at the restaurant and ate, or whether and when your father arrived, but you can remember one thought, which sums up how out of your depth you were feeling at the time; how heavily the difficulties with the school (your son’s autism has yet to be diagnosed) weight upon you; how hard you are trying, with the help of a referral by your GP to the Eating Disorders Unit as an outpatient, on a maximal ssri dosage, to combat the Bulimia with which you have been struggling since your son was a baby; so many things which weigh upon your now delicate, raw mind.

There is something so strange about the biggest trauma in your life not having been acknowledged by a family member; the same family member who counts among his friends a neurologist whom, it seems, also knows about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities in children.

Your son has autism and you have been fighting for years to get his legal needs met, and continue to encounter a great deal of resistance in the form of a broken system exploited by lazy half-wits who don’t care anyway. This has been the case for years, and this was on top of the pre-existing difficulties created by a brain injury which ranked as severe when it happened. Traumatic enough, you subsequently found that the attitudes of medical and psychological professionals showed not a trace of empathy or even care. Dealing with rudeness when you find you’ve lost the coping mechanisms that you previously had is tough, and exhausting. The exhaustion frustrates you and erodes your self-esteem because you want to get up and deal with it; but your energy is gone and nobody seems to care; so much seems futile, which never would have stymied you before. You notice this, and you are angry because something took that stamina away from you and you feel aggrieved.

The reason that you take your meds consistently is because, before you were put on them, you broke down, burned out and ached with suicidal ideation to an extent that itself wore you down, and wore you out. You couldn’t articulate this sense to anyone, so you kept quiet; carried on as best you could.

You found new coping mechanisms in the process of seeking support and finding it denied; you found yourself setting physical goals and achieving them in the face of greater challenges which were existential and therefore too immense to be tackled. You built furniture, lawnmowers, all kinds of things that your mother said you should ask a man to do. Something inside you lit up, like a flame; it burned brighter when you met these challenges. You managed, using this, to break out of active bulimia and, when a relationship with a schmuck hurt you enough, you drew a line and vowed to build some self-esteem. You took up boxing, weight training, more cycling; you obliterated the mental pain by putting something heavy and physical in front, and smashing it.