I took an impromptu week off last week as I was in Bucharest on a long weekend— more on that in Touching Grass. This week’s newsletter talks of my mam’s passing, so this is a trigger warning for parental death and cancer.
“I wanted to say sorry about the other day; I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
My year 9 art teacher said to me after pulling me out of my maths class to talk in the corridor.
A few days earlier, she had torn apart my collage because she thought I could “do better than this” and didn’t like how I had arranged all of the components on the cardboard backdrop.
Seething with justice sensitivity, I refrained from storming down the corridor to the D-block loos and instead held it in until I got home, and it spilt over at the dining table to my mam.
The thing about my mam is that she was a ride or die. She would fight our corners until the very end, and she did so on multiple occasions for my brother and me. In the above instance, she rang the school and explained how upset I was at how I was treated, leading the teacher to apologise to me. I was, obviously, mortified, as was my eternal state at the age of 13, but looking back (and now I am a mother myself), I can now see why she did this.
The weekend before I went to Bucharest, I was solo parenting as Craig was away. I woke up in the night with a really bad pain in my side.
Believe me, when I say a pain is bad, it is bad. One of the few benefits of my autism is that I have a pretty high pain threshold. For context, I had an assisted birth on just gas and air, which went on for well over 24 hours. So, yeah… I don’t feel pain that often, but I felt this.
I obviously had no means of getting help, as I was parenting my daughter and two dogs by myself. I probably could have asked for help from extended family, but instead, I did what I usually do, and I got on with it.
I popped a couple of paracetamol and hobbled around the soft play with
(and our children, not just Arlen), then crashed into bed after the tea, bath and bed routine.The next morning, I went to the GP (with much encouragement) and explained that I had a bad pain in my side and that I have a high pain threshold, so this is probably quite bad.
A few squeezes of my tummy and the GP confirmed what I had suspected… I probably had gallstones. She was both amused and confused by how I had run around after a 2.5-year-old for two days in agony. But those of you who know me well probably aren’t surprised.
I didn’t want to ask for help. Even going to the doctor required a rehearsal in my head of what I would say.
What do these two stories have in common?
Well, in the first, my mam is advocating for me. She is fighting my corner. In the latter, I am not advocating for myself at all. I didn’t take any steps towards asking for help, and I only went to the doctor when I was forced.
Although there were only a few months between my mam’s first hospitalisation and her passing from pancreatic cancer in 2019, I am pretty convinced she had been ill for months. Possibly a year.
Craig and I left to travel to Southeast Asia and Australia in the summer of 2019 after living with my parents for three months beforehand to save up for the trip. In those three months, my mam was agitated. She was self-medicating with co-codamol and alcohol, she didn’t eat much, and she fell asleep on the sofa every night before 8 pm.
My mam was also a highly qualified nurse who spent her days fighting for her patients, who had Multiple Sclerosis (MS). She was only one of two nurses covering the whole region supporting people with MS. Part of what made her so great at her job was her ability to advocate for people who couldn’t do so for themselves… so why is it that, when the time came to fight her own corner, she couldn’t?
Why is it so easy to advocate for others?
And how can we channel that into advocating for ourselves?
As usual, I don’t have the answers. But as I sat staring at the ceiling getting my gall bladder scan this week, I couldn't help but think about what my mam would have been doing if she’d been there. Of course, she’d have been furious about paying for hospital parking. But beyond that, she would have asked the questions I was too nervous to ask (like when do I get the results???) and made sure I was comfortable.
As my daughter grows up, I will, of course, channel my inner mam to ensure I always fight her corner. But, more importantly, I want to raise her to see that, sometimes, you have to advocate for yourself— especially when no one else is there to do it.
I suppose I can do this through leading by example, as difficult as that may be. If she doesn’t see me asking for help, how can she know it’s okay to do so? I never saw my own mam ask for help, and I can see the effects of that in my own behaviours.
I can do things myself. But that doesn’t mean I always have to.
I just got back from a trip to Romania with
, we went to Therme, Europe’s largest spa and wellness centre. It was really fun, although not quite as relaxing as we expected (classic us). The people-watching was top-tier, though.
Here are some things I've enjoyed over the last two weeks:
🎥Dahomey (MUBI) - This understated documentary depicts the return of 26 artefacts from a museum in Paris to their rightful home in Benin, Africa. The items were taken by French colonisers and have been on display in Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac for many, many years. But now they are home.
🎥 Conclave (Prime Rental) - OMG, this is absolutely wild. What a journey. Highly rec.
📚Gliff by Ali Smith - Everything Smith writes is great, but this is a new favourite for me. She tells of two children who, for a mysterious reason, are essentially living on the run as they are deemed ‘unverifiable’ by the powers-that-be. It’s one of those five-minutes-in-the-future, subtle dystopian novels similar to I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.
📚Love in Exile by Shon Faye - This was as excellent as is to be expected from her. I’d read Shon’s shopping list, tbh.
📚Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan - Dinan’s second book after her debut Bellies did not ‘disppoint’. I listened to this while travelling and really enjoyed it.
See you next week,
Ellen x
💌 About this email
I’m Ellen, and I write about mental health for the chronically online. I am a freelance copywriter, strategist and web designer, and I work from home with my husband, Craig, at Content By The Sea. We have two rescue greyhounds, Potter and Harmony, and a toddler.
I started this newsletter in March 2020 and have sent over 200(!) emails; currently, I have over 1,300 subscribers. I write about a wide variety of topics, including diet culture, my love of running, jealousy, my life falling apart, mam guilt, and this dystopian world we all live in.
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I hope you’re feeling better, and absolutely love that your mum wasn’t afraid to raise hell for you! You’ve said it so well already but advocation is so bloody hard and we all deserve care, respect and to take up space in the world!
Yeah, I was completely oblivious to that! Classic man. I'm glad you got it looked at and hopefully you're nicely medicated until you can get it sorted!