26/30: learning to live in uncertainty
Remembering Mum’s first brain surgery in 2003 and a moment in a flooded slate quarry that brought some comfort. Also, some initial thoughts on scarcity and what we inherit from our parents.
There’s something that I want to write that’s about scarcity, about not believing that you are enough, not believing that there is enough to go round. It’s about control and trying to make oneself smaller. Trying to want or need less, while at the same always watching to make sure no one else gets more than their fair share - of attention, love, time, space. It’s not a comfortable feeling, not one that it’s easy to admit to feeling.
I think it’s a mindset that I’ve inherited from my mum, and that she inherited from hers. A way of being in and interacting with the world that we all share, but each with our own particular slant to it: the same but different. I don’t think I’m quite ready to write about it yet though, to think about how and why each of us had experienced it, believed it, pushed back against it. It’s 8pm now; I’ve been trying to write today’s words for the past 3 hours and got no further than this.
Instead, I’m going to write about some of my memories from autumn 2003, the time of Mum’s first brain surgery. This was our ‘good’ experience of brain surgery, the one that led to a positive outcome. With the benefit of hindsight, I can craft a slightly rose-tinted narrative from diagnosis through to surgery within a fortnight and then steady progress towards recovery and a return to mostly normal life. By autumn 2004 the only remaining physical sign that anything had even happened was Mum’s short cropped hair, replacing her previous waist length tresses, and the snaking, branching scar hidden beneath.
I say a ‘good’ experience because living through it, before we knew what the outcome would be, was not good. As you might expect it was challenging and overwhelming and full of anger, sadness and worry. Similarly, while the only remaining physical sign one year later might have been Mum’s new hair cut, the emotional and psychological effects lasted much longer. I sometimes say that autumn 2003 was a full stop to mark the end of my childhood or youth. Paragraph break, new topic.
In autumn 2003 I was 21 years old, so maybe saying it marked the end of my childhood is pushing it. I’d graduated from my undergraduate degree that summer and had only just moved to Newcastle to start an MA when Mum was rushed to A&E after having a seizure. I wrote a little about my move up north earlier this month.
3/30: the worst row
The worst row Dad and I ever had was the night before he and Mum dropped me off in Newcastle to start my MA degree. They had driven me up from North Wales, a 5 hour road trip on a good day. The plan was that they’d help me get settled in my shared Tyneside flat in Heaton, then stay the night with friends who lived just north of the city. We’d meet up th…
When we first learned of Mum’s diagnosis, I think we all assumed it was a death sentence. My only knowledge of brain tumours up until that point was from articles I’d skimmed over in the newspaper, someone diagnosed with a brain tumour and dead within a year. It turned out however that Mum had a ‘good’ type of brain tumour. It was a meningioma, a tumour in one of the three protective layers of tissue that protect the brain and spinal cord: the meninges, made up of the dura mater, the arachnoid mater and the pia mater. The doctors told us that Mum’s tumour should be able to be surgically removed in its entirety - probably - without any negative impact on her brain.
There were two weeks between Mum’s diagnosis and the date set for her surgery. She was admitted to a specialist neurology hospital in Liverpool where she was to remain until after the surgery and the immediate recovery period. That was the part Mum found hardest: sitting and waiting for major brain surgery in the unfamiliar, slightly uncanny space of a hospital ward, far from her home and family. Removed entirely from her normal life: teaching yoga classes three or four times a week, going for walks on the beach, parenting my younger brother, going to the supermarket.
I spent those two weeks shuttling backwards and forwards between Newcastle and Liverpool. Weekdays in Newcastle, sitting through hours of lectures and seminars, trying and failing to make small talk with my new course mates. Weekends in Liverpool, spending every moment of visiting hours with Mum. Five hours each way on a train between those two worlds, staring out of the window at the trees and fields and houses rushing by, trying and failing not to think about death.
My old friends were starting new lives: new jobs, new courses, new cities, moving in with a boyfriend, breaking up with a boyfriend. I couldn’t muster up any interest in the various dramas of their lives. It all seemed so small and petty. I felt like I was in a bubble, separated from everyday life by a transparent but impermeable barrier. Pinned in place in this endless moment of waiting, where time seemed to move at a glacial speed.
On the day of the surgery my dad, my brother and I went on a very surreal day trip. We went to Llanberis in North West Wales, pretended to be tourists for the day, visited the National Slate Museum and climbed up the hill behind it to explore the slate quarries. Mum had made it very clear that she didn’t want us to spend the day sitting in the hospital waiting room, clock watching and worrying. Her surgery was scheduled to take 4-5 hours and the doctors weren’t able to tell us exactly when it would start, so there was no way of knowing when it would end. Mum told us to find something to do that would distract us instead.
So there was Mum in Liverpool, preparing to have brain surgery, and there was us in Llanberis, almost a hundred miles away, trying to pretend we were having a normal family day trip. We had a strained meal in a cafe near the station from which you could catch a train to the summit of Snowdon. None of us were able to eat very much. None of us mentioned what was probably happening right at that moment, two hours drive from where we sat. Most of the day is a blur in my memory, with moments that spring back into sharp focus when I’m in Llanberis again, which isn’t often.
The only moment that stands out clear in my memory was just before we got back in the car to drive home. We were standing on the edge of a flooded slate quarry behind the museum car park, staring down into the dark, still waters. The walls of the quarry loomed up around us, cutting off most of the daylight except a circle of grey cloudy sky directly above us. My brother stooped to pick up a stone and skimmed it across the water. It skipped once, twice, three, four times and then sank, leaving four overlapping circles of ripples that slowly expanded, moving out across the water. We watched while the ripples gradually faded away to nothing and the dark waters were still again. Then we climbed in the car and drove home to wait for the call from the hospital to tell us that Mum’s surgery was over.
It was such a small moment, but it’s stuck with me over the years. It’s taken on symbolic meaning somehow, in the same way that the hare I saw on the morning of the day we scattered Mum’s ashes has. The stone my brother skimmed and the ripples it made have come to represent something I can’t quite put into words about life and death and family. About how we’re not really able to control what happens to us and to the people we love, and how that’s ok. Ultimately, what I felt on that autumn day in 2003, was a sense that it was going to be alright. We didn’t know the outcome of Mum’s surgery yet, we didn’t know what would happen next, whether she would recover or not. The future was unknown but I could learn to live in uncertainty.
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