3/30: the worst row

Moving to the North East, fighting with my dad and brain surgery

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 the following morning for a slap up brunch (which felt very grown up and cosmopolitan!) and then they’d set off for home.

Heavy traffic on the M6 meant we arrived too late for me to collect the keys to the flat that night. So we all decamped to the friends’ house. I’ve always found it difficult when plans have to change at the last minute, but I remember feeling a sense of relief at being able to postpone the start of this new chapter for another 12 hours. I was 21 years old and more than a little scared at the thought of being left alone in this big city where I knew no one.

The family friends took us out for a meal at an Italian restaurant. Several bottles of wine were consumed between the five of us, with Dad and the husband of the couple moving on to digestifs at the end of the meal. More alcohol followed when we returned to their house. At some point the balance that every child of an alcoholic parent knows tipped from safe to unsafe. Dad went from just being drunk and garrulous, all loud voice and animated hand gestures, to being dangerous. Mum and I became focussed on appeasement and de-escalation, be careful, don’t say anything that could annoy him, don’t say anything that could be misconstrued. Be careful.

I was off balance, most of my life packed into two huge suitcases in the boot of my parents’ car. I felt like I was being thrust back into childhood, due to spend the night in a sleeping bag on the floor of the guest room, Mum and Dad taking the bed. At the same time I was about to begin what felt like real adulthood, the training wheels version of my undergraduate student days now behind me. 

I don’t remember what the fight was about or how it started, the details quickly obscured in my memory by the events that followed. What I remember is Dad speaking to me viciously, his finger jabbing at me and his face twisted in dislike. The usual excuses that he felt most like himself when he drank, that this version of him was the true one, and that I clearly didn’t like the real him. I was in floods of tears, the old familiar vertigo of not being able to trust that the Dad I loved was real or just a mask that he put on in order to face the world mixed with a deep sense of sadness that this was happening on the final night I’d spend with my parents for months. I was also excruciatingly embarrassed that this was happening in front of the family friends, that Dad was letting outsiders see all our dysfunctions. 

I took refuge in the front room of the house, cross-legged on the floor behind a dark wooden dining table, oil paintings of racehorses staring down at me from the walls. I remember Mum coming to comfort me, then leaving to try and calm Dad down, flitting between us. I remember I stayed in there for a long time, until it was time to go to bed. Dad said a begrudging apology before the end of the night, his tone and words making it clear that he felt that the whole fight was very much not his fault. 

A bad night’s sleep, unsurprisingly, and a walking on eggshells morning. I collected the keys to the flat, and Mum and Dad helped me lug my suitcases up the narrow stairs to the first floor, navigate a burglar alarm that would not stop shrieking. We had an awkward brunch at a trendy cafe near the Students’ Union, Dad and I being carefully polite and distant with each other. What had been intended to be a treat and a celebration became an unpleasant situation to grit your teeth and endure. Then Mum and Dad left. I watched their car turn west on to the A69 from the back seat of the family friends’ car before they dropped me back at the flat. 

I tried to put it all behind me and focus on meeting my new housemates and the first few days of my MA course. I was still angry with Dad, an icy sense of fury with nowhere to go because he wasn’t here. It was his birthday two days after they’d left me in Newcastle. I waited until the evening to make my begrudging call to wish him a happy birthday, determined not to apologise for what had happened, curious to see if he would acknowledge it. He didn’t. Instead, he told me that Mum had been rushed to hospital that morning after having a seizure while she was alone in the house, that a CT scan had revealed a brain tumour. 

We never resolved our argument, it was pushed aside and forgotten in the chaos of Mum’s diagnosis and treatment. Within the week she had brain surgery at a specialist neurology hospital in Liverpool. I saw a lot more of my parents and brother than I’d imagined I would that year, travelling between Newcastle and North Wales every week. Five days of lectures and seminars in Newcastle, wondering how to make small talk with my coursemates when I felt like my world had fallen in, then nine days back at home during each reading week, helping to care for Mum. Rinse and repeat.

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