A Thousand Illegible Scribbles | Chapter 2

The Turning Point

I started writing this over a decade ago when I was fumbling to understand what was happening to my mum. It then became a way for me to understand whatever legacy might be waiting for me when I reached midlife. And when I had a daughter, our three generations became tied together in a thousand illegible scribbles that had already been written, but we had each yet to decipher.

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Chapter 2 | The Turning Point

What came after had no connection to what came before.

If I cough, I can stay home from school. One cough will do it. I don’t even need a fever. My mum likes the company; she’s easily convinced.

As is our routine, we play pretend for the morning: I’ll lie in my parent’s bed with chicken soup and a magazine, “resting”. Around lunchtime, we’ll drive to the local garden center for baked potatoes and hot chocolate fudge cake with ice cream on doily-covered tables. Just the two of us, while my brothers are in school, smarting at the injustice.

We never ate in restaurants, always amongst the hothouses. I may have been her excuse to buy more plants, but I like to believe she grabbed time with me, greedily, accumulating all the moments when she could.

Even though my bus stop was ten minutes away, she would drive me there so we could chat. On Saturday mornings, we’d leave the boys in bed for M&S shops and toast and jam in a café in Stockport. She said that we were best friends. There was no manipulation there. We were.

I chose time with her over that with school friends when I was probably too old to do so. It was my mum who came clothes shopping with me, waiting outside the changing room of Tammy Girl and Top Shop with what I now see as an extraordinary amount of patience, shaping my teenage style into preppy rather than sexy.

I missed parties that I heard about on Mondays at school (no social media then) and was comfortable with what I’d replaced them with instead. In a moment of the era-defining nightclub Hacienda, just a train ride away in Manchester, I stayed home and shaped memories of a quieter kind.