Handmade Part Six

PART SIX

Letters 2 - The January after I 'Reject,' Alma's Present

Alma and I have not spoken since I dared, according to her, reject one of her Christmas presents; since she said she did not want to go anywhere with me. There have been no phone calls. Her birthday is in January, so I decide to send her a present. I buy a cookbook by Nigel Slater and parcel it up with a card in which I write a conciliatory message, but I hear nothing back. Two weeks later when I arrive home from work, my next-door neighbour calls out to me from her back door, 'There’s a parcel here for you,' she says. She hands it to me across the fence. I see at once that it’s the parcel I sent to Alma for her birthday. She has returned it unopened, simply re-addressed.

I decide that this enough, there has to be an end to this misery; an end to my appeasement and to the enduring silence of her punishment. I write a letter to Kit, telling him that it's up to Alma now. I will not be getting in touch with her again. I say that I cannot go on trying to make-up, trying to keep the peace and that I need to get on with my own life. I say that I know Alma has never liked J and that this has always made things difficult for us. I praise Kit's kindness. I tell him I value it and that I’ve tried to emulate it in my life. I say I’m truly sorry if this means not being in touch with him and that this is not about him. I address the letter to Kit at the local hotel where he now works as a handyman having retired from the factory.

I later learn that Kit was not at work when the letter arrived at the hotel and that a well-meaning member of staff took it upon themselves, knowing where Kit and Alma lived, to deliver the letter to their flat. Alma who would have recognised my handwriting opened the letter even though it was not addressed to her.

Alma writes an excoriating reply, accusing me among other things of being selfish and always having used her for my own ends. I see beneath the anger and spite to how hurt she is and I'm sad because I hadn't intended for her to read my letter. It was a letter meant for Kit. I understand why she saw it as a betrayal. We had after all, lived for years in the pretence of a good mother and daughter relationship and up until now I had been complicit.

But Alma's letter is unnecessarily vicious and cruel. On reading it I am distraught and cannot hide how I feel from the children. J is working late and in desperation I call a friend who lives in the village and ask if she'll come up to be with me, which she kindly does.

Almost before I have time to catch my breath, a second equally devastating letter follows. One clearly not being enough. Later, on the advice of another friend, I will burn both letters. But the last sentence of Alma's second letter stays with me, always: Nothing you could ever say or do would be of any interest to me now.

As far as Alma is concerned, the blame is all mine. There is nothing that can be done. In a phone call Kit says I must get on with my own life and concentrate on looking after my family. There is no way back. The only contact I now have with home is when Kit phones occasionally, and through my brother M. It will be nearly three years before I learn from Kit that Alma is seriously ill. Three years before I make the journey south to her hospital bed

Crushed Velvet Bell Bottom Trousers

1969, the University of East Anglia; out on Horsham Fields in the residences, snow and the bitter east winds which are nothing like the soft westerlies of home. Cold. Enduring cold. But the heat of freedom. Staying up, staying out, piling into cars at midnight off to the sea, to Sea Palling and its dunes. Summer days hitching to Cromer, a bus into Norwich, bell-bottoms and T-shirts with gathered necks and sleeves, flowers and fresh crabs from the market, cream teas in tea shops, egg and chips in the refectory, listening to Pink Floyd, Cream, Dylan, discovering Simone de Beauvoir and Satre, a trip to London during which I buy the most horrific pair of orange, crushed velvet, bell bottoms trousers which I never actually wear. In my student room in Horsham, boxes of black and white photographs strewn across the floor as I try to make sense of the sculpture on the west fronts of Chartres, Rheims, and Notre Dame. Seminars outside in Norwich Cathedral. Looking, looking, virtually no text, working almost exclusively from photographs, falling asleep in dark lecture theatres as the slides click through. In the second year a shared student house in Cringleford with an old glasshouse and a vine. Then back on campus for the final year.

University is a transformative time for me when I begin to relish the idea of not returning home. I think friends who knew me then would say I was vulnerable, fragile at times, aren't we all, leaving home at eighteen? I'm not sure I made the best decisions when it came to men. I had a boyfriend who had many good qualities: he was a man who liked poetry. But he was controlling, very controlling, and it took me a long while to break free from his hold.

In my third year before my finals, I decide to stay in Norwich over the Easter break. I have a room in a flat rented by friends who are in their second year and have gone home for the holidays. I have the place to myself. I go into the University library daily to revise. I keep in touch with Alma and Kit from the phone box on the corner of the road.

Two weeks before my finals, I phone home and Alma answers. She is hysterical. She says she will kill herself and begs me to come back. I feel compelled to go although it's the last thing I want to do, or need at this time when I should be studying. I catch the train home. Kit meets me at the station. In the car on the drive home I tell him, 'I can do this now, Dad. I’ll do this one last time, but I can’t keep doing it.'

I have returned to the eight-year-old girl looking in the mirror. Telling myself I’ll do this once, once is enough. Yet here I am revisiting it. Here I am rescuing Alma again. Needing rescue myself. And I know it's not good for me.

I graduate with an upper second, but I really don’t want to go to the graduation ceremony. I don’t want to wear a gown or have to parade in front of an audience of parents. I tell Alma and Kit that I won't be going to graduation, assuming they won’t mind. After all, Alma was never one to attend a speech day or any of the school functions or celebrations. But I'm wrong. When I tell them Alma says, 'Going to your graduation would have been one of the best days of my life.' She looks hurt as she turns away from me.

I feel instantly guilty, of course I do. They’ve put me through university. They’ve been generous about paying their contribution to my grant, giving me money for the train fares back and forth. Attending the graduation ceremony is the least I can do.

A Graduation Gown

July 1972 and I'm wearing a cream dress while everyone else seems to be in sombre, subdued, colours. I'm standing outside Saint Andrews Hall in the general melee of students in caps and gowns. I'm among my friends. Alma and Kit are also here. I'm feeling nervous. I don't want to be part of a show. I don't want to be the centre of attention. I know instinctively that nothing good ever comes of me standing in the centre of the frame. Perhaps this is the root of my nervousness.

'I need to tell you something,' says Alma pulling me to one side, out of earshot of Kit and my friends. 'I think I'm pregnant and it's not your father's child.'

I don't remember being surprised or shocked, but I know I had no words.

'I need an abortion,' says Alma. 'You'll have to help me.'

When it's my turn to mount the stage, one student in a long line of graduates waiting to shake hands with the principal, I'm hesitant, wishing I wasn't there. Afterwards, when it's over Alma tells me how out of place and nervous I looked among the others, how I looked like I might fall over or trip up. It's as if I am glass and she can break me.

There are the usual post-graduation photographs on the lawns back in the University, me in cap and gown next to Alma and Kit. There's nothing in the photographs to suggest anything untoward has been said. Later Alma will tell me that the pregnancy was a false alarm.

A Wedding Dress

Just as I'd known deep down that no good could come of my graduation so I knew that in the years to come I could never be married, at least not in the traditional sense. Wedding preparations and a wedding ceremony with Alma around were unthinkable.

There is still a secret part of me that loves a wedding and would have loved her own wedding dress. The cloth: tuille, chiffon, crepe, organza, the fine stitching, the covered buttons, the lace. I may dissemble, my old hippie self certainly finds the current fashion for protracted and expensive weddings hard to justify. But that doesn't change how I feel or how weddings make me cry. Apparently this is not unusual, plenty of people cry at weddings. But perhaps not inconsolably as I have done on at least two occasions (which thankfully were not my children's weddings). I've come to think that perhaps for me, weddings symbolise much of what Alma denied me: in particular, romance, love, your day in the sun at the centre of things.

Fortunately, as it turned out, when I was in my twenties and early thirties, having lived with Alma and Kit, I wanted nothing to do with marriage. Also fortunate was the fact that I was young at a time when marriage was unfashionable, and when J and I did get married for entirely legal reasons we did so at a registry office with our very young children present and without telling Alma. When she found out, it was by chance and from the mouth of a babe. My daughter K aged four said, 'When mummy and daddy got married...' Alma had not believed her at first. Ultimately when the fact was confirmed by me, she declared herself deeply hurt at not being invited.

In my younger days I had a recurring dream of a wedding. In the dream it was my wedding day, but it couldn't go ahead because there was something missing. Always something getting in the way, stalling it and stopping it from going ahead. Perhaps that's why I think of my poem, Letter to My Wedding Dress, as holding within it the essence of my relationship with Alma and of my loss.

Letter to My Wedding Dress

I might have worn you with my hair long, like Joni Mitchell

hidden something in periwinkle under your skirt, carried cornflowers.

Or cut you on the cross, a tea gown, all satin and Hollywood

I might have felt you brush my skin like a cobweb smelling of morning.

I might have kept you, wrapped in ancient, yellowing tissue

to show you to a daughter, to show you how young, how small I was

then, or thrown you in the dressing up box, or trashed you, yes

there is a fashion now for trashing your wedding dress with mud

or paint and taking photographs. I might have managed with

what I had, trailing you across the music room floor, where the boards

creaked and the piano caught the mood, when I missed you most.

I make you over a million times, sew you myself, spin you

from dream but there is always something missing, the flowers

uncollected, wilting, a muslin toile without its sleeve…

Happy Christmas

Not long after graduation when I’m living in London, Alma will phone me. She is coming to London with her new lover, the lover whose child it turns out she wasn't expecting after all. She doesn’t want Kit to know. She asks me if Kit phones to say she's been staying with me. I agree reluctantly but as soon as I get off the phone I know I don't want to lie to my father like this. Everything about it is wrong. J is with me when I get the call and also another friend and together they encourage me to stand up to Alma. It's completely out of order, they say. Emboldened I ring her back and tell her it’s not something I feel comfortable doing.

She is furious. 'You're such a prude. Miss goody, goody. You always did spoil my fun,' she says, putting the phone down on me.

The following Christmas, M and I go home. Alma has been seen out with her new lover. They have been spotted walking down the main street in the town, holding hands, parading their relationship for all to see. Kit the worse for drink, confronts them at a Boxing Day party. He's spoiling for a fight and tries to throw a punch at the lover, the hooked nose bastard as he calls him. M and I have to drag Kit away.

Back at the bungalow we do our best to keep Alma and Kit apart. We empty a bottle of whisky down the sink to keep Kit from drinking more and from doing damage to Alma or himself. The next day I go back to London. M says I should, that it's alright he will deal with them, for which I'm eternally grateful.

When I come back some months later after Alma has left home for her lover, there are knife marks on the door to the bedroom and I learn that when Alma finally left, Kit laid out in the road waiting to be run over and had to be rescued.

Several years after this break-up, Alma and Kit will get back together again and set up home in a flat in Weston-Super-Mare. Alma will be surprised when M and I are lukewarm about the idea.

Words

Town Hall Café, Bishop Auckland January 2025

I began my writing life here, in the Town Hall at a workshop with writers Wendy Robertson and the late Julia Darling, both of whom were inspirational teachers. I didn't know I wanted to write or be a writer then. I took some persuading. But words had always been important to me and as Alma's daughter I knew to choose my words carefully. After all, I was only ever one word away from disaster and rage. I knew her words as weapons; so many things I still hear Alma say that I wish I could forget. But worse still, her silence. No words at all.

It took me a long time to trust my words enough to put them down on a page and to share them with others, but I began that journey here. I've been writing now for twenty plus years. In all this time, mothers have played little if any part in my work. When they do appear I render them dead or weak or inconsequential. Until now I have not been able to find the words...

I arrive at 10 a.m. waiting for the café to open. It’s a big space and therefore not the warmest in this cold weather. I’m wearing my long, padded coat, winter boots, two pairs of socks, fingerless gloves, and a beret. I choose a table near a radiator, order coffee and a warm scone and start writing. After about an hour my friend M comes to join me. I put my pen down for a welcome break, drink more coffee, share a toasted teacake, talk about some serious stuff and also laugh a lot. When she leaves, I carry on writing.

They know me here, they’re used to me. They just let me get on with it. They’re always very kind when they come to take the cups away. They bring me glasses of water and ask if I need anything more. I don’t know what they make of me really, but I have definitely become a regular.

I had been one of the first to arrive in this quiet, hollow space this morning but when I'd looked up from my writing half an hour later, I'd been surprised to see how many people there were around me. I'd registered the chatter and the noise for the first time. Saw how busy the staff were, how all the tables were full. But I'd carried on.

Gradually, as morning became afternoon, as lunchtime was over, I wrote to the end of my story, to the day I sat with Alma when she died. I put down my pen. I'd completed the rough draft of the remainder of my memoir, Handmade. I’d reached a finish line of sorts. For good or ill, I had finally written a mother. There was still much to do in transcribing and editing the final 10,000 words but I’d come to the end of the story. And it felt like a special moment. I looked around me. The cafe had emptied, the noise had subsided, voices were subdued. I could hear the cutlery being sorted. Someone behind the counter was whistling…

Hospital Gown - 3

...The corridor to the ward is long. I swallow hard, my mouth suddenly dry, my breath ragged. I swallow the past three years. I swallow the past, the silence between us. I am walking on broken glass, body tensed for attack, in full fight or flight mode. Sick with fear, I push through the swing doors. And there she is, Alma, in the bed beside the nurses’ station, facing me as if in wait. Alma, for all the world looking like a child, like the girl she once was. The hungry girl who ate the last piece of cake in the tin when the cupboard was bare. I cross the ocean of space between us and put down my bag...

Alma has seen me, her eyes widen. She reaches out her hand as if pleading. She says my name, 'Avril.'

'Mum,' I say as I take her hand

I'm sorry,' she whispers.

'I’m sorry too,' I say.

I am re-instated. I have become Alma's daughter once more. Her handmaid. But this time I know it will not be for long. When I leave the hospital, I go back to meet Kit at the flat. I go via the town where I buy a white, cotton dressing gown embroidered at the edges with delicate blue flowers, several nightdresses and a bunch of cornflowers from the florist, all to take back to the hospital that evening.

Kit tells me that Alma has at the most, only weeks to live. Together, and with the help of the local hospice who will provide nursing care, we make plans for her to come home. The flat is empty and soulless without her. Her absence is marked, as is mine. I have been removed. Erased from family history. There are no photographs of me on the mantlepiece. M is there, the children are there, but I am not. There is a hole where my head should be in the family collage that hangs in the dinning room. Alma has cut me out. Later in various drawers in the kitchen and the bedroom I find small, folded pieces of paper, notes on which she has written: Avril has ruined this family. It is all Avril's fault.

August - a week later, I return again on the Friday with my daughter K. Alma is at home and the the hospice nurses are in attendance. I have come for the weekend. M and I have agreed we will take it in turns. Alma knows me and she knows K, and although she's unable to speak intelligibly, she mouths our names. She's agitated, restless, pulling at her nightclothes, twisting and turning in the bed. The hospice manager arrives. He thinks that Alma is in pain, and I agree. He says that he thinks she would benefit from morphine though it might hasten the end and the decision must be ours. Kit and I agree that the manager should fit a morphine driver, and Kit goes off to the chemist with the prescription. Once fitted it quickly takes effect. Alma settles. Before long she drifts away, seemingly out of consciousness. Peaceful at last, it's as if she is already gone. I let M know that he should not wait until next weekend but should come tomorrow. The hospice nurse sits with Alma through Friday night into Saturday morning.

I get up as soon as I wake. The nurse tells me that Alma has deteriorated, and she thinks death could be imminent. There will be a gap in care with the next nurse not arriving until ten o'clock. I feel ill prepared, I ask her how I'll know when death is close. She talks me through the final stages of life and tells me that when death occurs it will not be an emergency. I go to tell Kit who is also up now and making tea in the kitchen, he appears shocked but says nothing. He takes his tea into the front room and doesn't go in to see Alma. By now it's around seven a.m. I leave my daughter K sleeping, get dressed and then go and relieve the nurse who leaves.

I sit by Alma's bedside. I am alone with her. I hold her hand and moisten her mouth as I’ve been shown with damp cotton buds. I talk to her, but only in a whisper. Her breathing becomes shallower, there are long gaps between each breath, her hand is cold. I go into the front room and tell Kit that I think she's close to death. He does not move. He stays where he is, reading the newspaper. Alma takes her last breath just before 8 a.m. I hold her hand as life ebbs from her. There is no one with her but me.

I do what needs to be done. I make the phone calls. The doctor comes to certify death. Her body is taken away. M arrives with his partner, and J arrives with my son. We all go out, Kit with us. It’s August. The sun is hot. It glitters off the incoming tide. We take to the seafront, to an outdoor café, sitting under a wide umbrella in sight of the sea. We drink beer and eat ice cream. There is sadness but mostly it feels like a holiday. I do not cry.

2025

February is the month of the Snow Moon, so called by native Americans to track the changing seasons. February in North America is the time of heaviest snowfall, these are lean winter months and hence it is also known as the Hunger Moon.

Whether snow falls or not here in the North-East, and it falls much less than it once did, February for me is always marked by the emergence of snowdrops in my front garden. Like tokens of a spring to come, the Candlemas bells pierce the frost, braving the cold, laying a soft sea of green and white across the winter soil.

We’ve lived in our house since my son was a baby. The snowdrops have always been here. Other things like the lupins and the swing in the back garden have come and gone, but with my partner J's patient care and transplanting the snowdrops have increased year on year, until now when they've become a feature and people stop to look at them.

Nothing says that winter is coming to its end for me more than the snowdrops appearing in my garden. A small thing to notice and celebrate, a comforting inevitability in our cyclical lives.

This year, the end of winter will mark the completion of Handmade, probably the hardest thing I've ever written. By the time the snowdrops are over, I will be near the end, and glad of it.

Of course, the end is far from the end with any work such as this, for as long as its out there being read there is no end, because a book is made new every time a reader comes to it. Readers have rich imagination and compassionate natures, and as a writer I count on it. I count on your understanding, especially in this.

Final Thoughts

When I set out to write a memoir, I had no thoughts of it being therapeutic. Along the way people asked me if it was a kind of therapy. They seemed to assume it was, but to me it felt simply like a story I had to tell, regardless of outcomes. I'd come to a place in my writing life when memoir had become compelling. I’d spent years crafting stories, watching them unfold to points of resolution. It was time to do the same with my own story, the one that had preoccupied me my whole life. The story of my relationship with Alma. As with my fictional stories, I didn't expect all the ends to be neatly tied up, but I was hoping for an ending of sorts; a resolution of some kind. Mostly though it would be enough to have the story told all in one piece, for me to see it laid out as never before. But I underestimated how hard it would be to re-visit this story and consequently how much I would breathe out as I came to the end.

In time, after Alma’s death, her influence faded. I would catch the occasional glimpse of her in the pale, lifeless, faces of the women in the medication queue in the prison. The faces of women reduced and in pain. Over time she became even paler, a more ghostly figure, but she haunted me still. She was the bad ghost, the source of all my troubles and my unhappiness with myself. She was a deep sadness within me that could never be erased. She was an anger buried deep that I clung to and wasn’t willing to let it go. If I’m honest, I think I anticipated that a memoir might expose her. It would be a kind of victory over her. I would have the last word. But I was wrong, it was not a question of the victor or the vanquished but a question of reaching a new understanding. And there is a sense in which this, the toughest writing I’ve ever done, has brought that new understanding, new knowledge and acceptance, all of which have been therapeutic. I have relived the hurt, the sad, the lonely times, the fear, the lack of acceptance and love. I have come to accept they will always be there. There is no erasing them. But I have been made to see their effects more clearly: my deep insecurities, my perfectionism, my shame, the desire I have to always please, my fear of anger, my fear of rejection, my feelings of unworthiness and so much more.

I have also seen more clearly how the world looked through Alma's eyes. I've learned that Alma most likely had a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and I've gained a framework for understanding what it is to be the child of such a parent. How above all, the narcissist needs control to protect their identity and fragile ego. How their rage is easily triggered. How you are expected to be who they want you to be. How you exist to serve them. How the child of the narcissistic parent never really gets to experience emotional safety and support, and how they live with chronic stress. I have come to understand how such a mother might disown her child.

But writing Handmade has also shown me how my life with Alma prepared me for in my work with women in prison, how it inspired me to be the best mother I could, to be kind, how in the end I have Alma to thank for the cloth and the colour, for the drive and determination to be creative and ultimately now to be loved.

I did not come for therapy or analysis. I came to record simply what happened, where possible without judgement. I came to record who we were then and who I am now in this moment, newly reincarnated as Nana. And perhaps the least anticipated but the best outcome of all, has been in realising what a blessing my family and my grandchildren are, and my reincarnation is.

In the lines between writing this story and the suspension of judgement, I have found a space in which to learn more about myself, and about Alma. With it has come distance and separation both of which feel good. Like the gulls in the seaside town of my youth, my anger and bitterness have flown off to an uninhabited island offshore. They are no longer at my back and the writing is done.

The words with which May Sarton concludes, Journal of a Solitude, speak for me. (I trust she would have allowed me the insertion of Alma.)

'This book is less and more than I had imagined it might be, but it could not have been written without all that Alma gave me and for that matter without all that was lacking between us.'

Afterword

2025 March

The sun appears. For the first time this year I step outside, basket under my arm, and hang a line of washing out to dry. The grass is long from winter, the garden is greening. Tulips are sprouting in their pots, and the pear is covered in small, pink buds.

Narcissist 3 - Help

If you’ve been personally affected by my story and need to know more, if you need help as a son or a daughter of a narcissistic mother or father, then these are some of the places in which I found help:

daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com - Danu Morrigan

willieverbegoodenough.com - Dr Karyl McBride (her workshops and publications listed here)

The New Science of Narcissism - W Keith Campbell

Narcissistic Mothers and Covert Emotional Abuse - Diana Macey

Dear Daughter of a Narcissistic Mother - 100 Letters to Help You Recover and Thrive- Danu Morrigan

Unmasking Narcissism - A Guide to Understanding The Narcissist in Your Life - Mark Ettensohn