When I started writing this blog on NYE, I wasn’t sure why I felt the urge to do so. But I did feel it. Strongly. I’m not much of a social media person. I have an Instagram account on which I haven’t posted for around 3 years. I don’t have Facebook or Twitter. I think I had hoped that writing a blog would connect to me to people facing similar challenges. Perhaps to another desperate parent seeking answers. I didn’t know how (still don’t) a blog works and whether anyone would even read what I’d written. I didn’t know, if someone did read my ramblings, whether they would engage. So, it’s been a funny couple of weeks. Because I did receive some comments. Comments that gave me cause for some deep reflection.

Is it possible there is a different perspective I can find? Is my panic fueled catastrophising rooted somewhere deeper? Is my son falling foul of his mother’s 43.5 years on this earth?

I had difficult teenage years. My own parents separated when I was around 14. My dad did not cope well. He threw my mum out of the house after a loud altercation in the early hours one morning. It woke me and I saw the nasty tail end of what had taken place. Ornaments strewn on the floor, my mum pinned to their bed, the terrifying rage of my dad. In the early hours, I saw my mum on the drive. She was bereft and in tears. Bin bags filled with clothes surrounded her. Dad wouldn’t let her step foot in the house and I went to say goodbye to her in my pyjamas. I didn’t see her for a while after that.

It wasn’t pretty in the following years. But, I was a teenager. I had my own friends and my own life. I got on with it. I had grown up in a wider family full of boys. My cousins were of a similar age and we had been close all of our lives. My closest cousin and I were inseparable. We were born only 9 days apart, at the same hospital and we were neighbours for the first few years of our lives. At the end of my second year in high school, I moved to his school. It was in a town around 6 miles away from my home. We were best friends. Our lives were enmeshed. Initially, it was because of our family tie. Eventually, it was just because we loved, trusted, and looked out for one another.

In Feb 1999, as we were each approaching our 18th birthdays in the coming July. He killed himself. Shot himself with his father’s hunting rifle. He was 17.5 years old. There were no warnings, no signs. He was a popular, handsome boy with many friends and hobbies. He had everything to live for. That day was the most painful day of my life. The weeks that followed are a blur but there are memories etched permanently in my mind. Getting home from school and my friend calling me, frantic because she’d heard a horrible rumour. She had walked past my cousins house on her way home. There were Police cars and paramedics on the street. She had heard that the boy who lived there was dead. My mum was with me when she called and heard everything. I came off the phone in a state of shock and disbelief. My mum was a local Police officer at that time. She worked in our local town. She called the Police station and spoke to her colleague who confirmed that the rumours were true. I remember very little about what happened after that. I believe I was taken to a friends’ house and my mum went to my Aunt and Uncle. I remember seeing my dad later in the evening when I was brought home, and I remember the pain I felt seeing him cry. I had never seen him cry before. My dad was also a Police officer and on duty in the neighbouring town. His colleague handed him a report but didn’t have the heart to tell him. He was delivered the news in cold hard fact laid out in black and white.

I remember waiting for my Aunt and Uncle to arrive at our house a couple of days later. I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. I didn’t want to see them. I don’t think I could cope with the weight of their pain and part of me felt they might be angry with me – I’m still not sure why I felt this way. When they arrived, my Uncle held me tightly and wept. There was no anger. A Police officer informed me that my cousin had left a note. It was addressed to me. I wasn’t able to read it for many weeks because the Police had taken it as evidence. I don’t remember reading the note for the first time. I was asked to read a poem I’d written at his funeral. I agreed but when the time came, I did not want to get up there. A church filled to the rafters with hundreds of people and awash with the deep blue of our school blazers. I read the poem but I don’t remember that either.

I missed a lot of school after that. But I had my friends and I’d started going out, smoking a bit of weed and drinking a lot. I went on holiday with my friends over the summer, turned 18 and was preparing to move away to university. It looked like I’d coped pretty well. I realised I hadn’t come out unscathed when my parents collected me from the hospital. It was after a chaotic, alcohol-fueled episode. The turkeys had come home to roost. I was quite unwell and had to come home from university for a couple of months. It took me about a year in total to find some stability again but the experience changed me forever. There was a silver lining. In their grief, my parents leaned on one another. They reconciled after 5 years of separation and remain married today.

I’ve been thinking about my cousin a lot over the last couple of years. It’s strange to think you have completely dealt with a trauma from the past. Then, it rears its head again in a different iteration. I have some real and rational concerns about my son. But the depth and intensity of my terror cannot be completely rational. I know it isn’t. The people around me tell me that it isn’t. And I trust them. So, I wonder, has my brain connected these two distinct and separate experiences? And is the weight of my terror crushing my son? I think it is. How could he possibly cope, at 19 years old, with the weight of my fear? Fear that has been brewed, bottled and aged for decades.

Of course, I am trying my absolute best and would do ANYTHING to ensure my son’s safety and happiness. But this is how trauma works isn’t it? In Larkin’s words……’They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do’.

I wanted to write about my reflections over the past couple of weeks. These reflections have brought me to a different place. I have thought deeply about the comments people have made on my previous posts. I recognise that there is very little I can do to help my son. Indeed, I can see I am carrying a burden that I am off loading on to him. I’m making things worse, not better. All I can really offer him now is love and acceptance. This is very difficult when he brings trouble to our door. So what to do? I believe, now, that it is time for my son to spread his wings. He comes back from his dads tomorrow and we will be talking about him moving out by the summer. The thought of him living alone in the city somewhere terrifies me. His alcohol and drug use puts him at huge risk. He doesn’t have friends, finds it difficult to make friends and more difficult to keep them. So he’ll be going in to a ‘sink or swim’ situation. And I’ll be at home, hoping with every fiber of my being, that he comes through the other side.