Sometimes, it takes time away to appreciate all that you have. We had another brilliant holiday up north with family. We visited the same old places we always visit, but this trip was different. I’m not sure what it was but, after everything that’s happened, those few days away made the world seem OK again. After months of reading and writing reports and assessments that endlessly detail all that The Boy can’t do, I’d forgotten to keep looking for everything he can. And it made me realize that if you spend your life focusing on everything that’s wrong, you might just miss everything that’s right.
While we were away we revisited an aquarium we’d been to when The Boy was younger. He didn’t remember having been there before, but I did. He was around six and, having spent £20 to get in, we spent a total of twelve seconds in there, with him shouting one long ‘NEMO!’ at the top of his voice as he ran the length of the place before we exited out to the daylight at the other end. This time, the darkness didn’t bother him so much and we stopped to look at each tank, taking everything in – we even sat through the sea-lion show. I hadn’t noticed it before, but there’s an inquisitiveness to him nowadays, a desire for knowledge that was always missing as a toddler. And as I looked around at the enthralled three-year-olds sitting around us watching the sea lion jump for the ball, I realized our lives weren’t so different. I can’t quite explain it, but in some ways it just feels like we’re living our lives on a different time trajectory to everyone else, that’s all. Like The Boy will get there eventually – he’s just following a different path.
There was so much we did in those few days. We caught up with family we hadn’t seen for a long time. Their reaction to seeing The Boy is always the same – they’re always struck by how much he’s grown, but also by his similarity to me. Despite how often I’m told it, I can never see it myself, but apparently we don’t just share the same dashing good looks, but the same mannerisms, even the same sense of humour. Nowadays The Boy’s mum often refers to him as Mini-John. How blessed he is.
We went to a barbecue where The Boy had his first go in a hot tub and then refused to get out until his skin had turned blue. And, back at Nana’s house, The Boy played endlessly with Monty the dog, lying on him, pulling him, and apparently teaching him to ballroom dance.
Magical times.
But the highlight of our holidays were our trips to the seaside together. Short day trips away – the seaside was only twenty minutes from Nana’s house. And those days with The Boy reminded me of my own childhood more than ever.
We went on an open-top bus tour and had the whole top deck to ourselves, trying to scream as loud as we could into the wind.…
A seagull nicked the Boy’s chips on the seafront as we sat and watched a Punch and Judy Show, then I wheeled The Boy along the pier in his wheelchair, racing unsuspecting old people in their mobility scooters. We found an old joke shop Dad used to visit as a little boy, and we bought some fake poo and a fart whistle. Neither of us knew what a fart whistle was until that day, but it’s become such a part of our lives since that it now seems strange to imagine a world without it.
But the highlight of it all was when we returned a few days later. When we go to the seaside we usually park outside the George Hotel – named, apparently, in honour of The Boy’s cousin. Well, this day there were no spaces, so we found ourselves in an unfamiliar part of town. As we were walking along to the seafront, I spotted something – a fish and chip café I remembered going to as a child that I thought had long gone. Thirty years later, there it was, on the corner, where it had stood all this time.
The Boy didn’t need any convincing to go inside. His escapade with the seagull a couple of days earlier had put him off al fresco dining for life. We took a table in the corner, exactly where we’d sat as a family, a generation ago.
And it was there, in that café, that I finally saw what everyone else has been telling me since The Boy was born. As he tucked into his fish and chips he looked up at me and grinned. How had I missed it for so long? It was plain as day. Sitting opposite me was me as a child, exactly the same age. Unmistakable. Smiling away, looking up into my dad’s eyes and knowing there was no place on Earth I’d rather be.
And as I sit here writing this now, I can hear my dad’s voice once more, bringing me back down to earth with a bump. ‘How much? Eighteen quid for two portions of fish and chips!? Christ on a bike, son, you’ll never be me.’
MY SON’S NOT RAINMAN BLOG
Daylight. Sleeping. Screaming. Olanzapine. Tests. Hospitals. Line up. Therapy. Making good progress. Scared. Laughing. Government agents. Lamotrigine. Day release. Voices. Fear. Smiles. Kindness. Canteens. Medication trolleys. Lithium. Surreal. Doctors. Brain scans. Paranoia. Nightmares. Despair. Venlafaxine. Spies. Tremors. Relapse. Home treatment teams. Dry mouth. Fifteen-minute observations. Psychosis. Risperidone. The black mouse. Reality. My Boy. My beautiful boy.
Over the next two years I was in and out of three different hospitals. I heard voices, I saw things that weren’t real, I had moments where I was the Lord of all creation and then returned to the absolute nothing of nothingness. I spent my time on locked wards, under twenty-four-hour observation and, finally, thanks to an incredibly generous and understanding employer, sitting side-by-side with D-list celebrities in therapy sessions in a private psychiatric hospital.
I was given numerous diagnoses from different experts in those two years. Psychotic depression, schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorder. In the end, they settled on bipolar disorder. I didn’t really care what label they put on it – it didn’t change the lithium or huge doses of antipsychotics I was put on. Turns out, if you’re a big bloke, it can take a fair old dose to reach the desired effect. I resented taking their medications and maybe recovery would have come quicker if I hadn’t. But I could never quite explain it to medical professionals, this need to see how I felt without mind-altering medications. I was forever trying to stop taking them, simply because I needed to know if I could get back to me. I mean, the real ‘me’, the ‘me’ I was before it all started. For quite some time, I couldn’t.
Sadly there’s no ‘cut’, ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ in life, no matter how much we might wish there was sometimes. For so long all I ever wanted was a window to pop up to ask, ‘Are you sure you want to delete 2005–7 and all its contents?’ And never has that been truer than when sitting here in front of Microsoft Word, knowing that with a few clicks I could just erase this chapter and the chapter before it. But happen they did and the ramifications of those events continue to this day.
There are so many memories of that period flying round in my head – all disjointed, all muddled up. I remember being in one hospital endlessly laughing with other patients as we sat around one evening watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the TV room, casting each other in the different roles, the irony of our surroundings making it all the funnier. I remember the kindness of nurses who sat with me at 4.00 a.m. while thoughts swirled around my head, never quite making the journey into words. And I remember the air ambulance landing one afternoon, sadly too late for the fellow patient who found their own exit route in the bathroom with a razor blade.
I mentioned earlier that I don’t know the impact of that time on The Boy. He was around three years of age when it all began, too young to remember most of it, I think (and secretly hope). Every weekend he came to visit me in different hospitals, never on the ward, if I’m honest because I didn’t want him seeing the other patients. They were mad – not like me. Invariably we sat next to fish tanks in waiting rooms or, as I got better, in the garden or we went to the park. I looked forward to Saturdays more than anything. Without fail, he’d arrive with his mum. His smile, picking him up, me burying my nose in his neck, the smell of him bringing me closer to reality than any antipsychotic or therapy session ever could. He smelt of home.
I’ve probably said enough. This book, this story – it was never really meant to be about me. I don’t want to whitewash what happened, but I don’t want it to take over everything either. For now, it feels right to leave it there. My recovery from those days of mental illness has been a parallel story, not necessarily a different one. I should state that at the time of writing this, I’m well and have been for quite some time. I haven’t taken any medication for around seven years and I’ve not seen a psychiatrist in over four years. There was no miracle cure – I’m still far too sensitive, prone to mood swings and rubbish at relationships. And, although it pains the working-class man in me to say it, a long time in therapy helped.
It took a while to get used to the process. Sitting there, banging on about myself for fifty minutes. I never told anybody for years where I was vanishing to – sneaking away to spend my time in tiny consulting rooms that always looked identical; two IKEA chairs, a sign about confidentiality and a strategically placed box of tissues. Slowly, over time, with a psychotherapist I learnt to both love and hate in equal measure, I began to make sense of stuff. And maybe that’s the word to best describe what happened. Stuff (I’m sure there’s a more eloquent way to put it, but please bear in mind I originally wanted to write ‘shit’, so let’s look on the word ‘stuff’ as an improvement).
No matter how much I tell myself that what happened wasn’t my fault, every now and again I still feel a pang of guilt from that period, although not so much nowadays. Such is the stigma of mental illness, I suppose. With or without his autism, I will always wonder about the impact that my strange behaviour may have had on The Boy during such an important developmental stage.
As children we often look up to our parents and think they’re going to live forever. We place our hand in theirs and know the world will be OK. It’s only years later that we get a sense of their own fallibility, their own weaknesses. Other people are so often right – there is so much that binds me and The Boy; the shared sense of humour, the impulsiveness, even the same little birthmark we both have. But maybe the biggest thing we share is often overlooked by everyone. It’s our vulnerability.