Years ago OH and I had a stillborn daughter. She died three days before she was born at 3 weeks.
It's a bit of surreal experience sitting around for three days knowing that the child into which you have invested so much hope is dead and still inside you. And you do much but sit and wait, and will the hands of the clock to go backwards to a time when the baby was still alive and whatever it is you blame yourself for doing or not doing which caused them to die, you get a chance to do or not do.
All you can really do is make sure you don't forget to take something like a bonnet, or the shoes you bought because when that child gets wheeled away you ain't seeing it again: except in a coffin. So the bag gets packed and repacked with the stuffed toy you think she would like the most, the blanket you knitted, the rattle one of you bought in the excitement of first being pregnant. And between the tea and the meaningful silence, it all helps to pass the time.
The birth was pretty normal: except for the private room, the specialist midwife, and another midwife standing guard at the door and occasionally popping in to offer assistance. It was planned, so it was induced. There's the grunting and the screaming. The blokes fingertips gripped to whiteness as he's told to "shut the duck up," and "this is all your fault, you silly bastard." If anything the specialist midwife is calmer and more professional than the chatty cows that attend live births, but the process is the same. Until you get to the delivery and our daughter was there, and all there is is silence
Two months before my daughter was born dead my father had died. Personally I blame myself for gong to the funeral, the unborn shouldn't mix with the dead, but obligations to family got in the way.
Three nights after the birth my father and my daughter appeared to both OH and myself. I awoke in the middle of the night, to see my father standing at the end of the bed holding my daughter: they both appeared happy, and there was something comforting to knowthat they had both passed and were waiting for us. I know OH saw it to when we woke up OH said, "the weirdest thing happened last night." And then described exactly what I had seen.
Our daughter became a presence in our lives. Not like a ghost or a poltergeist, and it wasn't constant, nor was it scary or particularly odd. It became a bit of a joke; the wind would blow a door, or a can would fall out of the cupboard, and we'd say "she's at it again." She'd appear in dreams, always at the age she would have been; sometimes with my father, sometimes on her own, it was like she wanted us to know she was alright, and not worry.
I know she was at the birth of our eldest, because she couldn't restrain herself and touched my hand.
The youngest was the spit of her, they could have been twins. She would have been nearly six by then. And it wasn't as if we cared for her any less, but for some reason she was felt less and less unless the last time I saw her was in a dream, she and my father were holding hands walking away from me down a sandy track toward a wood.
It's been about ten days since they took the children. The first night I managed because a friend called round to listen to my woes and dose me up with gin. Which did the trick so far as putting me to sleep, but did nothing for the sheer hollow loneliness of waking up. I made myself feel better by ringing the local crisis hotline. They didn't bother with the usual "go on convince us you're a nutter", they just cut to the chase with the seven or so questions. When it got to the one about 'do you wish to harm anyone else', that was easy, the mother-in-law. Though clearly my expressed wish to "punch her bleeping lights out" was deemed not serious enough to warrant a visit from the men in green lanyards.
Which left precisely duck all to do but once more engage in the endless round of social workers, doctors, solicitors, trying to sort out the bank, dealing with OH, ranting at OH via text, email, and Whatsapp. contacting OH to say "I didn't mean what I said, I'm just pissed off" via text, email and Whatspp, contacting the school, talking to year heads, and on and on and on. It's amazing how much energy you have when you have stopped eating and drinking and just rely on plastering your body with nicotine patches and fueling yourself with roll-ups.
Between bouts of cold demonic rage at the next impossible hurdle invented in this game of how much can the system torture you, I wasn't so irrational as to know I needed sleep. So I rang the doctor. She has been incredibly understanding, patient, and kind. After promising that I wouldn't do anything daft,she prescribed me sleeping pills; five of them. First thing I did was check if you could overdose with five of them, but according all the websites I could find, you can't. Unless you down then with a refreshing cocktail of weedkiller and bleach, the worst that can happen is after a deep sleep you run down the high street twirling your knickers over your head.
Someone else who deserves a medal is the solicitor. As far as I can tell she isn't being paid, but whenever there is an issue, particularly with the twit social worker (who is either in cahoots with the mother-in-law or is being manipulated by her), if I give her a call, and providing she isn't in court, she'll call me back to give me the run down on the latest illegal or shady stunt being pulled. She's also very useful on keeping tabs on any orders being made by the courts, and since there are none, she's handy for pointing out when to tell twit social worker that he can go duck himself.
So having been provided with the said five sleeping pills, by my eldest on the way back from school to catch a bus to the witches castle,, I settle in for the night, As suicide plans go it is more like Mousetrap or Je Suis Fronteires than something that actually might work. The aim of he game is to somehow stage my death soas it will appear to be an accident. Obviously being a fan of Casualty, impaling myself on a broomstick due to falling off a stepladder while getting Christmas decorations out of the loft may in principle sound like a good plan; until you factor in what part fiv sleeping pills should play.
When do I take them? Should I try one, stand on the stepladder until I feel drowsy and then if not drowsy enough take another? Suppose I am so drowsy that the broomstick is poorly positioned?
I mean falling off a stepladder is hardly likely to make the local paper, let alone bring down the entire system of the British state.
So I wander round the house, occasionally having a tidy, in search of instruments of death that a drowsy person might use to deliberately stage their accidental death. The mallet I find looks promising, the trouble is that blooming hurts if you use even the least amount of force when trying to dash your brains in. I conclude that as a tool, your mallet, is more useful for tailors styling Harry's mangina than for an heroic crusader for justice: who just wants their children back.
Eventually I end up back at the campsite by the fireplace in the living room that I have set up as the base camp. After a brief attempt at self-murder, with an imaginary dagger and a quick go at a cobweb with a duster, I conclude that suicide isn't really such a good idea: I've got too many things to do in the morning.
And besides it wouldn't be fair on the nice doctor who prescribed me the sleeping pills. She has gone out of her way to help me. She has shown me nothing but kindness. What right have I to abuse the faith and trust she has shown in me? She didn't have to do it. She didn't have to do half of the things she has actually done for me, that has helped me through this crisis. So I decide to do the right thing. Take the pills as prescribed, take the opportunity to get some sleep and see what new disaster befalls me in the morning.
Fast forward five days, and the pills are gone. And not only are they gone, but on the first night pill less I get two hours sleep. And it is all back, the anxiety, the loneliness, the endless worry. It isn't helped by the obvious stupidity of twit social worker thinking this arrangement could ever work. You've got the eldest doing full days at school, then working until god knows what hour and getting back to the witches castle at half past one in the morning, and then doing it the next day. Meanwhile the youngest is being subjected to bizarre experiments by the mother-in-law to prove her theory that the way to good parenting i to ram food children don't like down their throat in order give them a varied and interesting diet. Meanwhile her erstwhile test subject is layed up in hospital with a fucked up liver having put her novel theory to the test with handfuls of pain.
But twit social worker appears to think this is all fine.
Now one of the advantages of sleep is that you get chance to formulate plans - one of the disadvantages of sleeping at the base camp is that I have fucked up my knee, so that whilst my body is rested, my knee is locked, and I am hobbling around like a little old imp. But being an impof of the faeriefolk, and having a plan, means that my brilliant new strategy - developed by me during one of my late night talking to myself sessions - is to say duck it. If they want to piss me about, then I will piss them about. I will force the issue so they have to take me to court, and frankly by this point I couldn't give a tit because I've got a bad knee.
And thanks to the advice of my solicitor, I formally declare my opposition to the current arrangements. 72 hours has long since passed. I do not consent. And there is a hole lot of other stuff that has been going on that I formally state I do not consent to. And all of a sudden this is going to cost social services money.
Oh and I may not have the brains of Katie Price or the armpit hair of Meghan Markle but I do credit myself with being at least as smart as Collen Rooney. And to test my theory that the mother-in-law has indeed been using OH's tablet I gave her, which has OH's email open and signed in, I have been feeding OH false information. And snippets of this false information as been trickling back to me via my spies my children.
However, I have a new problem, the sleeping pills are gone.
The first night I manage two hours sleep, but going into the second by a rough calculation, since finishing the sleeping pills Ihave managed two hours sleep in a little over fifty hours as I settle into bed. I have just fallen asleep when there is a loud knocking at the door. "If that's the bleeping police again," I mutter, my gammy knee clicking into place with excruciating pain. It's not just sleep I'm lacking, I haven't eaten in days, and my ungainly gait is further hampered by my knickers being one leg in and one leg out. Victims of bomb blasts have more style than me than night. But we hardy crusaders for justice need only ten nicotine patches adhered to hairless surfaces to endure where lesser mortals would feign dare go.
It turns out not to be the police but my eldest, stopping by at the end their shift, as they race to catch the last bus, to make sure I am still not looking after myself. And they bring news. In response to one of my cunningly phrased false emails, she has admitted that it was indeed her who reported me to the police, and that she was the got the police to take children, on account of twit social worker allowing her to be present at a supposedly confidential meeting during which confidential discussion of money was had. And that the reason the police had acted when they did was because she knew that once I had the money, which I did because on that day I'd had Universal Credit confirmed, the stuff the police used to justify removing the children would be gone; stuff that OH had hoarded. Proving my theory.
It was welcome news, if it did somewhat piss me the duck off.
Especially as I knew that I would be up all night fuming about it, and thus it would be near seventy two with three hours sleep, by the time I had spent the day dealing with the people and stuff that I still had to deal with. And even then there no guarantee I would sleep, and it was another twenty four hours beyond that before the doctor would prescribe me more sleeping pills.
I may have only had one leg in my knickers but the arse dropped out out of my world.
This time it wasn't going to be Mousetrap. This time it wasn't going to be mallets, or stepladders, or broom handles. I didn't know what it would be but the fact is when you face pure evil like the mother-in-law, a creature so bitter and twisted that she makes police canteen banter look funny... well...
Well there is another child. A child I have always loved. A child I have never heard laugh, except in dreams.
I can go to her.
And none of the "caring professions" can persecute me there.
But this time when I went looking for instruments of self destruction, I went to the bedroom: duck knows why! And amid the random crap that had accumulated over the years, in the midst of yet more random crap I found the white broderie anglaise dress that OH and I had hummed and harred about all those years ago, when we were deciding what to take to the hospital. duck knows why OH kept it. It was a pretty enough dress, I think we got it off the market. Which in the end was the reason she wasn't cremated in it, The other one had better cotton.
I didn't do anything that they do in films like stroke it or whatnot. I just threw it back in the box in the bottom of the wardrobe.
But there were weird things happening, and sure it was because I was sleep deprived. The main one was if I turned the thermostat to max, by the time I went back it was turned right down. It had been going on for days.
I didn't find what I was looking for. But I was so bleeping stone cold sober that I was scaring myself.
There was absolutely nothing to stop me. The kids wouldn't find me, I wasn't betraying anyone, like the doctor: nothing. And it's not like I hadn't seen what it was like.
But like any good smoker, it's always best to have a fag before making any decision. And by the time I finished, the lucid purpose engendered in the sobriety had subsided. So I rang the Crisis line. If they started goading me, and saying tit about wasting their time, I determined to hang up the phone and just do it.
The long and the short was that they didn't piss me about, even though I was saying stuff like "something in this is house is telling me to find it," and "I don't know but it will tell me the right decision." Ah, they don't write 'em like that anymore.
So they agree I'm nuts, and that a psychiatric nurse will come and and see me, and not do anything daft, and "yes, yes, there's no need to apologize." and "you have a nice night too, and if you need anything else just call us back."
And there she was, nearly seventeen, standing beside me. And I'm sitting on the floor, looking up at her. Didn't do nothing. Didn't say nothing. And when I looked again she was gone.
By now I just bleeping knackered. Sat cross-legged so my knee don't hurt. Just staring at the carpet and thinking "if that twit social worker complains I haven't hoovered..."
So text the kids to tell them I love them, and start going through the book I keep of who I have to ring, and who I have to chase up, and phone numbers, and reference numbers, and who I have to speak to at what time, and what hat I am supposed to be wearing when I speak to them.
Th morning goes smoothly enough, my knee i still giving me jip, but it's not to bad as long as you don't laugh.
And then just after dinner the twit social worker calls. the mother-in-law can't look after the children anymore, can I think of someone they can stay with. So I say I'll have to speak to the solicitor, and he's like "no I need a name now, I am just going into a meeting." So I hang up on the silly fucker. But before I can ring the solicitor, OH Whatsapps me to say the latest blood tests show the liver function is normal and the damage isn't as severe as they thought. So I tell OH about mother-in-law, and ask OH if they can think of anyone.
Then the psychiatric nurse rings and wants to arrange a meeting, and he's a right pushy sort, and I tell him that he'll have to call be back later. He gets on his high horse and starts going off on one. So I tell him I'm in the middle of something, and he says, "but we are here to help you, How can we help you?" I tell him to buy me a bottle of gin. OH messages me suggesting the perfect person to take the kids. The psychiatric nurse rings back but I decline the call. Then it's the charity I'd rung fr a quote on furniture. Th chap is right blokey, and says that because I am such a nice person he's going knock fifty quid off the quote. So I say it's a deal, and I'll ring him back later because we need to use my eldest's card. And that's all fine
And I'm thinking what the duck is going on?
The psychiatric nurse rings again and I decline again because OH is back on Whatsapp saying the perfect person will do it. So I ring twit social worker and leave a message. Next the doctor rings, it's not the doctor I've been dealing with, but she sounds nice, like the sort of woman who runs a cake stall at the village fete, and she wants my details to refer me to the food bank: so that's sorted.
And it just goes on like this all afternoon. Call after call, message after message, of people ringing to either give me money, knock money off, agree to stuff that yesterday they'd crawl over broken glass to deny me. Even the psychiatric nurse was nice about it after I rang the crisis line to pass on a message that I wasn't being rude I was just busy.
And I can't stop crying.
- showing off his new pube hair cut (yep I did say ‘hair’)
