The Open Wound : An Essay on Melancholy and Motherhood
Marrying the immediate intimacy of autobiography, with insights of social
commentary, this creative non-fiction unpacks the experience of the Empty Nest
I’m crying as I write this.
Today, for the first ever time, I mourned the fact that I no longer go to Cheeky Monkeys.
My heart actually aches with pain, as I pass (on my way to my weekly circuits class) the
sweaty Badminton hall where I watched my son stumble around with a plastic hoop, run
after a red ball and fight other toddlers over whose turn it was to roll the Bob the Builder
truck over the stained play mat.
I have literary passed that hall every week, for years in fact, and never thought of this.
What’s more, I hated Cheeky Monkeys. I’m not even sure my son liked it.
Like all enforced play spaces, toddler groups sort out the social wheat from the sensitive
chaff, and my son was never the centre of the party. Neither was I. I never enjoyed the
custard creams or brick-orange tea that stewed in the pot for the whole two hours.
What I wouldn’t give for a cup of it now, though.
How often did we go? When it rained, perhaps, and there was nothing else to do in our
out-of-season seaside hometown, between the long hours of waking and dinner, when myhusband retuned from work to complain about how busy his day had been, starving
hungry, and too tired to do bath time.
Or maybe when another mum made the optimistic suggestion that we could chat, while the
kids played. Fat chance of that. Often the kids only played after being cajoled, and all we
mums talked about was the kids. How much they ate, how they slept, what they weighed.
It was exhausting and tedious, so why do I mourn it now?
Of course, it isn’t Cheeky Monkeys I miss.
It’s my son, filling up this house with his teenage grunts and sweaty trainers and beautiful
face. Did I mention how beautiful he is? He has green eyes and the widest smile, and
somehow seeing that each day made the world seem brighter and my day happier.
He’s not dead, he’s at university. That ivory palace, up on the hill of success that we
climbed to beside him, stumbling or scathing our knees along the way. School projects at
midnight and homework the dog ate and dyslexia, all hurdles on the perilous journey to the
dream destination. It was something I wanted for him more than I wanted anything for
myself, though I often feared he wouldn’t get there.
But he made it, he’s in campus housing, and here I am, thinking about those long-ago
plastic toys in the Badminton court, which they’re going to pull down soon, it’s so
depressingly broken. And I hated it anyway. I did.
So why is it so hard to think about without crying?
And here’s another thing: I don’t cry. Didn’t ever cry. But now there’s no stopping me, it’s
like a trick I’ve suddenly learned to do, and I just can’t stop. The tears come hot and fast,
triggered easily. A film, a memory – even a word. That word – son – even typing it right now,
my throat swells.
I do know I’m pathetic.I could see a doctor. Should see a doctor, probably, but what to say? My son is at a great
university, in a beautiful city, and I’m sad.
Oh, well, pass her the tissues and let’s see the next person who has a real problem, like
cancer. Or alcoholism.
I’ve thought about drinking, but I stopped six years ago, and that was because of him too. I
should name him, if I’m writing about him. He has a beautiful name, I’ve never regretted
that name. Never thought about an alternative that would be better. But I don’t want it here,
not out of protecting him or my own privacy, but because it hurts my heart and I don’t think
I can go on telling this story if I have to keep stopping.
So let’s say ‘my boy’.
I don’t like that, I’ll change it. If I was one of my own writing students, I’d say, “no, give him
a name. You can’t keep saying ‘my boy.’ Call him something else, for god’s sake. So I may
come back to this, you can see my process as I’m writing. Raw and honest and direct. No
secrets here, on this page.
There must be books about this. Right? I mean, books are where we turn for solace and
advice. To laugh. I do, all the time. When I was a depressed teenager, I read The Bell Jar.
When my heart was broken, I read Romeo and Juliet (which wasn’t the best idea, granted,
but it did at least it convinced me he wasn’t ‘the one’). When I was pregnant, I read Rachel
Cusk’s A Life’s Work and felt seen. I understood how my life would forever be divided by
birth, there would always be the part before I was ‘mum’, and the part after, where I am
forever changed. So where was the book to console me now that am facing this third part
of my life, when I am reverting back, not ‘mum’ anymore, at least not daily and hourly like
before. Now, it is no longer my defining role, and other possibilities are opening up,
because the job I’ve been doing for two decades has just made me redundant. I am a
vacancy, waiting to be filled.Last week, I found a book, about motherhood, but it covered the toddler years. I tossed it
across the room, chastising the author for her moaning. “It’s short,” I wanted to tell her, “it’ll
be over before you know it – enjoy it and quit moaning about the supermarket runs with the
baby in the buggy. I would love that right now – swap with me!”
This is unfair, I know. The days are long in that stage of motherhood, even if the years are
short.
Eventually, I did find an ‘Empty Nest’ book, somewhere in the bowels of a bookshop in the
Self-Help section. The first line was “it is generally accepted that woman who cope well
with children leaving the nest are always…”
I stopped reading and closed the cover.
Because I knew, sure as eggs is eggs, how that line will finish: more fulfilled. Have a life
outside their children’s lives. Have a successful career.
You know what this sounds like to me?
It’s your fault! Yes, you at the back, who didn’t give enough to her career or in creating
hobbies, you are the problem. You’ve invested far too much into your children and now
you’re one of those mums we see on TV who can’t let go and becomes a nightmare
mother-in-law. You’re going to be the bitch from Hell who tells your daughter-in-law to let
the baby cry, or pick it ip, or dress it warmer. Aren’t you?
Well, you know what? I call bullshit.
Because I do have a life outside of my children, but they are also the axis on which it turns.
I thought that was what everyone wanted – for two decades society seemed to like it, only
now it’s all too much and I need to ease off. Because I’ve done it wrong. You’ve done it
wrong.
Whether its the supermarket tantrum or this, it’s our fault. Your fault.
Who coined that term anyway – ‘empty nest’? I bet it was a man.Mother’s Day.
I wake with my stomach tight and churning as the watery light peeks through the blinds.
My first thought is that for the first mother’s day since he was born I won’t see my boy.
This won’t do, this bleakness, so I throw back the duvet and pad downstairs to make
coffee, only to be affronted by silence. Where is he? Where is my girl?
My husband is in the lounge with the door closed. When I open it I see that he is naked, on
his yoga mat, trying to copy the shoulder-stand that the man on his iPad is perfecting. The
Empty Nest, I assume, hits men differently and my husband has been hitting the gym.
The man on the iPad is, himself, perfect and on a Californian beach as he sends out calm
instructions to my husband in the grey-light of our lounge. “Just ease yourself up, and hold
for as long as possible then a little more. You are building strength.”
“Happy Mother’s Day,” my husband says, from somewhere behind his naked thighs and
scrotum.
“Thanks.”
I close the door, and find my phone. No texts. It’s early yet. I’ll make coffee, I’ll get dressed.
I’ll try not to think about ever other Mother’s Day I’ve had.
My first Mother’s Day, as a mother, my girl was just four weeks old. I was so raw and new
to it all, still bloody from the battle, milk gushed from my heavy breasts but I did not weep. I
was warned, by the midwife and the health by health visitors and friends who’d already
visited Motherland, that the hormones would drop and I’d be unable to stop crying but it
never happened.
I am not a cryer, as I said. Until now.
That first year, my husband made the coffee, as I sat in the armchair – a velvet wing-
backed chair that was handy for feeding because I could balance a book on one arm, and
a mug of coffee on the other, if my husband wasn’t around. He is paranoid about spillages,
and I was one big spillage then, with my maxi-pads and breast-pads. With the coffee camea gift, a set of two silver bracelets each with a tiny heart. One was my size, the other was a
small replica for my baby girl. We were matched, a cute pair, and I wore my bracelet long
after my girl outgrew hers.
This Mother’s Day I sat in the kitchen and checked my phone. No messages. The kids
have never been early risers. Nor me, until this last year, when the nighttime became a
place where the television channel was immediately switched to horror and the world
became threatening and scary. I wake early, these days, and I’m not good at it. Really I
should be asleep and it makes my thoughts fractious, especially when I check Facebook
and see all of the smiley mummies with trays on their laps opening hand-made cards. This
isn’t quite true, because there are other posts too, and I see that things have shifted since
Davina McColl started talking about Menopause, and we are now allowed to drop some of
the pretence.
A writer I know – not in person but on Social Media – posts a piece about being childless on
Mother’s Day. It is moving and raw and makes me feel like shit. Who am I to say this is
loss, when I have two healthy kids who are doing exactly what I hoped they would? It’s not
their fault I’ve suddenly changed tack and becoming an emotional mess when I find a
rogue sock under the sofa.
I reason with myself that we are in a different time now. My feelings are valid, it’s okay to
share. And I want to – I need to know if there are others out there, feeling like this, wrecked
on the rocks of redundancy.
My husband, now wearing pants, comes into the kitchen for a glass of water. He notices
my face. “What’s up?”
A variety of responses goes through my brain. I shrug. “Nothing.”
“Do you want a surprise?”
I brighten and actually look towards the door. “Is my boy coming home for the day?”
My husband frowns. Then smiles. “No, but he sent you something. I’ll get it.”When he leaves the room I lower my head, relived that I am not forgotten. I hope for
something heartfelt, a message to fill the absence. Maybe a gift – my boy is good at gifts,
one year he bought me a necklace from a local jewellery designer before she became
popular, and he exchanged emails with her to get his choice right. One Christmas he
bought me the best trainers I’ve ever owned. He’s thoughtful, he takes time…
“Here ya go.”
The envelope is placed in front of me and I can see it’s from Moonpig meaning he will
have added a photo.
I open it, and slip out the card with has a cute bear and a rabbit on the front. I have nothing
against these animals but we are not bear and rabbit people. I went to three different card
shops to buy a card for my own mum, and rejected many bear cards, searching for a
glamorous design that I knew she’d prefer.
I open the card, and see a typescript message:
Dear Mum,
Happy Mother’s Day. Hope you have a great day.
Thank you for everything you do for me. Sorry I couldn’t be with you today.
There is a photo too, a grainy one taken when we lived in America. A Mother’s Day photo,
taken on the beach, back when we were an intact family. I can hardly make my expression
out but I remember the day, driving down to Santa Cruz and Capitola, going to a strange
cabin among the redwoods where we stood on tables and the wonky floors became level.
My heart hurts. I want him to call, I want to hear his voice, but I won’t call him. I’ll wait.
While I wait I do something stupid.I take a photo of the card – the message inside – next to a photo of my boy from primary
school. Blue jumper, scruffy hair, teeth too big for his gums. I post this on Instagram, with a
message of how sad I feel.
I realise it looks like he’s died, so I add a couple of pictures from our recent trip to see him
in the beautiful city: see, there he is! It’s okay really.
I show the post to my husband.
“You need to snap out of it,” he says.
Women are always told to snap out of it. I imagine this is exactly what Freud said to Dora
before he labelled her an hysteric. In fact, I think I’m hysterical right now, if the definition is
out of control of my feelings.
Freud’s essay on Mourning and Melancholia is useful for drawing the distinction between
those experiencing the grief at the loss of a loved one (mourning) and those feeling the
loss of a child who is still very much alive, but no longer in the home. He identifies the
feeling of melancholy as being connected to the loss of an ‘object’, be that an unrequited
love object, or a country, an ideal…this wide scope serves for the theories in the essay to
be applied to other losses, such as childlessness.
Whereas Freud understands mourning as the natural reaction to a death, he finds
melancholy more troubling, as at its heart is the contradiction that what is longed for may
be both lost and close at hand.
The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love (eg in the
case of a betrothed girl who has been jilted). In yet other cases one feels justified in
maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly that
it is that has been lost. (p245)
Empty nest melancholy is greeted with a range of reactions, but a prominent one is
incredulity. “He’s not dead!” says my husband. And maybe your husband. Certainly, therecurring motif is that a loss has not really taken place, and to give credit where it is due, at
least Freud recognises the feelings of loss in a case like this.
His understanding may fall short at points, but he does at least recognise that: Melancholia
is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in
contradiction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.
(p245)
And this is the key to the problem, that the person experiencing the loss is at odds with
others around her, because what is being mourned is not just the child who is no longer
sleeping in the bedroom upstairs, but the role of motherhood that has irrevocably changed.
Two decades of placing our children at the centre of our world, and suddenly the world is
spinning without an axis. No wonder we feel dizzy.
The melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing
him so entirely. p246
Here we can imagine Freud saying, “just snap out of it, love” or something fancy that
means the same things. Just snap out of it – well, if only. Take a walk, have a bath. See a
show, go shopping. Just do something to fix it because your sadness is puzzling and also
a tad inconvenient.
“Sorry.”
Don’t women always apologise for their feelings? Come on Freud, help me get it, give me
a cure. Doctor, heal thyself.
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego
itself. (p246)
That’ll show you. It’s your ego, your libido, your uncontrolled child inside, your narcissism.
Maybe I’m jumping ahead here, but what I wanted was understanding and I’m starting to
feel judged, Sigmund. Can’t you help me? I’m tearful and touchy and my sleep is all over
the shop…This picture of a delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness.
(p246)
Perfect, the icing on the case, and what was that about moral inferiority? Freud is on a roll
now, describing how the melancholics berate themselves. What sounds to me like lack of
confidence or self-esteem – and the crowd pleasing need to say “sorry” – is re-evaluated
here as part of the problem. It’s your fault, just snap out of it, and quit being so hard on
yourself. Have some pride, woman!
A good, capable, conscientious woman will speak no better of herself after she develops
melancholia than one who is in fact worthless; indeed, the former is perhaps more likely to
fall ill of the disease than the latter, of whom we too should have nothing good to say.
(p247)
On the continuum of worthlessness, who can say where Freud would place us? This
baffling statement leaves us melancholics in a state of not knowing, but at least it does
confirm that melancholy delivers a blow to the self esteem. Since my nest fell silent, I’ve
been questioning and second guessing decisions I made years ago – small decisions like
selling the pram, big ones too like moving overseas – and I wonder if this is me not having
‘anything good to say’ about myself? Freud describes it as being crushed by remorse and
self-reproach (p247) and that resonates. It’s like picking jewels from a pile of dung, this
search for meaning amid an essay that is not aimed at me, or for me, and reeks of old
fashioned sexism.
And judgement. Because, fundamentally, Freud sees the distinction between mourning
(where the loss is real and unequivocal) and melancholy (where is is more opaque) as
being rooted in ego. The ego, of course is one of Freud’s hobby horse and in this essay he
rides it with aplomb.
The self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away
from it on to the patient’s own ego. P248He goes on to give the example of a woman who berates herself as incapable, and pities
her husband for marrying her – in fact, the good doctor says, she is berating him for being
so incapable as to marry her. Isn’t it telling, that the examples he gives, are of women who
are melancholy about relationships – what of the men? Freud is setting his stall out here,
and the customers for the melancholy cure are women. Women who can’t take the loss of
an object, and are turning the feelings towards the object inwards in the only way they
know how, as an act of sadistic self-punishment. I’m paraphrasing, of course.
Here’s the man himself:
The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or
cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it.
(p250)
To be fair, Sigmund does admit that this is just his hunch, he doesn’t have actual proof that
the melancholic is cannibalistically driven as his theory has unfortunately not been
confirmed by observation (p250).
But how much does even the act of putting that theory on the page, make it true? How
many Freudian scholars take it as red that what Freud hypothesised was a fact, and tune
out his caution that it’s not proven? How much has this essay feeds that narrative that
feeling sad in this way is self-indulgent? Not to be taken seriously, not to be indulged.
“Snap out of it, love.” Such self-indulgence is also seen as a luxury, a feeling that would
not exist if the patient was busier, or had more to occupy her brain with. See also: had a
more fulfilling career or hobby.
The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is without doubt enjoyable, signifies just like the
corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends of sadism
and hate. (p251)
Alongside the self-indulgence, then, is the theory that the feelings of loss and sadness are
actually a turning around of the feelings of anger towards the love-object for causing thepain. And, to top it all off, the feeling isn’t even real because: After all, the person who has
occasioned the patient’s emotional disorder, and on whom the illness is centred, is usually
to be found in his immediate environment. (p 251)
The feeling is real enough, though, for Freud to observe it can cause suicidal tendencies
until it ‘passes off’, as he puts it. Such a tempting, delicious phrase, to have the feeling
‘pass off’, if only there was a grid or a time frame to indicate how long away that moment
lies. Right now, I’m in the grip of the circular insanity that Freud identifies as the moving
between melancholia and mania:
The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathartic
energies…from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished. It can
easily prove resistant to the egos wish to sleep. (p253)
I haven’t slept a solid night since September, when the boy left. The last time I felt this
tiredness was when he was a baby. And that too is circular, the feeling of exhaustion
looping me back to that halcyon time, that waking dream, when everything was about milk
and food and shit and sleep and not much else. It was all body then, but now it’s all heart.
What has happened here is that…a large expenditure of psychical energy, long maintained
and habitually occurring, has at last become unnecessary. (p254)
There, in a nutshell, is the situation. We are told, cajoled and persuaded, to make our
children the centre of our universe and then everyone is surprised when we can’t let go,
even when we want to. Even when we know it’s necessary.
Because, at the heart of melancholia, is a contradiction. A loss for a love object that is not
gone, and maybe on the horizon is a new beginning too, leading to ambivalence. This, for
Freud, is what makes melancholia complicated.
And for me too.
When I was the same age as my boy – nineteen – I too was at university, and it was the
first time I thought about melancholy. I was studying Keats, and now, three decades later, Idug out Norton’s Anthology of English Literature to see what I made of Keat’s Ode to
Melancholy.
I was an earnest student, I worked hard, driven by my conviction that I’d snuck under the
radar of the university to win this place, and I liked Keats a lot. His depressive personality
spoke to me, and there are lots of notes on the page in careful fountain ink. I never use a
fountain pen anymore – I should take the habit back up, as my writing looks better than the
scrawls I make these days.
Like Freud, Keats too, is aware of the link between melancholy and suicide:
No, no, go not to Lethe. Neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for it’s poisonous wine.
Our first family holiday after lockdown, we went for a long weekend to Rome. I stood on
the steps where Keats collapsed, thinking of that poor young man who had travelled to
Italy to heal his health, and ended up dying there on the Spanish Steps. John had watched
his brother slowly loose his life to TB, the same disease which would end his own life, in a
strange country, miles from his lover, Fanny Brawne. He was just twenty-five years old.
John knew sadness, his poems are poignant and full of an awareness of just how
temporary life is. But they are also full of warning, that we must ‘seize the day’ and enjoy
all experiences. That sadness is the switch-side of happiness, that one feeling cannot exist
without the other. Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet that parting is such sweet sorrow,
which is a similar idea. This pain we feel, this sadness, is the other side of the coin to love.
It is the proof of our feelings, that we gave enough, that we care. Keats is firm with us:
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on a rainbow of the salt sand-wave (15-16).
Enjoy it, y’all! Revel in it – don’t be ashamed. Perhaps this is the sadism Freud talked
about, when he said melancholy is undoubtably pleasurable.Spurred on by Keats, I enter the boy’s room, to test how it feels. I open the wardrobe and
glut my sorrow, touching the clothes hanging there: the suit he wore to school prom; the
wool jumper I got him for Christmas – why is it here? It’s cold in the beautiful city, he should
have taken it.
I wonder if I’ll cry, and though my heart is heavy and sore my eyes remain dry. I consider
this progress.
This will pass. Freud promises. But until then, how many women struggle alone with this
melancholy, hiding their sadness because it is perceived as indulgent? So here I am,
saying it’s okay. You’re not alone. We’re all in this together, and let’s not snap out of it.
Let’s talk about it.
Ruth Dugdall is a novelist and screenwriter. She is a Royal Literary Fellow, based at
Essex University. She is also a mother.
I’m crying as I write this.
Today, for the first ever time, I mourned the fact that I no longer go to Cheeky Monkeys.
My heart actually aches with pain, as I pass (on my way to my weekly circuits class) the
sweaty Badminton hall where I watched my son stumble around with a plastic hoop, run
after a red ball and fight other toddlers over whose turn it was to roll the Bob the Builder
truck over the stained play mat.
I have literary passed that hall every week, for years in fact, and never thought of this.
What’s more, I hated Cheeky Monkeys. I’m not even sure my son liked it.
Like all enforced play spaces, toddler groups sort out the social wheat from the sensitive
chaff, and my son was never the centre of the party. Neither was I. I never enjoyed the
custard creams or brick-orange tea that stewed in the pot for the whole two hours.
What I wouldn’t give for a cup of it now, though.
How often did we go? When it rained, perhaps, and there was nothing else to do in our
out-of-season seaside hometown, between the long hours of waking and dinner, when myhusband retuned from work to complain about how busy his day had been, starving
hungry, and too tired to do bath time.
Or maybe when another mum made the optimistic suggestion that we could chat, while the
kids played. Fat chance of that. Often the kids only played after being cajoled, and all we
mums talked about was the kids. How much they ate, how they slept, what they weighed.
It was exhausting and tedious, so why do I mourn it now?
Of course, it isn’t Cheeky Monkeys I miss.
It’s my son, filling up this house with his teenage grunts and sweaty trainers and beautiful
face. Did I mention how beautiful he is? He has green eyes and the widest smile, and
somehow seeing that each day made the world seem brighter and my day happier.
He’s not dead, he’s at university. That ivory palace, up on the hill of success that we
climbed to beside him, stumbling or scathing our knees along the way. School projects at
midnight and homework the dog ate and dyslexia, all hurdles on the perilous journey to the
dream destination. It was something I wanted for him more than I wanted anything for
myself, though I often feared he wouldn’t get there.
But he made it, he’s in campus housing, and here I am, thinking about those long-ago
plastic toys in the Badminton court, which they’re going to pull down soon, it’s so
depressingly broken. And I hated it anyway. I did.
So why is it so hard to think about without crying?
And here’s another thing: I don’t cry. Didn’t ever cry. But now there’s no stopping me, it’s
like a trick I’ve suddenly learned to do, and I just can’t stop. The tears come hot and fast,
triggered easily. A film, a memory – even a word. That word – son – even typing it right now,
my throat swells.
I do know I’m pathetic.I could see a doctor. Should see a doctor, probably, but what to say? My son is at a great
university, in a beautiful city, and I’m sad.
Oh, well, pass her the tissues and let’s see the next person who has a real problem, like
cancer. Or alcoholism.
I’ve thought about drinking, but I stopped six years ago, and that was because of him too. I
should name him, if I’m writing about him. He has a beautiful name, I’ve never regretted
that name. Never thought about an alternative that would be better. But I don’t want it here,
not out of protecting him or my own privacy, but because it hurts my heart and I don’t think
I can go on telling this story if I have to keep stopping.
So let’s say ‘my boy’.
I don’t like that, I’ll change it. If I was one of my own writing students, I’d say, “no, give him
a name. You can’t keep saying ‘my boy.’ Call him something else, for god’s sake. So I may
come back to this, you can see my process as I’m writing. Raw and honest and direct. No
secrets here, on this page.
There must be books about this. Right? I mean, books are where we turn for solace and
advice. To laugh. I do, all the time. When I was a depressed teenager, I read The Bell Jar.
When my heart was broken, I read Romeo and Juliet (which wasn’t the best idea, granted,
but it did at least it convinced me he wasn’t ‘the one’). When I was pregnant, I read Rachel
Cusk’s A Life’s Work and felt seen. I understood how my life would forever be divided by
birth, there would always be the part before I was ‘mum’, and the part after, where I am
forever changed. So where was the book to console me now that am facing this third part
of my life, when I am reverting back, not ‘mum’ anymore, at least not daily and hourly like
before. Now, it is no longer my defining role, and other possibilities are opening up,
because the job I’ve been doing for two decades has just made me redundant. I am a
vacancy, waiting to be filled.Last week, I found a book, about motherhood, but it covered the toddler years. I tossed it
across the room, chastising the author for her moaning. “It’s short,” I wanted to tell her, “it’ll
be over before you know it – enjoy it and quit moaning about the supermarket runs with the
baby in the buggy. I would love that right now – swap with me!”
This is unfair, I know. The days are long in that stage of motherhood, even if the years are
short.
Eventually, I did find an ‘Empty Nest’ book, somewhere in the bowels of a bookshop in the
Self-Help section. The first line was “it is generally accepted that woman who cope well
with children leaving the nest are always…”
I stopped reading and closed the cover.
Because I knew, sure as eggs is eggs, how that line will finish: more fulfilled. Have a life
outside their children’s lives. Have a successful career.
You know what this sounds like to me?
It’s your fault! Yes, you at the back, who didn’t give enough to her career or in creating
hobbies, you are the problem. You’ve invested far too much into your children and now
you’re one of those mums we see on TV who can’t let go and becomes a nightmare
mother-in-law. You’re going to be the bitch from Hell who tells your daughter-in-law to let
the baby cry, or pick it ip, or dress it warmer. Aren’t you?
Well, you know what? I call bullshit.
Because I do have a life outside of my children, but they are also the axis on which it turns.
I thought that was what everyone wanted – for two decades society seemed to like it, only
now it’s all too much and I need to ease off. Because I’ve done it wrong. You’ve done it
wrong.
Whether its the supermarket tantrum or this, it’s our fault. Your fault.
Who coined that term anyway – ‘empty nest’? I bet it was a man.Mother’s Day.
I wake with my stomach tight and churning as the watery light peeks through the blinds.
My first thought is that for the first mother’s day since he was born I won’t see my boy.
This won’t do, this bleakness, so I throw back the duvet and pad downstairs to make
coffee, only to be affronted by silence. Where is he? Where is my girl?
My husband is in the lounge with the door closed. When I open it I see that he is naked, on
his yoga mat, trying to copy the shoulder-stand that the man on his iPad is perfecting. The
Empty Nest, I assume, hits men differently and my husband has been hitting the gym.
The man on the iPad is, himself, perfect and on a Californian beach as he sends out calm
instructions to my husband in the grey-light of our lounge. “Just ease yourself up, and hold
for as long as possible then a little more. You are building strength.”
“Happy Mother’s Day,” my husband says, from somewhere behind his naked thighs and
scrotum.
“Thanks.”
I close the door, and find my phone. No texts. It’s early yet. I’ll make coffee, I’ll get dressed.
I’ll try not to think about ever other Mother’s Day I’ve had.
My first Mother’s Day, as a mother, my girl was just four weeks old. I was so raw and new
to it all, still bloody from the battle, milk gushed from my heavy breasts but I did not weep. I
was warned, by the midwife and the health by health visitors and friends who’d already
visited Motherland, that the hormones would drop and I’d be unable to stop crying but it
never happened.
I am not a cryer, as I said. Until now.
That first year, my husband made the coffee, as I sat in the armchair – a velvet wing-
backed chair that was handy for feeding because I could balance a book on one arm, and
a mug of coffee on the other, if my husband wasn’t around. He is paranoid about spillages,
and I was one big spillage then, with my maxi-pads and breast-pads. With the coffee camea gift, a set of two silver bracelets each with a tiny heart. One was my size, the other was a
small replica for my baby girl. We were matched, a cute pair, and I wore my bracelet long
after my girl outgrew hers.
This Mother’s Day I sat in the kitchen and checked my phone. No messages. The kids
have never been early risers. Nor me, until this last year, when the nighttime became a
place where the television channel was immediately switched to horror and the world
became threatening and scary. I wake early, these days, and I’m not good at it. Really I
should be asleep and it makes my thoughts fractious, especially when I check Facebook
and see all of the smiley mummies with trays on their laps opening hand-made cards. This
isn’t quite true, because there are other posts too, and I see that things have shifted since
Davina McColl started talking about Menopause, and we are now allowed to drop some of
the pretence.
A writer I know – not in person but on Social Media – posts a piece about being childless on
Mother’s Day. It is moving and raw and makes me feel like shit. Who am I to say this is
loss, when I have two healthy kids who are doing exactly what I hoped they would? It’s not
their fault I’ve suddenly changed tack and becoming an emotional mess when I find a
rogue sock under the sofa.
I reason with myself that we are in a different time now. My feelings are valid, it’s okay to
share. And I want to – I need to know if there are others out there, feeling like this, wrecked
on the rocks of redundancy.
My husband, now wearing pants, comes into the kitchen for a glass of water. He notices
my face. “What’s up?”
A variety of responses goes through my brain. I shrug. “Nothing.”
“Do you want a surprise?”
I brighten and actually look towards the door. “Is my boy coming home for the day?”
My husband frowns. Then smiles. “No, but he sent you something. I’ll get it.”When he leaves the room I lower my head, relived that I am not forgotten. I hope for
something heartfelt, a message to fill the absence. Maybe a gift – my boy is good at gifts,
one year he bought me a necklace from a local jewellery designer before she became
popular, and he exchanged emails with her to get his choice right. One Christmas he
bought me the best trainers I’ve ever owned. He’s thoughtful, he takes time…
“Here ya go.”
The envelope is placed in front of me and I can see it’s from Moonpig meaning he will
have added a photo.
I open it, and slip out the card with has a cute bear and a rabbit on the front. I have nothing
against these animals but we are not bear and rabbit people. I went to three different card
shops to buy a card for my own mum, and rejected many bear cards, searching for a
glamorous design that I knew she’d prefer.
I open the card, and see a typescript message:
Dear Mum,
Happy Mother’s Day. Hope you have a great day.
Thank you for everything you do for me. Sorry I couldn’t be with you today.
There is a photo too, a grainy one taken when we lived in America. A Mother’s Day photo,
taken on the beach, back when we were an intact family. I can hardly make my expression
out but I remember the day, driving down to Santa Cruz and Capitola, going to a strange
cabin among the redwoods where we stood on tables and the wonky floors became level.
My heart hurts. I want him to call, I want to hear his voice, but I won’t call him. I’ll wait.
While I wait I do something stupid.I take a photo of the card – the message inside – next to a photo of my boy from primary
school. Blue jumper, scruffy hair, teeth too big for his gums. I post this on Instagram, with a
message of how sad I feel.
I realise it looks like he’s died, so I add a couple of pictures from our recent trip to see him
in the beautiful city: see, there he is! It’s okay really.
I show the post to my husband.
“You need to snap out of it,” he says.
Women are always told to snap out of it. I imagine this is exactly what Freud said to Dora
before he labelled her an hysteric. In fact, I think I’m hysterical right now, if the definition is
out of control of my feelings.
Freud’s essay on Mourning and Melancholia is useful for drawing the distinction between
those experiencing the grief at the loss of a loved one (mourning) and those feeling the
loss of a child who is still very much alive, but no longer in the home. He identifies the
feeling of melancholy as being connected to the loss of an ‘object’, be that an unrequited
love object, or a country, an ideal…this wide scope serves for the theories in the essay to
be applied to other losses, such as childlessness.
Whereas Freud understands mourning as the natural reaction to a death, he finds
melancholy more troubling, as at its heart is the contradiction that what is longed for may
be both lost and close at hand.
The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love (eg in the
case of a betrothed girl who has been jilted). In yet other cases one feels justified in
maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly that
it is that has been lost. (p245)
Empty nest melancholy is greeted with a range of reactions, but a prominent one is
incredulity. “He’s not dead!” says my husband. And maybe your husband. Certainly, therecurring motif is that a loss has not really taken place, and to give credit where it is due, at
least Freud recognises the feelings of loss in a case like this.
His understanding may fall short at points, but he does at least recognise that: Melancholia
is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in
contradiction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.
(p245)
And this is the key to the problem, that the person experiencing the loss is at odds with
others around her, because what is being mourned is not just the child who is no longer
sleeping in the bedroom upstairs, but the role of motherhood that has irrevocably changed.
Two decades of placing our children at the centre of our world, and suddenly the world is
spinning without an axis. No wonder we feel dizzy.
The melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing
him so entirely. p246
Here we can imagine Freud saying, “just snap out of it, love” or something fancy that
means the same things. Just snap out of it – well, if only. Take a walk, have a bath. See a
show, go shopping. Just do something to fix it because your sadness is puzzling and also
a tad inconvenient.
“Sorry.”
Don’t women always apologise for their feelings? Come on Freud, help me get it, give me
a cure. Doctor, heal thyself.
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego
itself. (p246)
That’ll show you. It’s your ego, your libido, your uncontrolled child inside, your narcissism.
Maybe I’m jumping ahead here, but what I wanted was understanding and I’m starting to
feel judged, Sigmund. Can’t you help me? I’m tearful and touchy and my sleep is all over
the shop…This picture of a delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness.
(p246)
Perfect, the icing on the case, and what was that about moral inferiority? Freud is on a roll
now, describing how the melancholics berate themselves. What sounds to me like lack of
confidence or self-esteem – and the crowd pleasing need to say “sorry” – is re-evaluated
here as part of the problem. It’s your fault, just snap out of it, and quit being so hard on
yourself. Have some pride, woman!
A good, capable, conscientious woman will speak no better of herself after she develops
melancholia than one who is in fact worthless; indeed, the former is perhaps more likely to
fall ill of the disease than the latter, of whom we too should have nothing good to say.
(p247)
On the continuum of worthlessness, who can say where Freud would place us? This
baffling statement leaves us melancholics in a state of not knowing, but at least it does
confirm that melancholy delivers a blow to the self esteem. Since my nest fell silent, I’ve
been questioning and second guessing decisions I made years ago – small decisions like
selling the pram, big ones too like moving overseas – and I wonder if this is me not having
‘anything good to say’ about myself? Freud describes it as being crushed by remorse and
self-reproach (p247) and that resonates. It’s like picking jewels from a pile of dung, this
search for meaning amid an essay that is not aimed at me, or for me, and reeks of old
fashioned sexism.
And judgement. Because, fundamentally, Freud sees the distinction between mourning
(where the loss is real and unequivocal) and melancholy (where is is more opaque) as
being rooted in ego. The ego, of course is one of Freud’s hobby horse and in this essay he
rides it with aplomb.
The self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away
from it on to the patient’s own ego. P248He goes on to give the example of a woman who berates herself as incapable, and pities
her husband for marrying her – in fact, the good doctor says, she is berating him for being
so incapable as to marry her. Isn’t it telling, that the examples he gives, are of women who
are melancholy about relationships – what of the men? Freud is setting his stall out here,
and the customers for the melancholy cure are women. Women who can’t take the loss of
an object, and are turning the feelings towards the object inwards in the only way they
know how, as an act of sadistic self-punishment. I’m paraphrasing, of course.
Here’s the man himself:
The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or
cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it.
(p250)
To be fair, Sigmund does admit that this is just his hunch, he doesn’t have actual proof that
the melancholic is cannibalistically driven as his theory has unfortunately not been
confirmed by observation (p250).
But how much does even the act of putting that theory on the page, make it true? How
many Freudian scholars take it as red that what Freud hypothesised was a fact, and tune
out his caution that it’s not proven? How much has this essay feeds that narrative that
feeling sad in this way is self-indulgent? Not to be taken seriously, not to be indulged.
“Snap out of it, love.” Such self-indulgence is also seen as a luxury, a feeling that would
not exist if the patient was busier, or had more to occupy her brain with. See also: had a
more fulfilling career or hobby.
The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is without doubt enjoyable, signifies just like the
corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends of sadism
and hate. (p251)
Alongside the self-indulgence, then, is the theory that the feelings of loss and sadness are
actually a turning around of the feelings of anger towards the love-object for causing thepain. And, to top it all off, the feeling isn’t even real because: After all, the person who has
occasioned the patient’s emotional disorder, and on whom the illness is centred, is usually
to be found in his immediate environment. (p 251)
The feeling is real enough, though, for Freud to observe it can cause suicidal tendencies
until it ‘passes off’, as he puts it. Such a tempting, delicious phrase, to have the feeling
‘pass off’, if only there was a grid or a time frame to indicate how long away that moment
lies. Right now, I’m in the grip of the circular insanity that Freud identifies as the moving
between melancholia and mania:
The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathartic
energies…from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished. It can
easily prove resistant to the egos wish to sleep. (p253)
I haven’t slept a solid night since September, when the boy left. The last time I felt this
tiredness was when he was a baby. And that too is circular, the feeling of exhaustion
looping me back to that halcyon time, that waking dream, when everything was about milk
and food and shit and sleep and not much else. It was all body then, but now it’s all heart.
What has happened here is that…a large expenditure of psychical energy, long maintained
and habitually occurring, has at last become unnecessary. (p254)
There, in a nutshell, is the situation. We are told, cajoled and persuaded, to make our
children the centre of our universe and then everyone is surprised when we can’t let go,
even when we want to. Even when we know it’s necessary.
Because, at the heart of melancholia, is a contradiction. A loss for a love object that is not
gone, and maybe on the horizon is a new beginning too, leading to ambivalence. This, for
Freud, is what makes melancholia complicated.
And for me too.
When I was the same age as my boy – nineteen – I too was at university, and it was the
first time I thought about melancholy. I was studying Keats, and now, three decades later, Idug out Norton’s Anthology of English Literature to see what I made of Keat’s Ode to
Melancholy.
I was an earnest student, I worked hard, driven by my conviction that I’d snuck under the
radar of the university to win this place, and I liked Keats a lot. His depressive personality
spoke to me, and there are lots of notes on the page in careful fountain ink. I never use a
fountain pen anymore – I should take the habit back up, as my writing looks better than the
scrawls I make these days.
Like Freud, Keats too, is aware of the link between melancholy and suicide:
No, no, go not to Lethe. Neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for it’s poisonous wine.
Our first family holiday after lockdown, we went for a long weekend to Rome. I stood on
the steps where Keats collapsed, thinking of that poor young man who had travelled to
Italy to heal his health, and ended up dying there on the Spanish Steps. John had watched
his brother slowly loose his life to TB, the same disease which would end his own life, in a
strange country, miles from his lover, Fanny Brawne. He was just twenty-five years old.
John knew sadness, his poems are poignant and full of an awareness of just how
temporary life is. But they are also full of warning, that we must ‘seize the day’ and enjoy
all experiences. That sadness is the switch-side of happiness, that one feeling cannot exist
without the other. Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet that parting is such sweet sorrow,
which is a similar idea. This pain we feel, this sadness, is the other side of the coin to love.
It is the proof of our feelings, that we gave enough, that we care. Keats is firm with us:
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on a rainbow of the salt sand-wave (15-16).
Enjoy it, y’all! Revel in it – don’t be ashamed. Perhaps this is the sadism Freud talked
about, when he said melancholy is undoubtably pleasurable.Spurred on by Keats, I enter the boy’s room, to test how it feels. I open the wardrobe and
glut my sorrow, touching the clothes hanging there: the suit he wore to school prom; the
wool jumper I got him for Christmas – why is it here? It’s cold in the beautiful city, he should
have taken it.
I wonder if I’ll cry, and though my heart is heavy and sore my eyes remain dry. I consider
this progress.
This will pass. Freud promises. But until then, how many women struggle alone with this
melancholy, hiding their sadness because it is perceived as indulgent? So here I am,
saying it’s okay. You’re not alone. We’re all in this together, and let’s not snap out of it.
Let’s talk about it.
Ruth Dugdall is a novelist and screenwriter. She is a Royal Literary Fellow, based at
Essex University. She is also a mother.
photo: saying goodbye, University of Nottingham.
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