Prozac or prayers?

There is nothing worse when you're depressed than being told to pull yourself together. The illness is all consuming, the black dog, a thick blanket smothering everything, even joy. And it can descend when you're 'supposed' to be happy, like when you've had a new baby, or your life looks rosy every other way.
  Since joining Twitter I've had snippet conversations with interesting, inspiring people who really do have reasons to be down, but are intent on helping others. My story is no way as deep as some, but I still have one and have sympathy with others who have it and are afraid to admit it.
   I think I was prone to depression or at least melancholy even as a child. I can remember the mournful thoughts from earliest memories. I was third of four children, picked on and teased because I was skinny and serious. While my sisters got into trouble of various sorts, I kept my head down, studied, achieved, was head girl, got into Oxford, sang soprano - but somehow it was never quite enough for the family. Or so it seemed.
   I remember some moments  in my first year at Oxford when I sat in my lovely room in Turl Street, listening to voices and footsteps rollicking past, and hiding from the knock on the door. Why? Low grade depression. Pressure of being surrounded by brilliant people. Nearly dropped out, but didn't, and bizarrely, in my third year when I had finals and was dumped by a longterm boyfriend, I was really happy. Why? Because a gorgeous first year made me feel beautiful again. That sounds shallow, but it worked.
  More seriously I became v depressed as a single mum. The usual symptoms (though I didn't know it) of waking early with thumping heart and feeling of dread. My little boy came in wearing his school uniform and said, 'Mummy can you do up my top button?' I stared at him. Couldn't even do his button for him. Realised I needed help, for his sake, as well as mine. Took him to school and went straight to my GP who realised I knew what I was talking about, and prescribed Prozac.
   Some say you can be addicted, but I was only on it for a year. But in that year the sun came out. I likened it to being a boat being pushed gently off the shore into the ocean, calm seas, not storms. I made plans. Sold my house, moved my boy and back to London (see previous blog - it didn't pan out as I planned, but at least I had planned), got in touch with his father and saw them grow close. So much more.
   What I'm saying is recognise it. Tackle it head on, before someone close to you suffers. And don't dismiss medication. It's not for everyone, and some react badly. Don't come off it without guidance. But when it works, boy, for some of us

 it really is the answer.

 

Stabbing the Rain

This is the cover of my collection of short stories. Available on Amazon in e-book and print. Enjoy!

Single Mum to Host Mum

This is random in the sense that it's not chronological, but although I want to pursue those earlier memories of single parenthood, I've been deflected to write a little about how to beat this wretched recession by having lodgers. In our case foreign language students.
   The little boy who I dragged to London aged seven was now 19 and off to do an art foundation course. We needed money to pay for his fees and accommodation and brutal as it sounds we now had a double room going begging. We could put his two little brothers in together to release the little back bedroom and take in lodgers! Now this scheme is anathema to most people who wouldn't dream of sharing their house with a stranger. But needs must when the devil drives and it's actually as easy as pie. I had done it before, when as a single mother I did it, when G was little, in my wee house in Andover. I had two lodgers, swiftly but carefully vetted by me, always male, and it was fantastic. They helped with the mortgage, put up shelves and bunkbeds, even babysat sometimes, and buggered off back to their own families at weekends.
Not so foreign students, who can stay for up to six months and need food and conversation. it's not a job for the chronically anti-social or those who are married to a chronic anti-social. Most wives could do it, very few husbands, but mine is great and I've often left him having a convoluted conversation about corporal punishment or the finer points of cricket with a pair of bemused Koreans. Or, just occasionally, a very handsome Spaniard..
 

Streets not paved with gold

My intro to Twitter has had me wandering up and down all sorts of highways and byways, in and out of people's life experiences, and in particular one today has struck me, about the challenges of being a single mother which takes me right back to the days when I was a single mother with an adorable little boy who didn't meet his father till he was seven. How that came to pass will wait another day, because it's one hell of a story.
This is about thinking that although he was born in Hampshire I felt my real home was London. So when he was nearly 7 we moved back there, back to the place where I had been footloose, fancy free, and indeed where I got pregnant in the first place. I assumed my lonely single life would magically change just by being in the big city. In Hampshire all my friends were married - although 20 years on they are all, without exception, divorced.
   My little fourth floor attic (87 steps) was in Earls Court. £80,000 odd in 1995. My God, last time I looked it was selling for £400,000 or so. Tiny, studio, two bedrooms carved out of it, a floor bowed in the middle, leaking roof whenever it rained. Worse leaks for the neighbours beneath whenever I used the washing machine. I  hoped it might become a kind of atelier love nest, perched as it was above the District Line, rattled as it was by the vibrations of the Piccadilly Line deep below the ground. And located as it was right in the middle of Earl's Court , then an affordable slice of South Kensington full of rangy South Africans, but probably now tarted up out of anyone who isn't an oligarch.
   But actually life as a single mother was not as I'd envisaged when I returned to the haunts of my carefree youth. Because it meant finding not only good local schools for my son G but also childminders to fetch him after school, as I was working full time. I cringe to remember two of those childminders, total strangers, one an Italian grandmother living in a weird kind of garlic-flavoured shrine off Redcliffe Gardens where you had to push through endless tinkling curtains to get to the hunched figure of your son doing his homework at a vast mahogany table large enough to lay out your grandmother. Another was the single mother of a vast child who lived at the top of a council block on North End Road, and that's where G got his first taste of computer games. Eventually I found a nursery called Pippa Poppins in Fulham Road which was a kind of oasis of trad calm and efficiency. Amongst other amazing services such as providing hotel accommodation soley geared towards kids, it picked up your child from school, took it back to the yellow painted house near Fulham Broadway, gave him tea and supervised his homework. A lifesaver until I got a job opposite our flat and was able to walk to the school to pick him up.
   If you're a single mother in London you can't just nip on impulse to the City to have champagne with your exceedingly rich, unmarried, childless mates from university, because you must first get a babysitter. You can't just mooch down the Kings Road shopping because you don't have any money. You can't bring a man back to the flat because he's likely to be accosted by a little ruffle haired boy waving toast at him and demanding, 'Are you going to marry my Mummy?'