Before I Tell You Anything

I was driving Halle to jiu-jitsu when the thought came back to me.

I’d felt slightly off all day. A headache. A bit emotional. That strange discombobulated feeling where nothing is particularly wrong but you don’t feel entirely inside yourself either. I hadn’t really looked after myself properly that day, and somewhere on the drive my mind wandered backwards.

To my mum.

And to something I used to say to her during the enormous arguments we would have.

You have no idea how much thought goes into trying not to upset you.

I remember desperately trying to explain it. The amount of consideration that happened before I spoke to her. How many times I would run something through my head before telling her. How I would think about the wording. The timing. Which details to include. Which details definitely not to include.

If I do this, how will Mum react? If I tell her this, what will she think? Could this become an argument? Will she be offended? Will she misunderstand what I mean? Am I better just not telling her?

I wanted her to understand that I thought about her all the time. Not necessarily in the lovely way somebody might mean when they say that. I mean that she existed as a consideration in an extraordinary number of my decisions.

Whenever I tried to explain this to her, she would tell me the opposite.

“You never think about me.” “You don’t consider me at all.”

There was something particularly maddening about that — because I was standing there trying to describe the amount of space she occupied inside my head, while simultaneously being told that space didn’t exist. There was no way to prove it. How do you provide evidence for all the conversations you had with somebody before they ever happened?

The Wedding Dress

When I got married, I was seven months pregnant. There was nothing scandalous about this in our family. Nobody cared that I was pregnant before I was married. My mum was delighted we were getting married.

What mattered to her was that I had a proper wedding dress. What mattered to me was that I married Ste. That was genuinely about the extent of it.

I have never dreamed about big weddings. I didn’t want hundreds of people watching me walk into a room, or to host everyone, or to spend a fortune feeding people. We were getting married in Skiathos, in Greece, at six o’clock in the evening. I wanted something pretty. Something light. Something I could wear while heavily pregnant without melting in the Greek heat. If somebody had told me I could get married in a nice summer dress and be done with the whole thing, I would have been delighted.

My mum wanted the wedding dress. So I went wedding dress shopping. I hated it. I was about five months pregnant by then and my body was changing constantly. Traditional wedding dresses weren’t really designed for the shape I was becoming, and the entire experience felt completely disconnected from me.

Eventually my mum said that if I couldn’t find anything, I would have to have something made. She would pay. Whatever it cost. There was no limit.

Even that seemingly generous offer came with calculations in my head. Because I knew my mum. Money has always carried enormous weight for her. She grew up without much of it, and scarcity seems to have stayed with her long after her circumstances changed. So while she was saying, “Have whatever you want,” another part of me was already wondering what accepting that might mean later. Would the amount spent eventually come back into another conversation? Would I one day hear how much my wedding had cost? Would generosity become evidence? I didn’t know. And I didn’t particularly want to find out.

So even while being offered everything, I was still trying to take as little as possible.

I found a dressmaker. She told me where I could source appropriate fabric, and Ste and I went together. We found beautiful fabric from a proper textile supplier — white and a very pale blue. For some reason I had always imagined a little blue in my wedding dress. Maybe because we were getting married in Greece. Maybe it was the colour of the sky or the sea in my head.

We bought enough and took it back to my mum’s house.

Her reaction was immediate. She hated it. Not mild dislike, not “I’m not sure about that” — disgust. The fabric was awful. It wasn’t good enough. How could I possibly make a wedding dress from this?

I remember being completely baffled. It was wedding fabric. We hadn’t dragged a pair of old curtains out of a skip. We had gone where the dressmaker had told us to go and bought fabric specifically for the purpose. But suddenly that wasn’t the reality in the room anymore. Her reaction was so enormous that the thing itself began to feel enormous.

That was something I experienced repeatedly growing up. A relatively small event would happen and the emotional response would arrive at a completely different scale. It could feel as though somebody had just discovered I’d done something genuinely terrible. That disproportion was deeply disorientating — because when someone reacts to something with enough disgust or anger or disbelief, you begin to wonder whether you’ve misunderstood the seriousness of what you’ve done. Maybe it really is awful. Maybe I really have made a terrible decision. Maybe everybody else can see something I can’t.

The Fitting

I remember another fitting. My friend Naomi came with me. She was pregnant too, slightly further along than I was, with her second child while I was carrying my first.

The dressmaker had my measurements and had begun turning the fabric into the dress we’d discussed. I tried it on. And it didn’t look good. There wasn’t really any getting around it. It looked a little like an enormous white-and-blue nightdress.

At the time, I blamed my body. I was heavy. I had a large pregnancy bump. I remember thinking that there simply wasn’t anything the poor woman could do to make a dress look beautiful on me. Looking back, I’m not sure why the conclusion had to be that my body was the thing that had failed. I was pregnant. My body was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing. Maybe it was simply the wrong dress. But that wasn’t how I experienced it then.

And my mum’s reaction made everything worse. There are people who become loud when they’re unhappy. My mum could also become quiet. She could withdraw from a room while somehow remaining the most present person in it. The atmosphere would change. It is difficult to describe unless you’ve experienced it. Nothing necessarily had to be said, but the room suddenly carried this enormous sense that something was wrong.

Naomi felt it. The dressmaker felt it. I felt it. Three grown women suddenly standing there thinking: Oh shit. We’ve fucked up.

As though something catastrophic had happened. We hadn’t. A wedding dress hadn’t worked. That was it. But it didn’t feel like that.

Over time, I think I learned something more complicated than simply not wanting to upset my mum. I learned that if she became upset, I might be held responsible for everything that happened afterwards. Her reaction could become my behaviour. Her silence could become my wrongdoing. If an atmosphere descended over everyone, somehow I could find myself standing at the centre of it, wondering what I should have done differently.

The £40 Dress

In the end, after all of it, I bought a dress from ASOS. It cost £40. I paid for it myself. And that was the dress I wore when I married Ste in Greece.

There is something almost absurd about remembering it now.

All that emotion. The bridal shops. The fabric. The dressmaker. The money that could apparently be spent without limit. The feeling that something had gone terribly wrong.

And what I had actually wanted all along was a simple summer dress.

Forty pounds. Mine. No debt attached to it. Financial or otherwise.

And I married Ste. Which had been the whole point.

“It’s Like I Don’t Even Know You”

Years later, when my mum and I had arguments, she would sometimes look at me and say:

“It’s like I don’t even know you. I don’t know this person standing in front of me. I haven’t got a clue who you are.”

And underneath all the noise of the argument, part of me would think: No. You don’t.

Because how could she? I had spent so much of my life deciding which pieces of myself were safe to show her. Before I told her anything, it went through an internal customs desk. This bit can come through. That bit probably shouldn’t. Definitely don’t mention that. Change the wording of this. Wait until she’s in a better mood for that. Maybe don’t tell her at all.

It wasn’t that my entire personality around her was false. It was still me. But it was an edited me. A carefully selected collection of information that I believed stood the best chance of being accepted.

There was a painful logic to it. If the small amount of myself I did show could sometimes be met with such disappointment, judgement or disproportionate reaction, why would I volunteer the rest? There were enormous parts of my life that I knew she wouldn’t understand. Choices she wouldn’t approve of. Things I had done. Things I believed. Versions of myself that didn’t fit the daughter she seemed to want standing in front of her.

So when she said she didn’t know me, there was an awful truth in it. She didn’t. But not because I had deliberately kept myself from her out of cruelty. I had learned to censor myself around her.

A Normal Conversation

I spent a long time believing there was a perfect sentence out there — some exact combination of words, said calmly enough, kindly enough, clearly enough, that would finally make her understand. That hope is probably what made it hit so hard when, about six months ago, I saw a photograph online of a page from a book. The first sentence said:

I cannot even have a normal conversation with my mother.

I felt annihilated by it. The writer described thinking and rethinking what she should share with her mother. It was such a simple description of something I had spent decades trying to explain.

That is what I wanted. A normal conversation. To be able to phone my mum and say something without first having to calculate the possible consequences. To tell her something ridiculous. Something embarrassing. Something I had changed my mind about. Something she’d never have chosen for herself. Something that made no sense. Something completely ordinary. And for it just to be information. Not evidence. Not ammunition. Not a reflection of my character. Not something requiring scrutiny. Just a thing her daughter told her.

I have always envied women who describe their mothers as their best friends. Not because I think mothers and daughters have to be best friends, but because of the ease I imagine exists inside that relationship. The ability to say: You will never believe what I did today — without running the next twenty minutes of conversation through your head first.

The Perfect Sentence

I don’t know whether my mum would recognise any of this. Quite possibly not.

We have had versions of this conversation many times. I have told her that I didn’t understand why certain situations produced such enormous reactions. I have told her that the punishment sometimes seemed wildly out of proportion to whatever crime I had supposedly committed. I have tried to explain what walking on eggshells felt like from my side of the relationship.

But eventually something else becomes apparent: you can spend an astonishing amount of your life trying to find the combination of words that will finally make another person understand you. There is enormous hope buried inside all that explaining — the hope that somewhere there is one perfect sentence which will make another person say, Oh. Now I understand.

I think I believed in that sentence for a very long time. I’m not sure I do anymore.

The Amount of Thought You Never Saw

Perhaps that was what came to me in the car while Halle sat beside me on the way to jiu-jitsu. Not a revelation about my mum. A revelation about myself.

I had spent an extraordinary amount of my life trying to be an acceptable daughter — trying to predict, to soften, to explain, to stop the atmosphere changing, to avoid the silence, to make sure I hadn’t accidentally done something that would turn an ordinary afternoon into something enormous.

Perhaps my mum never knew how hard I was trying. Perhaps she never will.

But there is something unexpectedly freeing about realising I no longer have to prove that the effort existed. I know it did. I know how many conversations I rehearsed. I know how often I made myself smaller. I know how carefully I selected what could be known.

And maybe the work now isn’t finding better words with which to explain myself. Maybe it is learning that I don’t have to. Because there are people in my life now who can know the unedited version. The complicated one. The ridiculous one. The one who changes her mind and makes strange decisions and sometimes gets things completely wrong. The one who doesn’t always behave in the way somebody else would choose. The one who doesn’t need to anticipate the temperature of the room before she enters it.

And perhaps being known was never supposed to require quite so much preparation.

Perhaps love was never meant to begin with:

Before I tell you anything, let me first work out how much of me you can bear.