Inner Guide

By Mari Rhys

A memoir that is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, Inner Guide tells the story of a child growing up with a schizophrenic mother. Told with wit, honesty and self-humour, it’s not a sad book, nor is it a book of self-pity.

Maris’ time travel back into her childhood self, gives insight into the thinking and emotions of a child slowly coming to understand and live with the fact that she has a ‘crazy’ mother – a mother whom it is impossible to please, as what pleases one minute can be something totally different the next. Watching from the side-lines as her Dad disappears from her life, she and her siblings are left alone to deal with a neurotic mother who sees everyone as the enemy.
On the one hand, an absorbing difficult to put down story, on the other a reflection on life questions. Offering moments of contemplation, on such things as spirituality and humanity, one finds oneself also pondering how to think about things. For example, is a bad mother really better than no mother? Is it best for adults to act towards a child that everything is fine and not speak about the elephant in the room?

Letters and reports from a children’s home, internal, and to the local city council, demonstrate that the authorities knew how neurotic Mari’s mother was. Everyone from neighbours, family, social workers and Churchgoers eventually gave up on being able to help. Yet Mari wasn’t aware that adults understood the situation until she was older. Her journey of ups and downs leads us into her slowly realising that what she experienced as normal was in fact not normal.

Along the way, we are given a window to look at certain aspects and attitudes in the 60s and 70s, and of life at different types of boarding school of the 70s.

Slowly Mari emerges from childhood dependency, to become a teenager who starts to question her situation and starts to realise she can have some say in the direction of her life. She realises that she can move on to ensure the past doesn’t prevent her future. In some mysterious way, there always seems to be some form of help, be it in the form of her best friend’s awkward father, or a dedicated, caring headmaster. She always seems to find an inner guide to keep her intact in a seemingly impossible situation.

Inner Guide is a voice for these times full of wisdom and self-knowledge it empowers the reader. You feel at times as if you are in an intimate conversation with the author. Like a story-teller of old, it takes you on an emotive journey that you don’t want to let go of until you reach the last page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mari Rhys
• Release date: Jan 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463071960

Mari Rhys

Mari Rhys has been writing under various names for many years. She wrote her first story a year or so after she learnt to write. Proudly gluing that first story it to the wall next to her bed - much to her mother’s despair - she has been writing ever since.A communicator extraordinaire, if she’s not writing then Mari is reading, and if she’s not reading she’s chatting with family of friends, or even the cat’s if they’ll honour her by listening. She can also be found communicating as a lecturer and workshop facilitator.

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INNER GUIDE

BY MARI RHYS

Copyright 2020 Mari Rhys

Published by Mari Rhys at Smashwords

Front cover copyright 2020 Mari Rhys

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Knowing how I was is not how I need to be gives settlement.

Contents

Introduction

Beforehand

Prologue

Chapter 1 - Under her Thumb

Chapter 2 - Escapism

Chapter 3 - Five Against the World

Chapter 4 - The World Expands

Chapter 5 - Testing the Elastic

Chapter 6 - Growing Contact Inside

Chapter 7 - The Confrontation

Epilogue

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

A year before I began writing this book, Mum passed away. Living abroad, I’d maintained for many years that I wouldn’t fly over for the funeral. It seemed nonsensical having had nothing to do with her for years. Yet, at the point, I wavered. In the end, I flew over, and the moment I decided I would go, a chain reaction of intelligence came together that led to me later seeing that it was very important, perhaps imperative, that I was there.

It has long fascinated me how, in the most dire of circumstances, the human spirit can find the light of day. Like the dandelion that finds a crack in the paving stones and reaches for the sun. What is the difference between the person who surrenders to their fate and the person who rallies to find a deeper place to come from? Sometimes it’s a decision; sometimes there is no time for a decision, yet the best of humanity can blossom in spite of the odds. So, this book explores growing up inside the oppression and confusion of a schizophrenic, neurotic mother on the one hand, and on the other hand is an exploration of the indomitable human spirit, that can guide or watch over the person it lives within. It’s a journey into parts of the worst and best of the human, happening in the same place. A little like a micro of life in the world today.

When the authorities decided that ‘a bad mother is better than no mother’, they made a decision without, it would seem, really considering five young children’s best interests, but rather the social norms of the time. Some years ago, I read about a psychotic mother killing her eight youngest children. Whilst it again put my childhood into perspective, I read the question so often asked: Why was such a mentally ill mother allowed such responsibility for young forming lives? I’ve often wondered at the irony of a person having to study for so many years to be allowed to perform surgery on a person’s body, yet a person can become a parent without any study or responsibility, or even sometimes decision. I’ll never know what would have happened if that judge had ruled in favour of dad having custody over us five.

Writing this book meant going back into how I experienced my childhood and trying to recall why I felt or responded to something in the way I did. It is therefore as seen and experienced through the eyes and feelings of a child, of course with the perception and hindsight of my life so far, although it is not intended to be an accurate recording of events as they actually happened, but rather as I experienced them happening. As a child, I would have had a different perspective on events to the adults who were there would have done, or even my siblings. That is their story, and each of us experiences things differently. This is therefore a true story, with only the names changed, from a child’s viewpoint of the world.

After I had completed the first draft of the book, I was on a trip to England, and my younger sister – Helen in the book – told me that, just after Mum died, she contacted Barnardo’s – the children’s home where Helen had spent many of her earliest years - to ask for copies of their reports and correspondence concerning her. She lent them to me, and it was an eye opener to read them, as they describe Mum, and I realised how much I had actually sanitised her mental state, as if, with no adult authority confirming her state, I had embedded a secret – even from myself – guilt to dare to think of her that way. Her emotional claustrophobia making it feel like a betrayal. It had a curiously cathartic effect to read how adults viewed her, as if giving me the chance to forgive myself for seeing reality. Yet again, it caused me to wonder at a society that would leave five children with such a woman, knowing her mental state, and why also they hadn’t spoken to us about the elephant in the room? I have consequently used quotes from those reports and letters at the beginning of each chapter of this book. Sadly, Bristol Council couldn’t find the reams of paperwork they must have had on the Rhys family. That would have made interesting reading.

BEFOREHAND

The three sisters giggled like school children, even though all three were in their 50s. It was probably emotionally the closest the three of them had been to each other in over 30 years. Veronica, as the eldest, clutched the urn in both hands as she tried to shake some of the ashes into the river. The wind had other ideas. Learning from Veronica’s mistake, next in the age pecking order, Mari held the urn over the river so her share of spreading the ashes seemed to go better. But there was a slight indentation in the river, so the ashes just sank rather than joined the flow. Taking her turn as a way to get it right, now last in line, Helen tried to get the ashes out into the river, but also found them sinking too near the bank rather than drifting down stream as the three had intended. Typical of their mother to have the last word. Strange how such a potentially serious moment was in fact a bit of a non-event, which in itself caused much humour.

Mari photographed the number of the mooring spot in case they ever wanted to come back for a picnic. England in February is not a place to linger out of doors, so they hurried away from the open river bank to look for a spot in the woods to leave a few more ashes, then they could head off to the pub for a wine, tea and coffee respectively. Mari first wanted to walk on her own to see if there were any feelings to be had, any emotions to be experienced with this non-event. But there were no thunderclaps, no lightning revelations.

Earlier that week, they had debated for a while where to spread the ashes. Veronica had wanted to take them north, to the stately home which had served as a safe haven for Dr. Barnardo’s evacuee children from London during the war. According to her many stories, the one place that their mother had been happy. Mari suggested a small Somerset village where they had spent some family holidays along with their two brothers, Seb and Kevin; a suggestion based on a conversation once had with her mother on life after death, where her mother had said she believed she would live on after death in her children. A strange flash of sentiment snatched from one of their saner conversations.

Whilst there was a camaraderie between the three, there was also a curious feeling of being let down. Like a five-year-old child preparing for a party and then being told it’s been cancelled. Mum was gone. They were free. But were they really? They had carried her neurosis with them since the cradle. Would the simple fact of her not being amongst the living actually mean she was not amongst them still?

"Although to talk to her she is intelligent and has a good command of English, her irrational thinking becomes evident after a short while."

From a report about Mum by Miss. S of Barnardo’s to Bristol City Council Social Services

after a visit to Mrs. R’s, Weds 22 April 1970.

"As usual, she talked at very great length, running down her husband, his parents and brother, the people in the church and society in general."

From a report of Mrs. J of Barnardo’s to Bristol Council Social Services

after a visit to Mrs. R’s, 18 September 1970.

PROLOGUE

A book flew across the room, hitting dad on the shoulder. The abuse from Mum’s mouth a venomous volcano. My doll ornament followed the book, hitting dad’s head along with her abuse. Trying to protect himself from his wife’s onslaught, dad grabbed her arms and she started screaming that he was killing her. Suddenly, the tableau slowed to half speed. The screaming seemed to switch off. I looked down on myself from the ceiling in the far corner of the room. I saw my tiny self curled, terrified, on the opposite edge of the side of the bed, trying to be non-existent. My ceiling-self projected a calm, and slowly the face of my bed-self melted from terror to abject sadness. Though not the best of emotions, sadness allowed my young asthmatic body to breathe. I had just met an inner strength – perhaps what some would term my guardian angel - for the first time.

Some ten years earlier.

She laughed shyly when he asked her to dance. His heart was beating nervously. She hadn’t been sure which of the volunteer firemen had asked for this blind date. He was strong and manly-looking, but she was beautiful. He knew he was shooting above his league. His Bristolian accent felt like sandpaper to her more upper-class tones. She got on with her fellow carers, but was not really one of the girls, not quite fitting in. He saw her aloofness as shyness, her distance adding a touch of mystery to her beauty. He was one of the lads, yet a born leader, eldest son of a close-knit family where he had carried well the responsibility of the eldest male since his dad had died. They say opposites attract, and they were opposites. That night would change their lives.

Post-war Britain was full of promise. Like many others, these two star-struck lovers had spent the formative years of their childhood in a country at war. As they entered fully into the growing awareness of being a teenager, their country was rebuilding itself. War had been an adventure for him, helping his one-armed father with his exciting duties in the home guard. Then, evacuated from the city, he and his siblings went on an extended holiday of a lifetime to a farm their parents could never have afforded to send them to in normal circumstances. For her, the war had taken her to the stately home she was, in later life, always to view as her happiest years. Rations extended beyond the war, the economy struggled, but when the two met, Britain was in expansion, living standards were going up, work was available, the air was filled with a positive vibe. The taste of freedom gave the illusion of irrepressibility, a time of new beginnings; they truly felt that the world was their oyster.

If this was a film, it should have stopped there, where happy-ever-after was still on the cards. Attraction-turned-into-repulsion is still a magnet that, in a similar way to love, cannot be easily shaken off, especially with five children attached to the scenario. Repulsion can be insidious and destructive, poisoning all in the vicinity. But she was poison long before he met her. She’d already had a breakdown and had to spend time in a mental home. Yet, she was released to carry on her job of caring for the orphaned children of Dr. Barnardo’s Home in Bristol. If she was responsible for young children, one could perhaps forgive him for thinking she was safe to fall in love with. But if truth be told, he was no doubt too full of lust to let questioning her sanity reach his consciousness.

This is, of course, all compiled from stories heard and then by putting together the jigsaw puzzle. Getting to know them after the love had turned sour, it was difficult to imagine that this picture would appear from the pieces of the puzzle, that they could have felt anything other than animosity towards each other. If it weren’t for a few photos and five children, one might believe they always hated each other.

She had always been a bit odd, but no one knows when it began; there you have that nature or nurture question again. She was born in London, the seventh of eight children, whom her own children didn’t get to know well. Bristol to London in the 1960s on a working-class income, before the A4 was built, and without a telephone in the house, made the gap between the families a much greater distance than it would be today.

Apparently, her father disappeared not long after his last son and eighth child was born and had nothing to do with his family afterwards. So, not only was he not on the scene for her childhood, the family annuls are a bit vague about whether he actually paid any maintenance or supported his children in any way. Her mother seems to have come from a reasonably well-off family, if the photos are anything to go by, but eight children seemed to stretch her material and emotional capabilities too far. So, along with two of her eight siblings, Mum was sent, at a young age, to a Barnardo’s home – a place for ‘homeless and destitute children’. Being neither of these, I’m not totally sure how the siblings qualified, but it does demonstrate how bad things were