A Childhood Made Up: Living with my mother's madness: Living with my mother's madness

By Brent Meersman

'I remembered how, when I was a small child supposed to be asleep, my mother would slip into bed behind me and hold me. She would be trembling. She couldn’t hide it no matter how young I was. ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep,’ she’d say, as if that would save us.' Brent Meersman’s poignant memoir of a humble and eccentric upbringing in Cape Town, South Africa, in the 1970s and ’80s reads as a stirring eulogy to his mother, and a vivid snapshot of the times. His adoring mother, a horse-loving artist, received only rudimentary treatment for her schizophrenia; while his father battled a vicious whirlpool of alcohol-fuelled depression. 'A Childhood Made Up' is beautifully observed and filled with wry humour. Delicate yet brutal, this story pays testament to the power of love and the quiet heroism of resilience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780624089407

Brent Meersman

Brent Meersman was born in Cape Town in 1967. His father was a Belgian immigrant and his mother, Shirley Morris, a painter. His first job was as a news photographer in 1989 at the height of the turbulence that saw the closing days of apartheid. Brent has had an eclectic career. As a business entrepreneur, property developer and managing director of a hotel, among others. He has also acted as performing artists’ manager, producer, marketer and impresario in the theatre world. In 2003, he organised the 7th World Congress on Art Deco for South Africa. He is a well-known journalist whose work is published internationally. Currently co-editor of 'GroundUp', he has published a number of books including 'Primary Coloured', 'Reports Before Daybreak', 'Five Lives at Noon', '80 Gays Around the World', and 'Sunset Claws'. Meersman is a compulsive traveller who has visited the Antarctic and 85 countries at last count.

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BRENT MEERSMAN

A CHILDHOOD MADE UP

Living with my mother’s madness

Tafelberg

To Susannah and my godchild, Leo

PRELUDE

I WAS TWO years old when the earthquake of 1969 shook mother earth beneath me with such a force it woke me in my cot. I have subsequently read that the seismic wave was six point three on the Richter scale. There hadn’t been an earthquake in the Western Cape since 1809 and there hasn’t been one since, but my mother lived in dread of earthquakes from then on, often detecting ominous tremors in the earth. She was also convinced it was only a matter of time before a tidal wave would wash Cape Town out to sea.

‘There was an eerie rumbling that built into a crescendo – a shuddering roar,’ my mother recalled. ‘The whole building was shaking; the paintings went skew; bottles danced on the table. We grabbed you and all of us ran out into the street.

‘Most kids would have started howling their little heads off – ripped from their cots like that in the middle of the night. But you were looking around, staring at all of us standing there – on the street in our nightclothes – looking at us with your shining brown eyes … And then you gave us all the most radiant smile. You were like a little angel, assuring us that all was well, and we’d all be all right. I kissed you on the cheek and suddenly I felt very calm.’

I remembered the neighbour across the road; he ran out into the street stark naked. His wife screamed at him and chased him back into the house, which, for all anyone knew at that stage, might well have been a death trap about to tumble down. But he went back in.

‘How could you possibly remember that?’ Mom said. ‘You were far too young.’ She was obviously alarmed, for what else did I remember?

Perhaps it was a memory planted by her telling me the story before, but I could tell she was slightly shocked by how much I did recall, and a bit afraid when I dared to mention things that had happened in our home, when I braved the silence that often enveloped us, hinting at the unspeakable.

As a kid, I don’t think I ever overheard anything I wasn’t meant to, because things of such a nature were never discussed at home.

I remembered how, when I was a small child supposed to be asleep, my mother would slip into bed behind me and hold me. She would be trembling. She couldn’t hide it no matter how young I was. ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep,’ she’d say, as if that would save us.

I remember her saying she saw a dazzling, golden light, like an aura, shining around my head.

I clearly recall seeing her in the dead of night standing next to the refrigerator with a carving knife in her hand, ready to stab. She said she did not remember that.

There were other things she would rather forget but which I remembered. And then somehow, as I grew up, I forgot. I forgot almost all of it. Strange, isn’t it, that one forgets one’s childhood and yet it never leaves one?

It was painful and funny when I started to remember again, my memory jogged by going to a psychotherapist for the first time as I approached the milestone age of fifty. At first there wasn’t much order to my recollections – fleeting images I couldn’t connect to episodes in my past: the glare of a fridge opened at night; smells of tins filled with ash; the metallic taste of a small blue pill. I recalled the softness of my sky-blue blanket, the one I hid beneath as a child and found hard to leave behind as I grew up.

What I had experienced as a child was coming back to me: unveiled memories that would stop me in mid-conversation or surprise me while I might be out walking in the midday sun. It was like falling asleep under a giant tree somewhere out in the veld and then waking up to find yourself overrun by biting ants. My body remembered what my mind had forgotten; memories that made me burst out laughing and others that put me on the edge of tears.

Because of these reactions, which were sudden and usually came two days after a session, the therapist began insisting on seeing me twice a week. Our process was classic psychoanalysis – on the couch with my back to her.

I began to recall various traumatic incidents, seemingly unaware that they were traumatic. She would have to stop me: ‘Wait, wait, wait … please rewind … Did you just say it happened shortly after your father tried to commit suicide?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think we need to pause a bit and talk about that, don’t you?’ she’d say, or words to that effect.

But I couldn’t remember what I had felt at the time such things happened. There was only numbness; the numbness of turning events into matters of fact. An instinct for survival, perhaps, but I became more preoccupied with trying to understand and empathise with my mother and later my father and still later others around me, rather than to comprehend myself. Compassion is my default. I take a great interest in other people, yet at the same time I can be uncannily absent in their company. It is how I protected myself as a child, always placing a pane of glass between me and them, between stoic Brent and my family. But it wasn’t bullet proof. For I recall how, aged twelve, I started rehearsing for my own suicide.

I was still unsure if I wanted to recollect such dark details. I wanted to cling to the fairy tale I had been telling myself and others all these years about my childhood and my family – the story about how my mother was an angel and loved me unconditionally, about how my father was an abused child but broke the pattern and never raised a hand against his own children. It is the tale we tell ourselves about how fortunate we have been compared to so many others, about how our parents’ failings helped us become the unique creatures we are. It is the uplifting story about how thankful we are for the hardships we have suffered, because these have given us our rare qualities.

Should I not then have left memory alone and rather stayed content with the childhood I had made up? After all, what my therapist called my ‘coping mechanisms’ were solidly in place. I can with confidence tick nearly every box on any standard list of the characteristics of a psychologically healthy person. There may have been a dark whirlpool at the centre of my upbringing, but I had learned how to paddle.

But it was no use – psychoanalysis had unblocked my memory; my made-up childhood was coming apart. What is repressed must also be heard; the full story was demanding to be told. I had blotted out far too much for far too long.

One

SIGNS IN THE STUDIO

I REMEMBER SLEEPWALKING when I was a small boy. I was outside in the silent, dead hours, walking along the landings of the block of flats where I grew up, my body taken over by the impulse of a dream; not asleep but not awake either.

I was in my flannel pyjamas, something I would one day give up when I decided I was a grown man and allowed to sleep naked if I chose, only years later to go back to flannel pyjamas, wearing them when I wanted to let the memories come flooding back. I remember well those pyjamas with their paisley pattern, whorls within whorls, trees full of teardrops not dew.

Where was I going? Why was I out of bed?

I am back there now. My toes are ice-cold. My forearms and calves are bare for I have long since outgrown my pyjamas. I am not sure if my eyes are open, yet I can see where I’m going, as if looking through a waterfall. My arms are not stretched out in front of me, as an actress might do in the Scottish play, but hang naturally at my sides. My small, bare feet hardly make a sound on the concrete, which is so smooth it becomes lethal in the rain. My mother has slipped and fallen more than once here. I stub my big toe on a join in the concrete but feel no pain.

I climb the stairs to the second floor, then the third. I walk on the landing to the far staircase, then descend to the ground floor and return home having completed a great rectangular journey that took me three storeys up in the sky.

‘We found you at the front door last night,’ my mother tells me the next morning. ‘I heard a sound, someone fiddling with the door handle. I thought a burglar was trying to pick the lock! But I saw a small shadow through the glass; I recognised you at once.’

I don’t look up. Instead I dip my spoon into the bowl of porridge, quickly, before it forms that revolting skin.

‘… I can recognise you anywhere, my darling, even the faintest glimpse of your silhouette and I know it’s you … ’ Her gaze is inescapable.

I did clearly remember being outside that night, but I acted surprised and didn’t say anything. The rest of my somnambulistic meanderings were there but cloudy, yet I had no recollection at all of what she told me next. Like most dreams it had vanished upon waking. What happens to all those dreams we forget? Where do they go? Do dreams not form memories? Or do they wait for us, committed to some dark recess of our minds, like memories we suddenly recall?

‘I opened the door and you were standing there in a daze. I said very softly to you, Come to bed, sweetheart.’

I must have locked myself out; I could hardly have planned ahead for when my mind chose to set off with my body on one of its night-time adventures.

‘… I just took you gently by the hand and led you back to bed. You really were fast asleep on your feet … You do know that you must never wake someone in the middle of sleepwalking?’ She said it as if I were likely to bump into sleepwalkers on a regular basis. ‘The shock can be so terrible they never recover their minds. They can have a heart attack.’

A shiver goes through me. I glance down. I hate dirty feet and my soles are pitch black. There is the proof from being out on the landings. I want to bathe at once.

My parents caught me several times in the middle of the night fiddling with the latch and chain on my way out the front door. They also told me that I spoke in my sleep, fairly loudly, even shouting. I was afraid of what I might have said, that I might have betrayed my inner world.

‘Oh, what was I saying?’ I would ask, trying not to sound too alarmed, and I’d yawn for effect.

‘Nothing we could make out, just gibberish. Do you remember anything, dovey? Anything at all?’

I gave a little shrug. I have no idea why I didn’t want to admit to my mother that I did in fact remember walking on the landings at night. Perhaps I was afraid that if I admitted this, then she’d think I had only pretended to be asleep, in which case I had been misbehaving, wandering about alone at night, barefoot, catching cold. But if you didn’t know what you were doing because you were asleep, were you still being naughty?

Yet in my mother’s voice I sensed a deeper concern. Because I talked in my sleep and went sleepwalking and often had nightmares, did she think there was something wrong with me – the way she worried about herself?

A theory has it that one of the functions of sleep is to make emotional sense of traumatic events in our lives and neutralise them. When this fails, you are doomed to have repeated nightmares. I had night terrors and thrashed about suffocating in my sheets right into adulthood. I kicked in my sleep and could be quite dangerous to be near. I knew when I had had these night terrors – when I woke up in the morning and even my stubbornly affectionate cat had fled to the couch in another room.

But when I was sleepwalking as a child, I felt completely safe. I had no fear of the dark; no fear of the unknown; no fear of the world out there. When I was awake, I was afraid of almost everything.

I am told that sleepwalking is a sign of sleep deprivation; your body has such a deep desire for sleep that it keeps your mind in dream mode even though it has released your limbs. What kept me awake at night as a child? And why did I go outside? Was I running away or was I looking for something?

Why do we dream at all? Or perhaps, the bigger question is: why must we wake up?

I wondered what my father thought of all this, but by the time my mother woke me in the morning, he’d already be at work, having left as usual with his sandwich box and thermos flask long before the rest of the family rose. My brother was already at school. It was just me and my mom in the kitchen; me and my mom alone, the way it often would be over the years.

My mother had long auburn hair in those days, which reached down to her shoulder blades, hair full of life that bounced when she walked. She was a trim woman with an angular, slightly boyish body. She dressed in slacks, never dresses; a real bluestocking, she said of herself proudly. She smelled of English Lavender, the talcum powder she used to soften her skin, and a faint aroma of fresh, soft, green moss, and of camphor, and the fragrant sharpness of pine needles. Her arms were covered in freckles; sun damage from when she was a girl growing up on a farm on the edge of the Kalahari desert. Her name was Shirley. She was born in 1925 in Vryburg.

Mommy had two round patches on her right breast, like bullet holes, but white like the flesh inside a coconut, so smooth the skin seemed brand new. When I asked her why her skin was so different there, she said they were scars from an operation. She often complained her breasts were sore and I wasn’t allowed to rest my head on them, ever. Her tummy was also sensitive, and I had to be careful if I played on top of her.

Her face wasn’t yet as harrowed as WH Auden’s (it would be when she reached her sixties), but there were plenty of creases already, because her face was always busy with her feelings, and she chain smoked. She had deep frown lines, not from frowning so much as from lifting her eyebrows when she spoke.

Mommy could only raise hers together. I trained myself in front of the mirror to lift one brow at a time – left, right, left, right. I wanted to see how high I could make my eyebrow go without moving another muscle on my face. The shape my single raised eyebrow made at its highest elevation was like the invention of a new musical note. I tried to imagine what sound it stood for; a sort of crystal ping came to mind.

My face didn’t have the faintest line or blemish then, but I could see blue veins running under my skin, which was sickly white because I almost never went outside to play. If I raised one eyebrow while pulling the other one down, I got a crease above the nose and a comical expression. Then I started on my ears. That was more difficult, especially if I wanted to keep my mouth straight. But I got it right, eventually, juggling my ears individually. I could amuse myself for quite some time isolating bits of my face. Flaring my nostrils was easy, but how many people could also make the tip of their nose waggle left, then right? I could make my upper cheek shudder and my eyelid twitch out of control as if I were having some kind of fit.

Where did I get such an idea? Or was it just a child’s irresistible compulsion to pull all kinds of faces, to make itself ugly-faced, to discover what can be said or hidden with purely a look, like the silent violence of a smile withdrawn.

Soon I was ready to impress my mother with my new talents. I wiggled my eyebrows and my ears as fast as I could. Ping, ping, ping. Mommy laughed, but in a dismissive way. ‘Don’t do that. You look daft,’ she said, and the corners of her mouth turned down.

I thought maybe I should pull out all the stops and do my lying-on-the-floor-having-a-fit routine, with my arms and legs flailing about. But something told me she wouldn’t like that either. I might have done something like that once before and she had shouted at me.

‘Children can be awfully cruel, making fun of people,’ she said. I didn’t understand. I didn’t see the connection.

She said the boy who lived in the flat next door was just such a perfect example of the cruelty of children; naughty and thoughtless, which amounted to the same thing. She had nicknamed him Turtle because he was chubby and round and had stumpy limbs. She loathed him. ‘Horrible, horrible child,’ she’d say. But I mustn’t hate Turtle, mustn’t hate anyone ever, she said. I should even be kind to critics and art dealers. But she had to admit, she simply couldn’t abide the sight of that little blighter. Turtle had done something unforgivable.

In our block, adjacent flats on the ground floor shared a rectangle of garden between their balconies. A chameleon had been living in ours for over a year. One day Turtle stamped it to death and destroyed most of our garden. ‘Just for the fun of it!’ my mom cried. A chameleon! Was there any creature more harmless in this whole world? Her hands were shaking. My father’s hands shook too, but that was for a different reason.

I used to watch that exotic being, with its swivelling, cone-shaped eyes, for what seemed like hours. It was bright yellow and radiant green with flesh-pink patches on its sides. My dream was to witness it one day catching a fly or a cricket, but before the chameleon could perform the marvel of its weaponised tongue for me, Turtle had pulverised it to death.

How could Turtle have not seen its reptile beauty? It had been living silently in the tiny garden all this time, mostly unnoticed, minding its own business. Somehow, this solitary, prehistoric-looking creature had even managed to evade our cat. I knew how unique chameleons were; my mom said they could change colour to camouflage themselves. I wondered if there were people who could change colour too.

Once, I tried picking it up, prising its sticky toes from its branch. I must have squeezed and hurt it, for its mouth opened wide, big enough to swallow half its own body, and it let out a scream. Apparently, chameleons don’t scream so maybe it hissed. But that is not what I heard; I heard a penetrating, almost human scream. I dropped it back on its tree and ran, heart pounding.

I prayed the chameleon was all right. I feared I’d damaged its organs. I could still feel the scaly sack of its bulging body through my fingertips.

But then along came Turtle. He was no different from other boys, said Mom. Most boys liked to go out and kill things just for the thrill of it – crunching snails under their shoes, chopping earthworms in half and watching them wriggle, shooting doves with pellet guns. And doves are the symbol of peace, she said. Picasso had drawn one for the United Nations, where my exotic Aunt Sonya, my mom’s youngest sister, worked.

Mom said Turtle’s parents should have taught him better. Turtle was a normal kid; that is to say he was a proto-psychopath, which is a person without feelings for others. In time, most parents manage to sensitise and civilise their offspring. It was I who was different; I was not like the herd, like other kids; I was like her – born sensitive! The world was not kind to people of our nature, she said, ‘but may you always stay that way, my darling, for the meek will inherit the earth’.

I nodded, but something told me it wasn’t possible. At some point I’d have to defend myself, and there would be times when I would have to stop myself feeling. Already, my feelings were unbearable.

‘It’s because children are brought up in cities and buildings,’ my mom explained. ‘They are cut off from nature. Children should be raised with animals. Kids in big cities, like New York and Tokyo, they think milk comes in bottles! They don’t even know what a cow is. They think milk is made in a factory.’

She drew a picture of a cow to explain. I preferred the idea of milk coming out of factory bottles, not being squirted out of dangly cow tits.

Then she drew an exquisite illustration of my favourite nursery rhyme. For many years, when I was miserable, I’d recite it:

Hey, diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed,

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

Over and over again like a mantra, that last bit – ‘the dish ran away with the spoon’ – especially comforted me. I could easily imagine a cat playing a fiddle with such gusto that even a cow could hurdle the moon, and a dish and a spoon elope to a better world where they wouldn’t be used by people.

My mom would spend hours on end painting in her studio. The walls of our flat were already covered in her oil paintings, with their beautiful, strong colours. There were jungles and deserts and oceans for me to gaze into and dozens of strange men and women gazing back at me – a blue man with a fez, who she said was a merchant from Isfahan; a Chinese lady in orange with a pigtail who had come fully sprung from my mom’s imagination; a many-headed green monster which she said was there to frighten nightmares away; and a naked Greek hero, with his arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross, plunging from the sky. The wax that had held his golden wings together had melted because he’d flown too close to the sun, she said.

We had a handful of works by other artists. In Mom’s bedroom was a small Irma Stern watercolour of the flower sellers in Adderley Street, which the famous artist had given her as a gift. I thought it fairly unimaginative and trite when set alongside my mother’s work, but my mom loved it and I remember her repeatedly saying as she stared at it, ‘If only I could paint that well … If only.’

Mostly my mom did works in pen and ink and watercolour. She filled a whole book in a week. Occasionally, she would draw in pastels and Conté crayon on large sheets of paper that were so expensive they made her nervous. Only when she could muster enough energy did she paint in oils, a medium as time-consuming, tricky and demanding as it is rewarding.

She quoted Leonardo da Vinci: ‘An artist’s strength lies in solitude.’ Yet as children we were not banished from her studio, although there wasn’t much room in that poky work space for me and my brother.

It is only recently that I had the startling realisation that up to the age of six I had absolutely no playmates my own