I Was Made A Stranger In The Strange Land Of My School
A story of the time I was taken out of school, the bizarre experience of my reentry, and the overarching tapestry of my mother’s narcissism tying it all together.
There was a mysterious period of time, during my first couple of years of secondary school, when for an indeterminate number of weeks or months, I was absent from school for long enough that it eventually required me to have to be reintroduced into school life by way of a class separated from the rest of the main school.
It wasn’t until many years after the fact that I found out that my mother had had a part to play in my prolonged absences. One that was for her own benefit, rather than my own.
But we’ll get to that…
A piece of information you should know upfront was that, during my obligatory amount of time in the UK’s education system, I went to four different schools across two different countries. In England I attended two primary schools, and one secondary school; then upon moving to Wales, I joined a second secondary school, where I finished up the remainder of my education.
This is not common practice. And for most of my life, I was not privy to the true reasons behind why this was happening to me.
As far as I knew, I was going to school whenever I could, while struggling to juggle severe sleep problems, pervasive bullying, the early signs of fibromyalgia, the tensions everyone in the family seemed to have with my mother, and eventually me becoming my mother’s secondary (but really primary) live-in carer. She had a multitude of physical ailments: type 1 diabetes, sleep apnea, and having to use a wheelchair to get around when we went out somewhere, which I would have to lift in and out of the car, and push her around in, from when I was 11 onwards.
Her mental illnesses, on the other hand, were far less obvious for me to notice as a child, and even on through to my late adolescence.
It wasn’t until I had finished school, and became her carer full-time from 2009, that I finally began to grasp how deeply, thoroughly wrong things truly were.
It took many, many years of living under her tyrannical reign of emotional abuse, and many more years after her sudden death from a heart attack in 2017 (caused, according to the coroner, by her type 1 diabetes, and also — if I had to guess — probably by extension her immense disregard and mismanagement of her own health) for me to begin to comprehend even a fraction of how much turmoil in our lives — in my life — had been the result of her actions.
So what was the deal with that time I was gone from school for so long that I had to be re-educated into getting back in the habit of school life?
From what I could gather, via certain illuminating documents I found amongst my mother’s possessions months after her death — (because high on her list of issues was her propensity for extreme hoarding, which included the hoarding of decades’ worth of paperwork, emails, journals, printouts, etc) — was that during this time, unbeknownst to me, my mother was attempting to use her disabilities as a way to claim some kind of daily transport means to get me to school each morning, but doing so in such a way that she herself wouldn’t have to drive me, and also she would gain some kind of monetary benefit out of it.
Essentially, she was using me as a means to make extra money for herself, without her having to work, or put any effort into actually worrying about my well-being.
As I’ve been finding out in recent years from formerly estranged family members who are much more knowledgeable and trustworthy in their accounts of her past (seeing as another issue of my mother’s was her compulsive lying, coupled with her victim complex that made everything everyone else’s fault but hers), she had a history of exploiting anyone and everyone for her own gains.
She never passed her driving test, so she instead asked other people she knew to put their names down on her insurance forms, so she could continue to drive, even though she wasn’t technically totally safe to do so. (Her tactic usually involved getting members of her church — i.e. the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a.k.a. the Mormons — to be her named insurance people, but her luck with this ruse ran out at the same time her insurance did in 2011, so she lost her car, and never drove again.)
When she was being paid to give the requisite salaries to the Personal Assistants taking care of her while I was at school, it would appear as though she’d been fiddling the system to line her own pockets, and had been intentionally undermining the ability of the PA’s to look after her. As she often told me to keep me in her thrall, none of them were ever as good as me in taking care of her needs. (In hindsight, this was probably true only insofar as I was as loyal, obedient, and easily controlled as a dog in her eyes. Keep in mind that at this point in time, I was between the ages of 13 and 16, and she’d been sinking her clutches into me since I was a toddler.)
And just like she had told my sister for years beforehand when she had been our mother’s carer first, she told me for years that I couldn’t (read: shouldn’t) get Carer’s Allowance for myself as a stipend for spending all my time looking after her, as it would detract monetarily from the amount of benefits she was receiving. (The subtext there being that that was more important to her than anything.) Unfortunately for her, however, one mundane yet fateful visit from a social worker put paid to that false notion, when said social worker informed us that no, that wasn’t true in the slightest, and me claiming and getting Carer’s Allowance would not affect the money my mother was getting. If anything, it would improve the financial situation of our household dramatically! Or so presumed the social worker. But that wasn’t how my mother saw it. Controlling the money I could have for myself was paramount to her control over me, and if I had my own money, I had an ounce of freedom; it would mean I was no longer beholden to her monetary mercy in asking to go out, and visit friends, and have some semblance of a social life that didn’t involve her. Money for me equalled loss of control for her, and that was unacceptable to her.
This is the kind of woman my mother was.
Attempting to describe her in a diagnosably pathological sense, long after she’s passed away, is almost impossible. She was always infuriatingly contradictory. One moment you think she’s a psychopath, cold and loveless and prone to acts of jaw-dropping malice, and then she hugs you weepily after watching Precious, because it apparently reminded her of abuse she went through as a child, and now you don’t know what to think. (Though again, her version of her history is always difficult to take at face value, because almost nothing she ever said was entirely true. Even with matters as gravely serious as child abuse, rape, and domestic violence, she could lie about any of it, and not even blink. Dear reader, I implore you to keep in mind: You did not know her like I knew her, and I barely even knew her at all.)
At best, we can only surmise with an educated guess, based on everything me and my family ever endured through her, that she was highly likely a toxic, malignant, lifelong narcissist.
That was not the first time a social worker ever graced our home, by the way. In both England and in Wales, across both secondary schools, and even afterwards, social services were a frequent presence in our lives due to the kinds of conduct my mother engaged in. Not even a year into living in Wales, the staff at my school, and the social services team that assessed me at their behest, could all see that something wasn’t right, and that thusly landed me on the Child Protection Register in 2007, at the age of 13, due to what they deemed “child neglect” (or “parental neglect”, I forget the exact wordage). But it didn’t last long. I was too deep under her spell, too blind and unwilling to see what everyone else saw. But worst of all, I was too smart for my age. And by “smart”, I mean “articulate”. Apparently more articulate than the later social services teams, investigating the decision under my mother’s appeal, were used to from kids my age. Because of this, I talked my way into making them believe I was fine, that my mother did nothing wrong, that it was all a big mistake. And because of that, they took me off the list. (The later social services visits, after I’d become an adult, were the result of mother’s anti-social behaviour causing great concern in the local area. Stuff like the hoarding, the curtains and foil covering up the windows, and her unwillingness to pay for anyone to mow the lawns, making the grass and weeds grow up to literally 6 foot high. You know, perfectly normal behaviour.)
So about the reentry into school life after the time spent out of school, evidently because my mother was trying to get something out of it.
This wasn’t the only time she’d done this, now that I think about it.
I mean, the reason I attended two primary schools at all is because, sometime around 2002, she took me out of my first school that I’d been attending since I was five years old, and before I knew it I was supplanted into a whole other primary school. Why? To guess at the rationale of an irrational and cynical mind like hers, my deduction is that it was probably because the former school was a two mile drive away, while the latter school was just under a mile away, literally right down the road from us at a fifteen minute walk; hence, she had my sister walk me down to the new school every morning, and then they’d come pick me up in the car in the afternoon.
What did she gain from it? Maybe not having to wake up early every morning to see me off to school? Maybe saving money on petrol, which she could then spend on cigarettes or something? Who knows?
But alas, her cunning plan was (somewhat hilariously) thwarted within just a few months of her going to all that hassle to pluck me from one school to another, as this second primary school was upping sticks and changing location to a newer building, while the original was getting torn down in the summer. The new location? About two miles away in another direction.
My memories of how the travel was resolved after that are fuzzy. Each morning a coach came to pick me and some other pupils up from a bus stop near my house, so whether the coach was compliments of the school, or my mother had to pay for it in some way, I don’t know.
They say about toxic narcissists that they get a “supply” from the people they choose to surround themselves with, and leech off of. A “supply” of compliments, of favours, of being seen as so good, and so awesome… until the mask inevitably slips, the facade falls away, the people see that this person is not good to be around, and so the narcissist’s supply runs dry. At such a time, they often dramatically change something about their lives to find supply elsewhere from new people.
In my mother’s case, I think she exhausted her supply from a multitude of angles, each of which preceded one after another of the big life-altering changes I experienced without truly understanding why they were happening.
Moving from friendships to friendships, groups to groups, houses to houses, countries to countries… I think they were all her way of escaping the consequences of her actions, escaping from the people who knew the nefarious things she’d done, and escaping to places where she could be a blank slate to people blissfully unaware of the sort of person they were talking to.
When certain staff members of my second secondary school asked me why I’d moved to Wales, my mother gave me a few variant answers to regurgitate to get them off my (her) back. Oh, it was to move closer to my sister. Oh, we had to change our surname to hide from a stalker mum had back in England. Claims that had tiny crumbs of elements of truth to them, but which were so wildly misleading and out of context, that they were lies nonetheless.
So I was kept out of the mainstream of school life for a while?
Yes. That was in my first secondary school. All I remember leading up to it is that I hadn’t gone to school for a while, and that absence had gone on long enough that the school faculty felt I couldn’t be flung straight into the deep end of being around all the other students in regular classes again. Re-indoctrination was required to ease me back into the swing of things, like carefully slipping into a hot bath.
I don’t recall the official term for classes like these, nor do I recall how long I was in that cabin classroom sectioned off from the rest of the school. Two weeks? A month? Whatever it was, I remember specific moments from my time in there, if not the actual lessons themselves.
I think this class was primarily for kids with attendance problems (like me), behavioural problems, learning difficulties, or what have you. I was one of the quiet ones, though by no means was I a saintly good boy, as we’ll soon see.
I remember being sat by the window one day, as the bell rang outside, demarcating the end of one class, and the beginning of another. I watched the kids spill out through the various doors, walking, running, chitchatting, shouting, laughing in raucous tones that my body instinctually associated with mockery directed at me. I recognised most of them, and I’d been in plenty of classes and assemblies with them all. Seeing them from afar, behind glass, disconnected from their routine that used to be my routine too, felt alienating. But then again, I always felt alienated from everyone else. Always at a remove. Always the other. And now here I was, even more removed, even more othered than ever.
I remember, during one of these outsider lessons, being horribly unable to concentrate on what was being taught — (probably Maths; it was always Maths that I couldn’t latch on to) — because I was so unbearably tired and sleep deprived, that I was falling in and out of consciousness in fits and starts. Trying to listen to the teacher was like hearing a song skip and judder, the sounds legible, but the information incomplete, filled with gaps that made the whole incomprehensible. Trying to write in my exercise book was a farce, lifting and dragging the pencil across the paper feeling as heavy as my eyelids. Trying to keep my eyes open was a joke, my vision fluttering and stuttering in and out of focus, of lightness and darkness, slow and fast, a losing battle against my body screaming for me to go to sleep. (The best visual examples I have to compare this to are in moments peppered throughout David Lynch’s filmography, but especially the whole visual style of Tony Scott’s Man On Fire, which is the most accurate approximation of what my description looks like beyond my words.)
I remember more than anything, however, the time in that classroom cabin when I got myself into a fight.
For context:
Between 2003 and 2005, or thereabouts, I had a phase of being obsessed with guns. In the waning years of primary school, in the playground I’d play-pretend I had a machine-gun, making stupid mouth sounds I thought were uncannily similar to the rapid rat-a-tat of machine-gunfire, but was basically just me blowing raspberries; with my burgeoning DVD collection, I’d count exactly how many of the films had guns in them somewhere; and shortly before the incident in question, I bought a kid’s fake plastic capsule gun, so I could have a gun all my own. (Thank god I’ve never lived in America, or who knows how bad this temporary gun obsession might’ve gotten had it blossomed within the land of the 2nd amendment. I shudder to imagine.)
On the day of the fight, I brought that gun — minus the capsules — in with me, concealed in my school bag.
The second contextual factor it’s important to know:
The night before the fight, shortly before bed, my mother decided to regale me with another one of her long, sad stories of her life. Ever since my sister left home near the end of 2004, to make her own life and to escape the hell our mother had been putting her through, mother had started taking it upon herself to tell me hours-long tales of the hardships she had faced in the past forty years of her life. Detailed, long-winded, tears-filled stories of beatings from her parents, childhood molestation, bullying, adultery, betrayal, rape, abuse of all kinds. And on this night, the latest story on her docket was her childhood and adolescence in Belfast, living through the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the 60’s and 70’s.
This was the first (though it certainly wouldn’t be the last) time she told me about this, and I think it provoked precisely the kind of reaction she wanted out of me: devoted awe-filled fealty to a poor heroic woman who had survived unbelievably awful times, and as such deserved undivided respect and admiration for her unsung courage and bravery. (Remember: I was about 11 or 12. The mind of a child is easily manipulated, especially by those who live to manipulate others.)
Cut to the next day:
I had the fake gun in my bag. I had this upsetting story of my mother’s traumas floating around in my head. I had this childlike ego of feeling as if my mother was deserving of everyone’s respect, and if everyone knew what she’d gone through, they would respect her, and by proxy, respect me, and stop picking on me. At the same time, I wanted to talk to someone about this story she’d told me, but I didn’t have anyone to talk through it with — any sort of friends I might have were out there in the real school, and I couldn’t talk to them yet; my sister had left, and even if she hadn’t, mother had brainwashed me against her; my father had left years ago, and I wasn’t in regular contact with him much these days, and even so, mother had brainwashed me against him too; and I couldn’t properly process or articulate my feelings about what I’d heard to myself, let alone anyone else, because I was a child who didn’t know better, and shouldn’t have been put in that position by my mother in the first place.
There was another kid in that cabin sat next to me that day. In our short time together in that class, with all the other misfit kids held at arm’s length from the rest of the school, this one boy was notably irritating, and the most prone to picking on me.
So on this day, during a lull between lessons, with him sat next to me, I felt like picking a fight. He might have said something vaguely antagonistic first, but he might not have, and even if he had, it was entirely unrelated to what I was thinking about making us fight over. I wanted this, and it was no other kid’s fault but mine.
I inelegantly brought up my mother’s story of having been through the Troubles, and because of that, I told him he should show her respect.
That was as obvious a piece of bait as can be, especially to a kid looking to wind up the weirdo who’s easily wound up (i.e. me), so he gladly took it, and promptly insulted her. In what way, I don’t know. But he’d done what I wanted, and now I had an excuse to get back at him.
I pulled the fake gun out of my bag. We stood out of our chairs combatively. The other kids watched, maybe egging us on. Someone probably went to get a teacher. Meanwhile, he’d lifted his plastic chair up and held it aloft in front of him, brandishing it against my threat of the fake gun.
This part’s a little uncertain, but I think he might’ve asked if the gun even fired anything, and when I replied no, he laughed and mocked my stupidity, riling me up even more. All that I do know is that for whatever reason, I changed tact, and held the fake gun by the barrel instead, so I could use the grip to hit him with.
He gave me a bit of an out: if I hit him with the fake gun, he’d hit me back with the chair. Meaning that if I stopped, he’d stop.
But I wanted this. I was all in.
To this day, I vividly remember how I heard in my head, in the few seconds right before the inevitable hits, a little action movie music sting punctuating the buildup. I can still hear the exact notes of it even now. Full string section, rising staccato, brass crescendo, sudden silence at the end as the sounds of the fight take over.
I swung at him with the butt of the toy gun. He swung at me with the chair. We sort of tussled. It was a pitiful kid fight.
The teacher came back to break it up.
We were both in trouble.
But me more so for having started it.
I don’t know what my punishment was, if anything. We were both physically unscathed, and the fake gun was now held indefinitely by the staff. We were both told off, and the teachers called my mother to tell her what happened.
I don’t know if she reprimanded me in any way. A lot of the rest of that day is intractably fuzzy. Maybe I blocked it out, who knows?
Though I do remember that I was sent home early for my chaotic indiscretion, and she had one of her church friends pick me up instead of her.
In due course, I was finally permitted to re-enter the regular school curriculum, and be around the rest of the students again.
But something strange seemed to have happened in my relatively short period of being MIA from school life.
The most immediate sign of this disturbing alteration to what I thought was the status quo, was one afternoon — maybe lunchtime, maybe end-of-day — right before the following day when I would wholly return to the usual grind: 9am to 3pm, six lessons, two break times, the works.
I was in the school’s library, perusing the books, eager to be able to borrow some of them out again now that I was back, when I was approached by some kids I knew.
And it was the strangest thing.
In my time away, it was as if everyone had suddenly started speaking a whole new language I’d never heard before, and now that I was back, it was like they were speaking in tongues to me, using so many words and phrases I didn’t know, or understand, and had never heard before.
They asked me why I’d been gone for so long, and where I’d been. But then these questions were dotted with words that sounded like gibberish to my ears. They said I was “skiving”… I must be “emo”… something about “plebs”… something about “mongs”… what were they saying? Did everyone’s language evolve into a whole new dictionary while I was gone?
It was disorienting, and uncanny, and I felt utterly adrift and alone.
Everyone had moved on without me, and I never even knew I was standing still.
