August 2009

William has been back living with us for over a month, and things are going well. Today is the first day of the two-month plumbing course he has signed up for. Some weeks ago he began the distance-learning part of the course, but today he is beginning the practical training in Central London. He has also joined a Sunday League football team, and played his first match at the weekend. I’m learning just how central sport is to his life.

He rang today during his lunch hour, whilst I was in the park with Jack, who got back from travelling around North America this week. We were out walking our dog, Lily. Will began by saying that after a sticky start (he went to the wrong building, so missed the first hour of the course), he’s been bending pipes and learning soldering. He had also cut himself badly already. (‘There was blood everywhere, you wouldn’t believe it, but it’s fine, it’s all good’).

He sounded happy, and motivated. I was pleased he called to let me know how things were going, and began listening to myself laughing at what he was recounting, slowly becoming aware of my smile and my joy. Looking over at Jack, who was glancing towards me with a half-smile, I felt a twinge of guilt suddenly because he’d been in the middle of talking to me about his worries about taking another gap year when my phone rang. Damn. William rings and I jump, again. Guess I’m still hoping things will work out well hence the jumping, but this call could have waited. I could turn my phone off even when I’m out walking. I’m determined that our other two boys still get the attention they deserve, and are not overshadowed by William.

I had spoken to Jack while he was away, to let him know that Will was staying with us, and how did he feel about the fact that he’d be here when he returned? Jack said he was fine with it; he has always said that he was the one least affected by Will’s behaviour. He said he was surprised, though, that Guy and I had considered having his brother back, given what had happened. Now he’s home, Jack is obviously happy to see everyone. He’s had a wonderful trip, but is glad to be back. After our first meal together as a family, he sat back in his chair and said: ‘With Grandma here and everything, it feels like Christmas’. We all smiled and said we knew what he meant. Caroline, Guy’s mother, was here when Jack returned, she had been staying with Alex and Will for the weekend while Guy and I were away for a few days.

Just after Will moved back, Guy began saying to me that he can see how close Will is to me, and reckons he has missed me very much over the past two years. He went on to say that Will must have been devastated when I cut off from him in the way I did (I resigned as his mother, as you may recall). I have only vague memories of us being close in the past, it seems so long ago – my last happy memories are of him in Year Six at primary school, when he was 11.

I never believed that our relationship could ever be mended given the damage that it has suffered over the past five years, and I have to remind myself that it is still early days. Feeling so wretched about what was happening to us as a family, though, was what spurred me on to set up the web-site and to begin the parental campaign group. The sadness and loss were such that I needed to do something, never once believing that out of such grief could come the sort of transformation that has taken place, both in the outside world, by helping get the law changed, but also at home. Now here we are, in a different space, at a different time.

Since coming back, Will has apologised for how difficult he has made our lives and says that his mistakes cannot be repeated. He knows that this is his last chance with us, and that he has to make amends. He rarely goes out, and when he does he rings to let us know what time he’ll be home, and has only stayed overnight with friends once. Huge changes indeed. He is at home with us most of the time, and I’ve just vacated (with some reluctance) the little attic room I’ve been using as a study these past two years, so he can have this as his room. Will has been using Jack’s room, whilst he has been on probation here. We said that we would look again at the arrangement at the end of August, when Jack returned.

We have all changed, though, not just William. We have a cohesiveness and mutual respect as a family which we may never have had. The gift in what we’ve been through is the opportunity to grow that it has given us all. My own personal changes have been many. I have learned to focus on being loving instead of being right, moving into my heart before I act or speak and yet listening to my own instinctive inner teacher, for want of a better phrase, so that my heart doesn’t take over. This has helped me to make more balanced decisions and responses: a more masculine, logical approach which is very useful at times, especially with boys.

Of necessity, I have also learned not to feel hurt every time I receive hate mail. Going public with our family’s story was never going to be easy, I knew that from the beginning, but I also knew that someone needed to do it to highlight the misery that cannabis causes.

One of the reasons I knew that our family’s story could not be unique, and that thousands must be affected adversely by cannabis was the almost identical experience of friends of ours.

Jane and Peter had been at university with myself and Guy, and had their first child months before we had William. When our children were young we spent a couple of summer holidays together. Their eldest child, Luke, seemed to have it all – good looks, charm, ambition, intelligence. Guy and I were astounded that he was reading a Joseph Conrad novel one of those summers we spent together; he must have been nine or ten.

We both admitted to being a little envious of our friends, they seemed to have a perfect son, closely followed by a clever, and beautiful, younger daughter. Then cannabis came uninvited into their household. Jane’s tears followed soon after, and it was through comparing notes with her that I realised that something needed to be done before a whole generation became lost to skunk cannabis. Jane and I talked about the sort of support network that was urgently needed for families like ours, how we might go about forming such a thing, and setting up a campaign of some sort. As I began thinking of names for the web-site, and setting up the first meetings in Parliament, she backed out saying that she wanted to understand why Luke felt he needed to use drugs, and worried that he may see her as attacking him if she joined me. I understood how she felt, of course she didn’t want to alienate Luke, but I’d reached my own rock bottom with my son. He was already as good as lost. I needed to carry on.

Peter and Jane did not approve of us asking William to leave, although they never said so explicitly, but it was something Guy and I instinctively knew. We opted to handle the situations in our families differently, and Guy and I had accepted that that was the way it was. We remained friends though, and still compared notes; the similarities between the boys’ pathways were remarkable, although Luke’s behaviour was never as extreme as William’s – he never became a thief, or was violent, for example. Neither was fulfilling their earlier promise, though, bottom line, and the sadness and incredulity of their respective families was identical.

The common denominator in it all was skunk cannabis, and this was proof to me that what I was doing in going public was right. I was grateful for that, without it I may never had had the understanding that underpinned my first efforts to publicise the distress and misery of cannabis-afflicted families. Luke remained part of his family and is living at home again, after a short time working in Scotland. He is still smoking cannabis.

I understand that not everyone will want to ask their child to leave, but I know that William would have taken all of us down with him had we not asked him to go. I have been accused of many things for throwing out my son, and also for going public with the story. I received this unsigned, anonymous email through the web-site this summer:

‘I can keep quiet no longer. What kind of mother sets out to demolish in this way her own flesh and blood, all in public? Don’t believe for a moment that your son has stopped taking drugs, and who can blame him with your pressure on him. You are airing your dirty washing in public and bleating all the time…you blame everyone else but instead isn’t it time to start looking at yourself and the reasons for your failure’.

I finished reading ‘Women who run with the wolves’ by Clarissa Pinkola Estes whilst on holiday in Spain this summer. One part leapt out at me, and I was reminded of that email.

‘The common proscription against washing the family laundry in public is ironic because usually the ‘dirty laundry’ does not ever get washed in the family either. Down in the darkest corner of the cellar, the family ‘dirty laundry’ just lies there stiff with its secret forever. The insistence on keeping a thing private is poison.’

Estes goes on to say how keeping something private, in reality means that the individual gets no support in dealing with the issues that are causing such pain. This resonates with me – having been brought up in a family that did not discuss traumatic real-life events that had impacted so sharply on all of us i.e. my father’s suicide when I was two, the resulting split in my family which meant I never saw my paternal grandparents again, the death of my mother ten years after, the belief that my unloving step-father was my ‘real’ father. Lies were told to myself and my sister, presumably in an attempt to protect us from a truth that was deemed too unsavoury to be digested. But as my sister said some years ago: ‘What you know about you can deal with, but what you don’t know about you can’t.’

These life events were not talked about, there was no-one to give me a hug and explain what had happened when I was too young to remember, and how I couldn’t have done anything about it. I grew up thinking that somehow the tension and unhappiness in the family must be something to do with me – that it was my fault. I inhaled the mists of shameful secrets even though I knew not what they were exactly, and the toxin seeped into my entire being causing me to feel alone, lost and in everyone’s way for years. It affected everything I was and did. My core belief was that I was guilty, and when I looked around I couldn’t see anyone who might contradict me. Turning against ourselves produces depression, of course. Things could have been handled so differently. (My next book tells the story).

My husband’s family operate in a similar way. One of a handful of adages that is regurgitated in substitution for wisdom, is ‘Least said, soonest mended’. I understand now, after reading Estes extraordinary book, why such attitudes are so common – to engage with trauma would mean that other individuals would have to share the grief and ‘take their place in the cortege…….and weep at the grave’. How I long to live in such a world. Guy recently said to me that he has had more support from colleagues at work these past few years, than he has from his own family. A judge recently heard about our story and called Guy into his rooms at the end of a case they had been on together.

‘Guy, I had no idea what you’ve been going through’ he said. ‘You mean you’ve been continuing with your cases with all that going on in your life? How remarkable. I don’t know how you coped. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know.’

He went on to ask how things were going now, what had happened to our son, how everyone was. Guy was pleased someone understood and had taken the time to express it. He said he wasn’t sure how he kept going either, during those dark times.

An effective family acts as a support mechanisms for its members, that is one of its primary functions, but sadly so often a family doesn’t fulfil that role. It is also a fact that the loss of a child, whether it is through death or any other consequence, is one of the most traumatic events for human beings to deal with.

It made me realise that although I am hurt when someone sends an email like the one I’ve quoted, maybe by my going public and voicing our family’s pain it may have helped other people deal a little better with their own. We all have our particular pain, our own wounds and the permanent scarring they leave. But it is not ‘our pain’ so much as ‘the pain’, and in that we are all joined. It is the same for us all, globally, part of the experience of being human, irrespective of the label we give to our pain or how it is caused.

I believe you can heal anything though, and, as Estes points out in her book, although wounds leave scar tissue – which is permanent – this skin is stronger than ordinary skin. We can never get away from our wounds, they will always be there, when we knock them or the weather changes, but we can learn to live with them and accept them as consequences of walking our paths which at times are treacherous causing us to slip and fall. I remember reading something that Mohammed Ali said about boxing. I’m paraphrasing but it was something along the lines of:

‘It’s not how many times you get knocked down that is important, it’s how many times you get back up.’

So, we need to get back up and all of us we need loving support to be able to do that, and sometimes just the knowledge that you are not alone can be a start. It allows us to move into a space of compassion for ourselves and then the healing can begin. (A good place to start is to write down the story; to do so is to access the soul where answers are waiting.)

Will has just returned from his first day on the course. He is going to football training immediately, he says, rushing upstairs for football boots and shin pads. He had returned injured from the match he played this weekend and I had asked him later, after he’d rummaged around in bathroom cabinets for the Deep Heat can, how he was going to cope with a physically demanding course if he was going to be dealt blows on a Sunday.

‘It’s all part of the conditioning though, you know’ he said, limping and holding onto his right hip. ‘I need to get used to all of this, and it’ll improve my fitness – it’s fine’.

‘Conditioning’? He still surprises me with the things he says. He grew up away from us, and for some reason that is the way it had to be. Our closeness had to be surrendered for him to find out a good deal about himself and to begin to become a man, which is something he talks about a lot. He is now certainly among men most of the time – the training course he is doing, how he is choosing to spend his spare time. If I could just relax now, trusting that it will all be as it is supposed to be………possibly that is the way ahead now.

‘Women who run with the wolves’ by Clarissa Pinkola Estes is published by Rider Books.

All names have been changed to protect identities. Parts of this Diary have been edited since its publication on this site on September 1 2009, after a request from one of the families mentioned.

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