I’m only recently realising that I’m not remembering. Names, places, book and film titles. Past experiences, people I once knew. Yet when I sleep my dreams feel full of all these forgotten details. Crowding into my mind, willing me to wake, to write them down, log and acknowledge, console myself that all is not lost. I think I’ve been in denial, telling myself that I’ve got away lightly with menopause symptoms. Actually I’ve just got better at managing the empty spaces, the mind fog, the night sweats. I’ve been here for a good six years now so I’m intrigued by the idea that my cells may have been regenerating during this time, though my sense is that my brain cells have somehow not been included.

I recently spent a weekend with my brother sifting through my Mum’s old diaries. She was a prolific writer. We inherited pocket diaries from the 70s through to 2020 and then heavy A4 journals for every year from 1960s through to 2016. Page after page filled with words, sentences, questions, anxiety, self-doubt. Just to work through these pocket diaries took us the best part of a day. I’m not sure either of us had realised that we would be witnessing so much trauma on those pages, that her depression and addictions had been present for so very long. We decided to start with the so-called pocket diaries as we thought they would be easier to manage, to read and digest. But even here, the multiple doctors’ appointments, the meetings with friends cancelled, crossed out. The listing of never ending symptoms at the bottom of so many of the pages, within so many spaces of a day. 

I always assumed that my mother suffered from hypochondria, but never thought to search for a definition before:

Illness anxiety disorder (previously called hypochondriasis) is a psychiatric disorder defined by excessive worry about having or developing a serious undiagnosed medical condition.

Maybe this is why I do my best to stay well, to remain fit and healthy as I age, to avoid anything in excess. I have never carried the burden of guilt. I have never suffered the weight of depression. I have never been a glass half empty but always a glass half full. Since becoming a parent I haven’t been able to abide the thought of being out of control. I am not my mother yet I am of my mother. I am fearful of those genes of addiction, for both myself and my children. How much has this shaped me into the adult that I now am? 

When I was pregnant with my first child a chasm grew between me and my mother. I felt she showed no interest in the pregnancy, no empathy for my doubts and fears. When I read about this time in her journal I was surprised to read that she felt I was being selfish, making demands around how I wanted things to be once the child was born. I don’t remember this but as I read her words I felt a void opening up. A space of miscommunication, misunderstanding between the two of us. Is it wise to read your parent’s reflections from so long ago? What is it I’m hoping to find, to understand or discover that I don’t already know? I know she wrote to be read but where do we draw the line?

Do I want to burden my own children with my prolific notebooks, sketchbooks and morning pages? Those endless files of thoughts, projects, creative ideas and plans? Will this stuff offer them an insight into me that they don’t already have? I doubt it. Will they thank me for the responsibility for my musings? I doubt it. How do I let go of this internal part of me that I surround myself with, on endless reams of paper, behind anonymous book covers? Piling them on shelves, in cupboards, in boxes. I am my mother’s daughter in so many ways.