Public Life
by Niki Shisler
I’ve been a mother for a long time now – over 16 years. I think (maybe we all think, maybe that’s our downfall) I’m doing a reasonably good job. But, like most parents, there are times when I’m not good. Times when I’m not the mother I want to be; when tolerance is hard and selflessness harder. I can be Super-Snappy-Woman, able to crush childish enthusiasm with a single glare. Days when I’m the mother my children will one day be discussing in therapy.
Before Felix, these days were my dirty little secret. I didn’t have to show the world my darker side; I could present the face I wanted people to see. Now, of course, nothing in my life is private. My son has round-the-clock nursing – for which I am very grateful – as well as an apparently endless stream of physiotherapists, speech-therapists, occupational-therapists, health visitors, wheelchair engineers, community nurses, equipment salespeople… Dozens of people regularly visiting my home; looking at my son and, very often, taking notes. I live knowing that if I answer the door looking tired there’s a good chance that “mother seems depressed” will find its way permanently into my child’s record.
There is always someone working in my home and I have learned to accommodate them. My husband and I have learned to argue quietly and have sex silently. There are no naked trips to the kitchen for water in the middle of the night and the heating stays on 24 hours a day, so as not to freeze the night staff. But all of this is nothing compared to the paranoia that can come from being continuously observed.
The people who work with my son see me at my loving, engaging, nurturing best as well as my ratty, hormonal, unreasonable worst. They see me on the days I can’t find the energy to even try and the days I am filled with enthusiasm and ideas. Every up and down, every mistake, every triumph and every failing witnessed, noted, judged. How many parents can stand up to such scrutiny? I try to see myself through the eyes of others and am alarmed by the picture of chaotic motherhood that I must present. And all these people, entering my home with thoughts and ideas for Felix, focussed on him and his needs, must wonder why I cannot, will not, match them in their focus and commitment.
But, for them, for the time they are there, he is all their purpose. And when they leave another will come and again, he will be the focus of their time in my house; and even though I know that it is impossible for me, with all the different calls on my time, to match their energy and enthusiasm, I do compare and I find myself lacking and it’s another small voice to add to the chorus in my head that tells me I’m a bad mother.
It starts as soon as I wake up. Bleary-eyed and ratty-haired I say good morning to one, two, sometimes three people as shifts change over. If we are using a nursing agency it may be someone I have never met before. I struggle into coherence and amity. Being charming to strangers is not one of my natural traits; I’m a Londoner to my core and our default setting is ‘aloof’. Today though, in my home, I swallow the instinctive urge towards waspishness and, instead, am friendliness personified.
This monumental personality shift is not altruistically motivated. I want my home to be a happy and harmonious place; I want engaged and energised people working with my son, I want the very best. Control can be a slippery concept and there are times when it seems the more you try to cling to it, the more elusive it becomes. I have found that, in order to get the kind of care that I want for Felix, I have to be prepared to share him. It is a strange thing for a mother, to let other people into your child’s life, to accept that they can and will bring their own influences and ideas to how he is raised. Instinctively I want to hold his whole world in my hand but the child I have been given has a life too big for that. So, whilst I set the broad guidelines, my son develops unique relationships with his nursing staff. Hard though it is, I step back.
My home is not just a home, it is also a workplace. For it to function smoothly I have to approach it as a manager. The people working in my home have professional aspirations, areas of interest, ambitions. My job is to provide a workplace that is stimulating and fulfilling, if I am to get the best out of people, and that means stepping back, allowing them to do their job, letting them grow. I am secure in my son’s love and I know that he knows he has only one mother; but I sometimes wonder what these people think of me. Do they see that I am making a space for them, or do they just see me as uninvolved? I tell myself repeatedly that it doesn’t matter to me what people think; that I know, and Felix knows; but of course it does.
Felix, of course has never, and likely will never, know privacy. He is never alone, watched over even in sleep and monitored for everything from temperature to mood. Nursing will be a fact of his life forever; another reason for allowing him to form his own independent relationships. One day hopefully he will, like other children, take control of his own life. He will make the decisions about his care and the way he lives in harmony with his team.
The models for our life today, and his in the future are not our parents or other families. We are learning from the experience of communes with their need to consider others, perhaps not chosen companions, in every aspect of personal life.
I am looking at the bigger picture, sitting atop this anthill trying to direct, protect, love and tend. One step away from the coalface. Watching and praying.
