Four Plates.

A Christmas to forget

The four plates are set for Christmas dinner. The camera is on the fridge.

This is part story, part observation, part memoir. Written as it happened.

The old lady sits high in her chair. Her throne, her home, her entire world. Trapped by swollen legs and fear fed by endless true crime lies pumped into her cage. A windowed aviary, where porcelain birds perch on every shelf, trapped behind glass, peering over pictures of children now adults now gone. The innocuous green box, sealed, sits front and centre, the certificate of cremation taped to the front, curled, yellowed, and fading.

She stares at the TV. Her face twitches and squirms as she mimics the characters on the screen. Minute and fleeting, her brain remembers connecting with others, but she hasn’t left the house since the funeral. There is nothing outside she wants to see, no one she wants to see, none who wants to see her. The curtains open and close on a cord that trails over the armchair, but the grey winter light resists coming in. The windows are wet with condensation, water droplets distorting the overgrown roses, winter naked in a garden long forgotten.

She drifts in and out of sleep as I watch her. Dipping in and out of the story, someone’s been murdered or lost, or forgotten somewhere warm or cold. Three barrelled men plummet off a Yorkshire hill. A detective arrests a confused man in a boat. The stories blend, meaningless, banal, filling the space between one breath and the next, stretching her passive existence across an endless schedule of liquid beige stories, designed to wash over. But seeped in blandness, the undercurrent of mistrust, the belief that a murderer is around every corner, down every alley, in the middle of every train/plane/boat ride doesn’t escape her. It fuels her fears, subtly breathing life into her slow death.

She will never leave this house again.

It’s the only thing we agreed on this Christmas.

In hiding, I wash her chipped bowl, the faded mug. Her knife and fork. It’s always been hers.

I breathe and remind myself she doesn’t know any better…but…

There are four unused plates, four saucers, and four side plates in a box on the worktop in her shuttered kitchen. Kitchen by name only. The cooker stopped working two years ago; the microwave unplugged, the fridge stocked with twelve pints of milk, the freezer the same. She moves unsteadily to the door and notices the camera that watches her. She doesn’t trust it, dislikes it. Knows we see how she moves when we leave, how easily she manages tasks but chooses to be lame, to shake and fake being frozen, legs that move without pain as soon as the door is closed. She looks for the red light but sees nothing. Unaware, we changed the settings, but it changed nothing. She will play out her role; she will wear us all down to dust, like my father before, if we let her.

“I have a right to be cared for,” she growls, “cared for like I cared for you!”

If only I could be that cruel.

We fight over the plates in boxes, the location of her beloved remote control. She scowls when I point out the madness of putting T-bags in a bowl next to the combustible recycling.

“It’s the way it’s done!”

“What do you know?”

“Is that right? Is that what you learned…bighead!”

Her words, as blunt as the black gums that spat them, still find their mark. The madness of being mocked for learning, scorned for reading, mistrusted because I fought to better myself.

They mean nothing written here. You can turn away and laugh it off over tequila on the carpet later, miles from her glare, in the arms of someone who knows how to love, someone you trust not to hate. Someone you trust more than your own mother. But this just reminds you of what you lost.

No.

Never had.

How did this tiny person break you so completely?

How often she chipped away at you, and you spent decades making yourself anew, again and again, as you tried to understand - why didn’t I get a mother who could love?

I didn’t want to shout at her about the plates. The stupid plates in a box. Serving no purpose. Saved for a special occasion that never came. Bought from a bargain basement shop, made in China by child labour, given as a gift by her child labourers who fed her and clothed her and feared her, just to be left on a shelf. Her pointless, endless, vacuous life threatens to drown me.

I scream for help and am taken away.

I have cried too much this year.

We drive away in silence. Assuring ourselves that she was broken as a child. Tortured by her father, she never saw love, she knows no better. And we find peace in the rage. We let understanding temper the storm. We agree once again to draw a line under the trauma waterfall and ensure it ends here. We silently send messages of love to our children and breathe when they reply. Sincerely, quickly, beautifully.

In seven days, she broke me again, and my children will never know how that feels.

That is my life’s work.