Built in obsolescence, or hitting temporary self-destruct

It’s the day before my 45th birthday and I’m in self-destruct mode. Yoga has been binned, I’m smoking on my morning walk, and I’m pouring wine before 8 p.m. Compared to the total annihilation I witnessed last year from a childhood friend I mistakenly tried to save, this is mild. But still—this milestone is not landing with anything resembling grace.

That friend would be drunk by 8 a.m., swollen with cider and denial, and I worry he’s unsalvageable. Either way, he’s no longer my responsibility. Perhaps he saw the same destructive streak in me as I risked my marriage trying to rescue him and cut me off to save us both. The end of that debacle coincided neatly with the end of my last job. Not unrelated, but I suspect the job was killing me—and the reckless behaviour was a symptom, not the cause.

I’ve not worked since, not for lack of trying. Saying my confidence is on the floor is hypobole (yes—hypobole, the opposite of hyperbole). Most of this year has been a reaction to those twin assaults on my sense of self. I regrouped. I started posting cooking videos online. I retrained as a neurodiversity coach. I have the certificates and the debt to prove it. This way, I can tell myself that no matter how few inquiries come in, at least my ego will survive the current economic firestorm.

And yesterday, I got my first ever paid subscriber on Substack. After 525 posts, the £18 subscription should be treated as a small victory. Sadly, I can’t live on it, and the poor chap probably doesn’t realise he can read all my old content for free on my website. Still, it inspired me to write. Just don’t expect entertainment— I’m on a bit of a downer.

Meanwhile, my stepmum, Jane, has been very ill. I wrote about it during the crisis stage, back when we genuinely thought she had a form of CJD. Then we were told Pick’s Dementia. Now: delirium and anxiety, and she might recover. Physically she’s much improved, but at 72, I’m not convinced she’ll ever leave the care home—despite certain relatives’ best (financially motivated) efforts to “jolly her back to herself.”

It’s got ugly. People I admired have shown behind their masks. Jane wasn’t just some woman who floated into my life during the chaos of a broken home. She found a confused toddler whose mother had suddenly left and—with puppets and fairytales—made things okay again. She’s the bread and butter of my psyche, the moral core I built myself around.

To this day, I parrot Jane when parenting. I read my children the stories she read me. I give them her advice—sometimes gently, sometimes with the same exasperated fury she deployed when my sister and I were little terrors. She wasn’t perfect, but she brought us up, and I forgave her everything, especially knowing how much my dad let the side down for years. When he finally left her, I took her side, helped her move into the house he bought to buy himself out of his obligations. A pattern, that.

We treated her as the woman to whom we owed so much—especially after Dad remarried a woman who could barely speak English and started a shiny new family that never felt like ours. So when, after Jane’s illness, her sister—someone I had admired—casually told me she’d been relieved when Dad left because she no longer had to deal with “two difficult girls,” I was stunned. She even claimed Jane had never warmed to us.

No. Absolutely not. That is not my truth. Jane loved us. We loved her.

Recently she developed another UTI—the kind that hospitalised her in the first place—after being moved from a proper care home into an “assisted living” set-up where she’s expected to wash and dress herself, despite telling me repeatedly she struggles with both. So off I went, post-interview for a job for which I feel underqualified , but which pays so little I might actually have a shot), out of the capital and into the wilds of Kent.

I arrived to find her looking lost at the dining table, eating her dinner like a dutiful child. She was confused and hostile—nothing new since the illness, which seems to have magnified her already autistic tendencies and her need for control.

Brian, her long-time partner, was there. I hadn’t seen him since the shit, so to speak, hit the fan. He seemed in good spirits. We’ve always had a cordial but cautious relationship—pleasant enough, but he never divorced his wife, which always puzzled me. During her acute illness, Jane had insisted he was leaving her, that he didn’t love her, that he wanted to go back to his wife and daughters. We all chalked it up to her illness. But then, would she be so adamant? Why the same story every time?

Brian dutifully trotted out the family line: the dementia diagnosis is wrong; she’s just delusional.

I didn’t believe it then. I don’t believe it now. Her memory is shredded, her anxiety through the roof. Physically she’s stronger—her voice no longer just a croak—but mentally she remains highly suggestible, eager to please, eager to avoid trouble. She’ll say whatever she thinks the listener wants to hear.

Back in her room, she recoiled from my attempt to hug her. I wondered whether I’d become persona non grata, whether certain relatives had poisoned the well. She snapped at me when I suggested cranberry and bicarbonate alongside her meds to help with the UTI. “No thank you,” she said tartly. “I don’t want any advice from you.”

She cried twice. Each time I tried to comfort her, she refused, accepting consolation only from Brian—who, until recently, had been a source of her worst anxieties. At one point, she looked at me and said, “It’s all an act.”

And just like that, the little girl inside me felt the same burning injustice as the day our childminder’s daughter slammed into me with her rollerboots, denting her mum’s car and then blaming me. I was punished and sent to bed early by Jane. I vowed then to run away to my “bloody mother.” And eventually, at 15, I did—though it was no fairy tale, thanks to a stepfather who didn’t want me there and a father who dumped me on the doorstep in a bin liner of belongings because I’d pierced my ears twice and once snuck out to see a boy – not the one who became an alcoholic – by that point, he was experimenting with LSD and very strong ganja and wouldn’t want to hang out with me again until I was 17 and grew tits – another one, who was my boyfriend for about four years.

With time and absence, , I forgave Jane for the false imprisonment over the car dent, and the fact she made me go to school the day after I broke my nose at the Alpine Ski Centre in Hemel Hempstead, and a myriad other control freakeries: over the burglar alarm and the cats and the kitchen door that made life at Dad’s rather trying. And she forgave me for leaving her with my sister, especially when Dad left her, when I was in my third year of uni (in, it must be admitted, the same town the boy who became an alcoholic had gone to art college, which is where I gravitated after being rejected from Oxford).

As adults, we basically enjoyed each other’s company, when we’d go for tea in the M&S canteen at Bluewater twice a year. She was the first person to give Reprobate Tom her blessing —he’s a good one, she said —and always gave my kids a birthday card and a tenner, even if she was not the grandparent to them I’d wanted her to be. I made a point of visiting her a Christmas, sending flowers on Mother’s Day, getting her a gift card for her birthday and massaging her feet in hospital when I thought she might be dying.

So, when she looked at me yesterday and said my concern was an act, I broke with the force of decades. Because the one person who made me feel safe, the one who steadied my childhood, now believed I was some kind of fraud—poisoned by people who want control over the last decent thing father did before he threw Jane out of his life for good.

I drowned the pain of this latest abandonment in two glasses of good wine and an early-night cigarette, and another one on my morning walk. I was mourning. Saying goodbye to the person I thought I was to her—the good girl terrified of making anyone walk out of her life.

But thanks to Jane, I know who I am. And I am not a person who will let my own children suffer through a family that never put them first.

So I will stop. I will. I must.

But first—I’m having my little pity party for myself.