Gin as a Cure for Your Existence
A Family History of Mother's Ruin
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My mother tried to abort me by drinking neat gin.
Don’t condemn her. She was in a terrible place. With two-year-old twin boys to look after, an unexpectedly affectionless marriage, and freshly moved to a city thousands of miles from her home, where she could not feel more isolated, she was barely keeping her head above the waterline. A brilliant woman, suffocating in domestic drudgery, with all the imagined “romance” of marriage evaporated. I get it, Mum. I have found myself drowning in a similar place.
This was pre-pill, pre-legalised abortion. What was a desperate woman to do, to keep herself out of the asylum, and still able to care for her dear boys? Drink “Mother’s Ruin”. Gin was a well-known cure for unwanted pregnancy. Sit in a hot bath, drink neat gin. The juniper berry is toxic to the unborn. Plus: early days, just a clump of cells, not conscious. One in four pregnancies miscarry anyway. No harm, no foul. Mum, I cannot blame you.
Though I admit, when you first told me, I didn’t quite get the implications. I was thirty-five, freshly escaped from my dire first marriage. You’d come down on the train to help out with the boys some weekends, and I’d use white wine as a truth serum. With a failed marriage behind me, I no longer blamed you for yours. But I wanted to understand, in detail, why you’d left the dad I adored, the act which “ruined my life”, as I told it then. And this was the context — both of us drunk, in a local Thai restaurant— when you told me you were so miserable in Washington D.C. that you’d once tried drinking neat gin.
“But I was a wuss,” you said, “I just couldn't do it. I hated the taste!” You told me how hard you tried to drink that gin neat, and how impossible it was, and how, as a result, you hated yourself even more. “I just wept and wept. I was so pathetic!” And I, innocent of your reasons, asked, “Why not add a mixer?” And you said something about being very, very miserable, and that somehow, it felt like the right thing to do, to drink gin neat, when you’re as miserable as that.
A couple of years later, you were dead.
It took me another twenty to understand what you had drunkenly revealed. In Washington D.C., you say, Mum? Where you only lived for just over a year? A year in which you fell pregnant with me, and where I was born? Neat gin, you say? Ah.
Suddenly, in the context of my personal growth quest, everything fell into place. In late 2022, my world exploded for reasons I still cannot talk about. This crisis set me on to chasing down the source of my lifelong need for external validation. October 2022 catastrophically revealed that without external validation (or the hope of it), my whole identity collapsed, and I wanted to die. Frightening to discover that despite fifteen years of dedicated personal growth, my confidence was so alarmingly fragile. Apparently, what I thought was a sturdy townhouse was just a facade, propped up by spars that a decent sledgehammer swing could knock out of place. Was I really so easy to smack back into the abyss?
The reason? I valued myself only through achievements. Fate blew them up, and I was nothing. This vulnerability had to be hunted to its lair and destroyed.
Eventually, tracking back the damage to its source, I uncovered the Mother Wound. It’s blindingly obvious now, of course. In search of love, I had learned to achieve for rewards. Achievement unlocked = a few minutes of maternal approval, the simulacrum of love. The sun shines on you briefly, then slides back behind a cloud. You have to do more, be better. Win another prize. Get another publication. To have an achievement (which involved years of labour) obliterated has all the weight of an existential threat.
I had taken a lifetime to realise that my mother never loved me. These are the things we don’t want to admit to ourselves. If even your mother doesn’t love you, what does that make you?
In truth (as I finally recalled), I had known it all along. A memory surfaced: me, four years old, infuriating my parents by singing, from the backseat of the car, a repetitive song I’d invented; a song whose only words were “Nobody loves me.” It was a catchy circular tune. I could still sing it today if you asked me.
Dad did love me when I was little. After Mum replaced Dad (the one who loved me) with someone who despised all her children, and I started expressing my anger about that, she often didn’t even like me.
The way Mum felt about me was different to the way she felt about my three siblings. The twins were born when she was still in the honeymoon haze, and not yet in the grip of domestic drudgery. My younger sister was born in a time of relief: back in England, the twins at school, community and friends easing Mum’s social isolation.
But I was conceived and born when my mother was in Hell (aka, Washington D.C, which she hated). My (totally undiagnosed) ADHD didn’t help, since ADHD leads to very blunt communication and some irritating traits. But that (like my backseat-of-the-car song) is circular in nature.
Yes, we ADHDers are wired to be hunters, not farmers,1 forever attuned to the cracking twigs in the forest around us (predator?) and switching to hungrily focused in pursuit of our prey. One way of viewing this: we are wired for survival in hostile conditions.
ADHD is highly correlated with both perinatal2 and postpartum depression.3 A mother who doesn’t actually want you is an existential threat. Had abortion been legal, or neat gin palatable, I wouldn’t be here.
Getting bathed in the chemical cocktail of your mother’s low seratonin (plus, in later months, both hearing and feeling your life-giving vessel sobbing) may serve as the epigenetic trigger for ADHD wiring, which will give the best chance of survival. But once you emerge it will also, let’s be frank, annoy the fuck out of your nearest and dearest who didn’t want you in the first place.
Like mother, like daughter: as mentioned last week my perinatal/postpartum depression combo also resulted in an ADHD child that I didn’t bond with. Living in a more advanced era, I had the tools to mend that breach, eventually. My mother did not. No doubt she felt guilty for not loving me, but she failed to hide it. It leaked out from her every pore, in every filter-free comment. Because yes, I’m 100% sure she was ADHD too and guess what, her mother didn’t love her either. And Nanna? Her mother died in labour, and she was raised by an “evil stepmother.” So, yep. All the way back, at least to the 1910s we have Mother Wound Central, stitched through with a glittery thread of ADHD.
It was only last summer that I could say out loud, “My mother tried to abort me.” I worked diligently through my toolbox, dismantling and resolving my emotions about that, and every verbal arrow Mum shot into my flank that still quivered through my bones twenty years after we buried her.
I love her. Forgiveness isn’t necessary. I understand where she came from, having been there too. I worked through the Mother Wound, layer after layer. But the scar tissue goes all the way down to a time before language. A fear of rejection and extinction that is as old as your own consciousness. This stuff isn’t easy.
In January, I felt I’d found some closure. But in April, the wound revealed that we were not done yet. It bit me in the form of three older women I respected, accusing me of something I hadn’t done and turning against me; the pattern of my relationship with my mother. I knew they were reflecting to me something still unresolved. And I knew what it was. Hi, Mum.
This event had been seeded in mid-November, though it would take months to sprout into the open air. And just after that event was seeded, even though I had no conscious idea of what was brewing in someone else’s mental soil, I was possessed one morning by the idea that what I needed was a silent retreat. I had never done anything of the sort, but suddenly it felt like something urgent and vital. A dear, trusty friend, the guide formerly known as My Subconscious.
I googled “Silent retreat UK.” Most of them looked absolutely horrible. The day begins at 5 am. No, it fucking doesn’t. I’m interested in healing, not punishing myself. I adapted my search, found one that seemed perfect, and booked it.
And so it was that I spent five days and five nights last week, living with 28 strangers in glorious silence. I went there with the aim of deepening my meditation practice and strengthening my access to inner guidance. What I emerged with was not only that, but the complete healing of my Mother Wound, and a personal letter from John Cleese.
It’s not every day one receives a lovely, witty missive from an actual Comedy Legend, but even then, I’m not sure which of these is the more surprising.
For now, I have burned enough time and words on the little fire of my darkly-humoured hearth. Come back next week for Part 2: How I finally healed my mother wound by living in silence for 5 days with 28 strangers.
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Over to You:
Let me know what you think!
Were there any revelations here for you?
Have you discovered anything about a parent that shocked you?
Does forgiveness feel more possible when you understand the other person’s damage?
More like this:
Thom Hartmann’s A Hunter in a Farmer’s World changed my thinking about my son’s ADHD 20 years ago… and he is now here on Substack e.g explaining how he came to his theory here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-150815100
Rogers A, Obst S, Teague SJ, et al. Association Between Maternal Perinatal Depression and Anxiety and Child and Adolescent Development: A Meta-analysis. JAMA Pediatr. 2020;174(11):1082–1092. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.2910
Christaki V, Ismirnioglou I, Katrali A, et al. Postpartum depression and ADHD in the offspring: Systematic review and meta-analysis, Journal of Affective Disorders, 2020; 318: 314-330, ISSN 0165-0327, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2022.08.055
Thank you for your courage in sharing this. I too had a mum with severe post natal depression and both her and I were in a psychiatric unit for a while after I was born because she was so unwell.
This was never talked about - of course - and I found out in a roundabout way in drips over the years.
She suffered most of her life with depression - my dad was not kind to her although I of course saw none of that and adored him (until he left after a long standing affair with his secretary 🙄)
I’ve not spoken to my mother for over 9 years - long story of course - after 4 difficult years battling with her after she had a breakdown and bipolar diagnosis. Most of the time I do not know how I feel about her. I’ve lost the mum I loved as a child.
I had post natal depression and found it hard to bond with my son (born by elective c-section). We’re good now but then he is 21!
Friends of mine with an ADHD diagnosis are pretty sure I have it. 🤷♀️
I suspect my son is too. And autistic.
My daughter has autism diagnosis (and traits of ADHD).
Not sure I’ve ever shared all of that before in one place all at the same time.
Feels good to get it out
Those of us familiar with your brilliant work -- three volumes of poetry, "The Marlowe Papers," "Devotion," and the tantalizing "Nothing Becoming" -- can consider ourselves fortunate that abortion was illegal in Washington DC in 1963 and that your Mum couldn't tolerate neat gin. You might well have not been here and we would all be much the poorer for it.