ELLE.COM/UKNove mbe r 2O19Photography: Courtesy of Jessica Andrews, Dan Martensen/Trunk Archive.ELLEMemoirworked hard to fill the lives of my brother and me with love and care so
that we wouldn’t see the shape of my father’s absence. The three of us
ran around the garden in the silver spray of the Crazy Daisy sprinkler and
made shaving-foam sculptures on the kitchen floor. I sensed something
was not right when I found my dad hunched in the garage with bloodshot
eyes, or when my mother locked herself in the bathroom to cry.
My mother looked after my father for years. She put aside her own
needs to care for all of us. She has since told me that day after day she
felt herself wearing away, until she decided she couldn’t live like that
anymore. She didn’t want to be invisible and insignificant. She didn’t
want her life to be trampled under the work boots of men like her own
father, and generations of husbands and fathers before him.
When my parents got divorced, I didn’t feel sad. My dad had been
leaving and coming back for years and my
mother had long been curling up with me in
my single bed. ‘Divorce’ was just a legal
name for everything we already knew.
Today, a lot of my friends’ parents are
no longer together, but then, against the
backdrop of my Catholic school, divorce
was regarded as failure. I looked up at
the shelves my mum built in our kitchen
and her paintbrush strokes on the
bathroom ceiling and I couldn’t see
the shame anywhere. I was thrilled that
I had a secret to carry. It felt grown-up to
have witnessed the weight of something as
dark and adult as a broken heart.fter my dad moved out for
the last time, my mother
learned joy again.
She came home from
New Look with plastic
bags filled with denim miniskirts and
sequinned T-shirts. She smoothed Rimmel
instant tan onto her calves and I helped dye
her hair at our kitchen table, rubbing rich
chestnut colour into her scalp. I was 13 and
learning what it meant to move through the
world with sexual currency, as my mother
began to reclaim her body. I watched
carefully as she painted her fingernails
coral and crossed her legs across bar
stools. She went on dates with art teachers
and construction workers, learning how
to be cared for, after so many years of caring for others. When
she wasn’t at home, I tried on her dresses, hoping that some of her
bold beauty would rub off on me.
I had my first real relationship when I was 16. I fell in love
with Sean, who was in the year above me at school. He rubbed kohl
into his eyelids and got excluded for writing Smiths’ lyrics across the
walls of the boys’ toilets in lipstick. We went out dancing on school
nights, goading each other into the electric wild. Sean sometimes
disappeared for days at a time and I lay awake, sick with worry, until
he eventually called to tell me he had been on a bender, or he had
been arrested and ended up spending the night in a cell. I thought
our relationship was the kind I wanted, but really, I think it was the kind
I thought I deser ved. If we imitate the relationship models that wesee around us, then I was chasing a rumpled, rock-star version of
my dad. I wanted the chaos, the drinking and the unpredictability.
I hadn’t yet learned that there are other ways to love.
When I left home for university, Sean stayed behind. When he
came to visit and saw that I had grown a life beyond him, he cut his
wrists in the shower of my tiny student bathroom with a broken beer
bottle. The cuts were superficial and I put him to bed. While he was
sleeping, I mopped his blood from the walls and wondered what
my mother would say. She was living with a new partner who cooked
her stuffed peppers and did face masks with her in the bath. The
domesticity of that scared me, but it showed me that there are other
ways to live. Through tearful kisses, Sean and I broke up.
I have often thought about the parallels between the way my
father treated my mother and how Sean
treated me. I wonder what would have
happened if my mother had not shown
me, through her own example, that I didn’t
have to settle for that kind of life. By ending
her marriage with my father and forging a
new world for herself, she showed me that
endings are part of living. She taught me that
being able to leave when things are bad is a
sign of strength; that ‘breaking’ a home that
did not care for the women it housed was
powerful, and not a sign of failure.
I had other relationships after Sean.
Joseph, who was an architect and built
miniature houses on our kitchen table.
There was Charlie, who drove a moped
and had special polish for his Dr. Martens.
There was Ben, who slept in his art studio
and made coffee in a mug from an old
job that said, ‘I heart spreadsheets’ in red
letters. I never thought any of them were
The One. I loved them, in different ways, but
I had an understanding that things might not
work out, that life is strange and transient,
that we are growing and changing all the
time and not necessarily at the same rate.
As a teenager, the books and magazines
I read and films I watched told me I should
search for one special person to spend my
life with, but my mother’s experiences gave
me realistic expectations. I’m hungry to
love and be loved. I’ve felt the deep swell
of longing and the raw ache of heartbreak.
But I know that I will always be fine on my own – that is a vital lesson.
My mother has not forgotten about my father and, of course, neither
have I. His alcoholism still shapes significant chunks of our lives, and
the bruise left by their lost love still lingers, but she regained control over
her life by choosing something different. She taught me that I am allowed
to choose, to change, to want different things at different moments.
My school religion teacher wanted me to stay quiet about the jagged
edge of love when it is broken, but I don’t see it as a failure or a source
of shame. I’ve been through break-ups that made me feel devastatingly
lonely, but they helped to form my identity and their breakdown gave
me time to work out who I am. My mother taught me that it is important to
hold on to the people that you love, but it’s just as important to let them go.
Jessica Andrews is the author of Saltwater (out now)“ I WAS CHASING
A RUMP L ED,
ROCK-S TA R V ERSION
OF MY DAD. I WANTED
the CHAOS, THE
DRINKING and THE
UNPREDICTABILITY”48
THE WRITER
Jessica Andrews (left) with her motherA