The Sunday Times Magazine • 35fulfilment for me might look different to
what it meant for her. So I bristled and
dug my heels in. She sent me pictures of
my nieces and nephews with doomsday
warnings. I sent her photographs of flats in
Tokyo and told her I would be moving there
unless she stopped. Until, eventually, the
problem was resolved.
I was 32 when I met my partner, someone
innately kind, the quality Mum valued
above all. Our first son was born a year and
a half later to my mother’s great delight. She
doted on him. She was with us often, took
on childcare duties with great enthusiasm
and for a while everything was fine. Until
all of a sudden it wasn’t. I was already three
months pregnant when I realised I was
expecting a second child. My son was barely
a year old. I had only been back at work for
a matter of weeks — and already feeling as
though my career had been derailed by one
maternity leave. I didn’t feel happy; I felt
worried all the time. I panicked about
money and our future — I had always been
the higher earner and proud of it but now
the pressure kept me awake at night.
At first I dismissed it as hormones,
but the panic didn’t shift. I began to cry
compulsively: in Pret at lunchtime as fat
tears soaked my cheese and pickle baguette;
on the bus home. I wore sunglasses to spare
my fellow commuters the discomfort of
watching a pregnant woman weep. My
partner eventually persuaded me to see
a doctor. The doctor suggested I try
antidepressants, which he was “fairly sure”
wouldn’t hurt the baby. It was a risk I didn’t
feel I could take. Instead I joined a queue for
NHS therapy where I lingered for months.
I was still waiting when my son was born. By
then the pressure had formed a relentless
whistle in my head. What I didn’t do was
talk to Mum. She never pushed me on this,
but I think that when the truth did emerge
later on it might have troubled her a bit.
There are two things I wish I’d told
her: one is that one of the crueller aspects
of depression is how it turns you in on
yourself, to the point where everyone else,
even those who love you, is locked outside.
The other is that I was afraid. Motherhood
came so easily to her; what if I couldn’t do
it? What if I’d been right?
The book I’ve written is about what
happened next: the disorientation of those
early weeks when my confidence seemed to
evaporate overnight. And how I eventually
discovered horticultural therapy and
exploring the forgotten pockets of green
space in south London where I live.
There is nothing new about the idea that
plants can heal you. But what I felt standing
in a community garden, digging and sowing
with total strangers, felt radical and intense.
My parents were away for most of this,
but even when they came back I couldn’t
work out how to tell them what had been
going on at home. So I did what I usually
do and wrote it down. I am slightly ashamedto admit that my parents discovered the full
extent of the story along with everyone else,
by reading about it in The Sunday Times.
My mother reacted as she always did:
with empathy and kindness. Soon
afterwards she began to arrive at my house
with gifts. First it was three pots full of pure
red geraniums to cheer up the courtyard.
Then it was her plant bible, a battered old
copy of Roy Lancaster’s Perfect Plant, Perfect
Place, with pages folded and notes scribbled
at the side. Plants, which I’d had no idea she
was interested in, became something we
enjoyed together for the last two years of
her life. (While searching through emails
for this piece I came across an exchange
between us headed simply “Nice shrub”.)
One of the impacts of loss is how
inconsequential it makes everything else.
It isn’t just the sudden impact of her having
left us but the relentless thud of each
aftershock: that she just missed her 50th
wedding anniversary; that she didn’t get
the holiday she’d planned with her children
and grandchildren; that she left us just as
my sons are entering the stage of big ideas
and earnest questions, the stage she loved
the most. The hardest thing for me is the
thought that they may not remember her,
which I find so painful my mind will not let
me dwell on it, forcing me to move on.
She never got to read the published
version of my book, but I did send her a
digital copy a few months before she died
and she read the early chapters. She had
a few questions afterwards, one of which
was who I thought would read it. I didn’t
know what to say because she had hit on
something I’d been avoiding for a while.
Why had I done this? There was nothing
exceptional about what I lived through;
people live through far, far worse every day.
So I forced myself to think about it properly
before I replied. I wrote it for me, I told her
in an email, because I felt like I had to, to
prove that I could, and because writing is
the best way I have to sort life’s chaos into
some sort of sense. “The story of your
ordeal is beautifully depicted. We are so
proud of you,” my mother replied.
A few hours later she wrote again. The
email was headed “Filling in the gaps” and
inside were the details of her ordeal, what
she and my father had lived through with
Leila all those years before. Not just the
anecdotes this time, but the facts. My
mother was 24 when Leila was born, my
father was 25 and at the beginning of his
Foreign Office career. There was nothing
unusual about her birth, though it was
noted that her heartbeat was fast. “It’s
fluttering like a bird,” one of the nurses said.
The doctors thought it would settle on its
own. Six weeks later a trainee GP noticed
that it hadn’t and Leila was referred to
Great Ormond Street.
There, during an investigation, doctors
saw the extent of the damage. Her arteries
were “transposed”, so the weaker side ofRosie met her
partner at 32 and
gave birth to their
first son a year and
a half laterMUM WAS ALONE
WHEN DOCTORS
EXPLAINED THAT
NOTHING MORE
COULD BE DONE FOR
LEILA. SHE LEFT THE
HOSPITAL IN A DAZE