Sock Free Hideaway

BEATS OF LOVE 

173. Free Energy by Bananagun

SYMPTOMS OF bulimia; binging and purging got interpreted through the lens of other psychiatric frameworks prevalent in the late 1950s.

Leading to misdiagnosis or classification under broader categories of disordered or neurotic, so my mother got sectioned. I never knew this in her lifetime, but I was told candidly by my sister. When I mentioned it to her surviving partner, he flippantly said, 'your mother was in the bottom block.' I was sad as I recalled how upset we both were leaving Horwich after my father quit his job.

He took us to Middleton, which also unbeknownst to me, was mother's birthplace before finally taking us back to her hometown. The draw was being with her own mother, despite some folk knowing her history. They held a silence that seems impossible now in such a loud, confessional world. I recall my ambivalence after giving up on the Mancunian dream to return home myself and the one pull factor of my mother, who understood my sadness more than I knew.

I miss that tangible love like when she knotted herself around me prior to my major surgery, so much it hurts still.