Episode notes:



To learn more about Mary or her book Austerity Bites go to www.austeritybitesuk.com

Follow her on Twitter @MaryOHara1

Episode Transcript:



Welcome to episode 232 with my guest Mary O’Hara. I’m Paul Gilmartin, this is the Mental Illness Happy Hour, a place for honesty about all the battles in our heads, from medically diagnosed conditions, past traumas and sexual dysfunction to everyday compulsive negative thinking. This show is not meant to be a substitute for professional mental counseling...wow, ran out of breath there. It’s not a doctor’s office, I’m not a therapist, it’s more more like a waiting room that doesn’t suck. The website is mentalpod.com. It’s also the Twitter handle you can follow me at – so go check out the website. You can fill out surveys that help us get to know who you are as a listener and you can also browse the forum, you can support the show financially, you can buy a Mental Illness Happy Hour t-shirt or coffee mug, you can shop... I just reach a certain point in describing the website where I just – I tire of myself. Is it bad that I am a minute and seven seconds into the podcast and I’ve tired of myself? It’s not a good sign because I’ve got a big ass pack of surveys and the interview with Mary is about an hour and twenty minutes long, so this is going to be a long one. This is going to be a long episode. I did want to mention one thing about the interview with Mary. There’s a moment when we were talking about civil rights in the sixties and as I was playing the show back and editing it I realized I meant to say “integration.” Instead I said “segregation,” so if you’re puzzled by what I say there, that’s why.

Anyway, I’m going to kick things off with a couple of Struggle in a Sentence responses. This is from Isla and about her depression. She writes, “It feels like I’m trapped in a bubble that keeps me from taking any action that could make my life better and it separates me from others. It’s like watching life go by from the sidelines.” Boy, I bet a lot of people relate to that one, I do.

This one is by Kristi and she writes about her depression: “My kids laughing their little hearts out. Quick – I need to smile so they know it’s good to laugh and I’m not mad at them.” About her ADHD: “Where the fuck is my – oh, I haven’t heard this song in forever!” About her anxiety: “It’s like being married to an abusive husband: ‘I’m sorry I can’t go to the park. My anxiety won’t let me.’” Wow, that is great. That is great.

This is from our friend Catla, uh, Cut...Cutler or Catla? I can’t – I always forget. Cotla, that’s right. No, Catla. Shit! Anyway, Catla is a trans female and she writes about her OCD: “I want everything around me to be right and perfect because nothing about me is right or perfect.” That is profound. A snapshot from her life: “Every morning when I get up I go through shock trying to figure out how to work my oversized and too masculine body, so I wind up staying in bed hitting the snooze until I need to get up and leave. Every night when I go to bed I have to free my mind from the stress of working my body that doesn’t fit in order to be able to sleep. As a result I can’t go sleep without an extensive relaxation process. During my day to day life I have trouble focusing on tasks because I’m preoccupied with my gender struggle. I have tested in the 150 to 160 range for IQ, but I can’t put my entire mind to any problem because my body doesn’t match my mind. Every hour of every day of my life is filled with frustration as a result. Sorry for the novella here.”

This is filled out by a guy who calls himself Very Treatable. About his ADHD he writes, “It’s like there’s a million trains whirling around me in all different directions and I have to know who’s in each window of each train because one of them is super important, and I have to make eye contact with each in order to know.” That is right.

Jonny Toxic 1985 - this sounds like a terrible Johnny Depp movie! About his physical disability, which is cerebral palsy, he writes: “Every time I pass a stranger on the street I ask myself, ‘is this going to be the person who will call me Speed Racer or some other diminutive name?’ If you are going to call me something like that at least have the decency to call me Racer X.” Snapshot from his life: “I work part time and the pay sucks, but it’s really all I can handle because I can only be ‘on’ for four hours a day. I come home to an empty apartment and the security blanket of Seinfeld episodes, Iron Maiden and Springsteen records. I depend on those three things because they help me forget about the body I am imprisoned in, unless Bruce Dickinson is fencing during Powerslave.” I have no idea what that is. I think Bruce Dickinson is a heavy metal singer, [Bruce Dickinson is the lead singer of Iron Maiden and a competitive fencer] but, anyway, thank you for that Johnny.

And then finally this is a dark thought from a guy who calls himself Flying Squirrel. He writes, “I think about how I would kill people and dispose of the body. I sometimes think about who, who I know that would help me if need be. After all, good friends help you move. Great friends help you move a body.”

INTRO MUSIC

Paul Gilmartin: I’m here with Mary O’Hara, who is an award winning journalist who writes about social issues and mental health. She writes for The Guardian and The Observer and she won a book of the year award for The Guardian Review of Books. Congratulations.

Mary O’Hara: Thank you. Yeah, so, it’s just when The Guardian writers choose their favorite books. So, it was nice.

PG: What a way to put it down, though. Now we officially know you’re Irish.

MO: No, I’ve gotta diss myself just a little bit more.

PG: If the dialect didn’t give it away, that certainly did. You are from Belfast, and I know we have a lot of young listeners who may not understand the history of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain, so if you could, I know you could explain it a lot more eloquently than I could. Give them the lowdown.

MO: Well, I suppose it’s like how many centuries have your audience got, you know? It’s a long and twisted history. Trying to summarize Northern Ireland, Jesus...

PG: Would you say it started with Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell?

MO: Everything started with Henry VIII. Now, civilization and everything. Debauchery. Everything started with Henry VIII. No, the situation with Northern Ireland is a kind of peculiar one. It’s constitutionally, but to cut a very long story short, when there was an agreement in the early 1920’s between the British government and Ireland that some of Ireland would get its independence of British rule, and it had been ruled by Britain for a long time. One of the things that they didn’t get was the six counties in the north of Ireland, and one of the reasons for that is because a very large proportion of the population in Northern Ireland are pro-union, as in pro-being part of Britain.

PG: The crown.

MO: Yeah. And that’s –

PG: And generally tend to be Protestant.

MO: That’s absolutely right. So you’ve got, sort of Protestants/Catholics is how it’s usually talked about, but really what they mean is Nationalists and Unionists. So, the proportion of the population that wants to be part of a united Ireland is still smaller than the proportion of the Northern Irish population that wants to be part of Britain.

PG: And much less wealthy.

MO: Oh, yeah, and over the years there have been times of incredible social unrest in Northern Ireland, and perhaps the biggest issue arose in the late 1960’s, really around the same time as the civil rights movement was happening in the U.S. and you had the riots in Paris and across Europe. Northern Ireland experienced the same thing because the Catholic part of the population had been for a long time discriminated against by the majority Protestant rulers. Northern Ireland at that point had its own government separate from Westminster [Westminster is shorthand for the British parliament] in London, and in things like housing, employment, education: Catholics were less likely to get the same opportunities as Protestants. There is – a lot of issues coalesced at the same time, but there was a civil rights movement launched to highlight these inequities and to say, “we need to change this, this is unacceptable.” Around the same time, the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, which had fought for Irish independence back in the day to get the whole of Ireland free, and ultimately got the south of Ireland free of the British, came into resurgence. There was a number of incidents where the police in Northern Ireland...there were lots of incidents of police brutality, a lot of Americans will recognize this in the current climate of when people go out to protest legitimately sometimes they find themselves faced with almost militaristic police responses. People die, people are injured, that then snowballs, creates a much greater problem, and in the Northern Irish context what that meant was that the IRA suddenly found itself no longer dormant. Lots of people felt that the only way to get the whole of Ireland united, to get Northern Ireland free of British rule, was through armed insurrection. That was the option that people felt was open to them. It – there was a lot of incidents that happened. One of the responses, there were many responses, but one of the responses was to send the British Army in to Northern Ireland in the early 1970’s. There were thousands of British troops walking the streets of Northern Ireland, especially the cities. Places like West Belfast where I grew up, where I was born were – we had four or five what were called “foot patrols,” the combined army and police presences on our streets five or six times a day. Local people were often just pulled aside. They were searched without any recourse. People were imprisoned without trial for periods of time.

PG: Generally Catholics?

MO: Yeah, usually.

PG: And the area that you grew up in, was it predominantly Protestant or Catholic?

MO: Well, it’s interesting, West Belfast, because it really speaks to the issue of Northern Ireland. Because the main road is called the Falls Road that runs through West Belfast, and it is a Catholic road, a center for Republicanism. And yet only a stones throw away, divided by a huge wall, is the Shankill Road, which is the Protestant equivalent. These are very working class areas, have had long histories of poverty, it’s the area where for instance the old cotton mills used to be back in the industrial age. So, real heartlands of working class culture, but very different traditions right along side each other. Now what that meant was there were opportunities for clashes, for enormous clashes between the two groups because they had such divergent ideas of what the world should be and what their communities should be. And certainly, in my lifetime, when I was growing up there, I mean the violence that I witnessed on just an, almost a weekly basis I think most people would find quite extraordinary. We had for a long time – our streets were barricaded off by army vehicles, we had tanks driving up the street, people shooting from rooftops, bombs going off. It was, you know, for a very long time an incredibly unstable situation. Lots of young men, and it’s usually young men, would then try to defend their communities – Protestant and Catholic – they all felt they had to do something to defend their communities against what they perceived to be as an enemy. So they go, ah –

PG: Would it be fair to say though that the Protestants had the army more on their side than the Catholics did?

MO: Yeah, but you know it’s kind of interesting, because there was these wonderful pictures of the early days of “The Troubles,” because it was called “The Troubles” in inverted commas [‘inverted commas’ is British English for quotation marks] is very fucking Irish right there. That’s like, it’s not a war, it’s “The Troubles” - we’re all a tiny bit troubled by some things, you know. And it’s kind of like - ‘cos I only took it for granted growing up there, but later on I’m like, seriously? That’s what they decided to call a civil war? (Speaking in an exaggerated Irish accent) “Ah, sure, we’re only havin’ a tiny bit o’ trouble today!” No. So, it was sort of ridiculous, but in the early days when the army turned up strangely the Catholic community saw them as their rescuers. Because what the Catholic community were worried about at the time was this dominant Protestant, sort of, political force that was then manifested in the police force: 99% Protestant. They thought the British Army coming in would be an independent arbiter in some way and there were pictures of women in the street giving baked goods to the soldiers when they arrived ‘cos they felt they were going to be a buffer between them and this police force and political institutions that were oppressing them. Now, over time that altered and when it did alter so dramatically. Hence you have the IRA then targeting soldiers. Lots of them were assassinated, blown up. It was an incredibly, sort of, messy situation. And so it weirdly transformed from them being seen as a protector to the being seen as another part of the British establishment and the enemy. I mean for me, because I had soldiers on my street all the time, one of the things that struck me –

PG: The household you were raised in, one parent was Catholic, one parent was Protestant?

MO: Well, my mum had a Protestant father who fought in the Second World War for the, as part of the British Navy. And they – but was brought up a Catholic as was my father. But because of that background, as children my brothers and sisters and I were always aware that we were part something else, right? So, whenever there were these – whenever people were talking about sectarianism or identity or “be on your side, you’re not on their side,” well, for someone like me who was an obstreperous little shit, and I always had a million questions and I’d be like, well, I just happened to live here, but part of me is part of these other people, so tell me why I should hate these people? So I was very aware from an early age that this idea of identity is a bit confused. You can tell yourself you’re something, but you look into your background and suddenly you realize you’re actually something else entirely. So, I used to annoy a lot of people including my friends, because they’d be quite dogmatic, they’d be like, you know, “Up the IRA!” and all this kind of stuff and I’d be like, well, you know... And then I started learning a wee bit about politics as I got really into politics generally when I was quite young I was kind of like, but, isn’t it the case really that a lot of working class people are being done over by people who are wealthy? Isn’t it the case that none of the middle class areas have soldiers in them everyday? And they’re not being blown up and no one is shooting on their rooftops? Shoot me, I’ll ask that question. But I – I began to see that is was a much more complicated picture then maybe we were being told that it was.

PG: If the ruling elite can get the poor people to fight each other, they can just sit back and sail their yacht.

MO: They can, and that’s exactly what they were doing. There’s actual lough [‘lough’ is lake in Irish] in Northern Ireland where that’s what they all do. They go off the weekends and sail their yachts. But it’s kind of – for me the soldiers were interesting because even as a little girl I could tell that a lot of them were really young...and actually terrified. So, you know they’d walk up and down your street, and they had this technique where they would, they always had rifles, but they had this technique where they would bob up and down. So, they’d be, like, down on their hunkers, down on their knees, and then up again, down again, up again, because –

PG: So snipers –

MO: Snipers, and kids are curious, you know, kids would go up and pet a rabid dog, you know, they don’t care, like. So you’d go up and have a conversation with these guys and you realize, well, they’re not actually that weird, you know, they’re just people here doing what they think they’re supposed to do. And then you realize you’re talking to eighteen year olds. When you’re ten, eighteen seems ancient, but you’re not that stupid to realize that this guy is still young, you know, this is the age of my uncle or my brother, or – and I sort of felt for everybody in the situation. I sometimes felt it’s easy to define things as, you know, no areas of gray. There’s always an area of gray.

PG: Always. Always. That’s one of the things that I stress so much, and why I always – I should say why I started adding to the Shame and Secrets survey is: did you have any positive experiences with your abusers? And almost always, even the worst abusers, there was something that they did that –

MO: That was an act of kindness once or twice. There’s always something, and I think that’s definitely, certainly from, like, the place I grew up had – like, there was so much social unrest and so much destabilization that were – there was a lot of mental health problems, a lot of domestic violence, alcohol problems, all of those kinds of things. So you’re exposed to how people react to these, like, extraordinary traumatic things. But even in the midst of the bleakest of moments there are random acts of humor and random acts of kindness even by people who you can’t believe would be capable of it.

PG: Any of those spring to mind?

MO: Well, it’s interesting, because in my own experience, like, lots of my friends lived in households with extreme domestic violence, for instance. A lot of the men were unemployed. A lot of them were being pushed and pulled into terrorist organizations, often being threatened, some of them had been shot, so their lives were often pretty bleak. And you could be in a room, I mean I was in a room once with one of my best friends and her father was holding a knife to her mother’s throat. And you would think there’s nothing about this man that is redeemable, he’s holding a knife to his wife’s throat. And yet every summer he drove us to the coast to have some kind of holiday. Because, you know, we needed to have a break from all this shit, you know, and it was – so you’re kind of like, “yeah, well, he beats his wife, but he takes us on holiday, and when else do we going to get a holiday,” you know, your thirteen year old self says. You know, so it’s just so twisted in many ways, and I think also because when, when you’re witnessing acts of horror you can’t believe that someone can pull back and in the context of Northern Ireland over the years a lot of the guys who perpetrated the most heinous acts went on to be community workers, went on to be advocates for poorer people. Everything from getting, helping people to find a home to, you know, if an elderly member of the family has dementia how do you get better care for that person? It’s – none of these things are simple, and I think when you’re exposed to it first hand you’re very reluctant to let people paint any issues as black and white. There’s always more to it.

PG: There always is and, you know, what springs to mind is in the Middle East some of these organizations that commit these terrible, terrible acts are also helping to feed some of the poor people, to take care of the mothers who are widows, and its...so complicated.

MO: It’s really complicated and after, remember – I moved to England when I was eighteen to go to university, and like there was just constant questions, people had never been to Northern Ireland. And when I – at that age it was still pretty bad, it was 1988, so there was still, every time I went home there were still people being shot, and, you know, there were bombing campaigns in London, and –

PG: I remember visiting London in the mid-eighties and just – I think it was about a week after the really big bombing in the department store, and maybe not a week, but it was shortly thereafter, and I just remember kind of, uh, being a little nervous, having a good time, but also –

MO: Yeah, yeah, what can happen next? Of course I had a classic once, I’m going of on a tangent here, but you know how it is when a story comes into your head that you just want to...

PG: Sure.

MO: I was at work, I think it was ‘92, and there had just been a massive bomb in the City of London [the City of London is the financial district of London] and interesting ‘cos it was a financial target, you know, very symbolic, but, my dad rang up and he says, (speaking in concerned dad voice) “So I’m really worried about you, are you okay, you know, it seems like a very scary place.” And I’m like, “You live in West Belfast!” You know, I’m like, “What are you talking about?!” You know, I’m like, okay, I know, there’s a few bombs going off, but, like, what’s new? But I’m just like – he says, “Oh, I don’t know, it’s not the same, you know, I don’t – you know, it’s dangerous...”

PG: Dad, I can’t hear you over the tank.

MO: Yeah, you know what I mean? So I’m just kind of – but, for him it’s just an unknown ‘cos at that point he’d only been to London once and he just thought it was like a foreign country. You know, “My daughter’s in danger,” and I’m like, oh for Christ’s sake, you know, you walk down the street and you’re in danger, you know. I know how to take care of myself, the one thing you learn when you grow up on the streets in the middle of a civil war is how to get the hell out of Dodge when the shit hits the fan, you know. I’m like – when I was a teenager I didn’t do high heels for a reason. I lived in flat lace-up shoes, right, and luckily for me, sort of mods were quite in at the time so everyone wore flat shoes, but we needed to run like, we needed to know that we could get out trouble fast. I’m like, “I think I can handle myself, Dad. Alright. It’s okay.”

PG: Share some recollections that you have of your childhood, be it related to “The Troubles” or within your family.

MO: Boy, you ask big questions. (Laughing) Okay, oh my god, right, so there are lots of – there is no way to talk about my childhood and not think about the weird circumstances that we were in. So, I used to find myself sat in the corner reading books ‘cos I used books as an escape to – ‘cos I used to go and do whole shelves in the library.

PG: Really?

MO: I would just go from one end to the other. I bored the librarians to death ‘cos I would just take – I mean this is like as a seven year old or something, take all the books home, sit and read them ‘cos I needed to escape, and the thing I think that defined my whole childhood for me was it was always about escape. Everything was about how I was gonna eventually get out, so I’d read all – I read every children’s book known to man that was in English, you know, because I, I didn’t care whether it was about frogs or, you know, I didn’t care what it was about as long as I could escape a bit. And my friends and I used to spend a lot of our time doing things like that. We had, weirdly, this odd piece of waste ground that used to be, I think, like a del – like a sort of depot for deliveries, but it had all become sort of overgrown with like, wild foliage. Now for us inner city kids this was like nirvana, you know, we were like it’s on the end of our council estate, so basically, I suppose the equivalent of what you would have here would be in any public housing complex, we were in the Northern Irish equivalent, except with a few thing – you know, like being shot at, whatever. But we would just escape into this little what we thought was like –

PG: Wilderness.

MO: Wilderness, you know, and thinking about it now, it was probably –

PG: There’s not a lot of green in Belfast.

MO: No, but it was probably like a hundred square feet or something, but when you’re ten it’s like amazing. So, we used to just go over there and we’d, like, do the thing where you make pretend houses and pour pretend cups of tea and all this kind of stuff and hide under dark leaves, and, you know, find tadpoles and stuff, like. This is – our parents had no idea where we were. But the other thing that we were doing, which people get a bit weirded out by, is – well, we were just like kissin’ boys, right, we were just like at ten, you know, get all these boys to come over and sit in our pretend houses, and we would just like snog the faces off them, you know. And these just – these bewildered ten year old boys goin’ “what’s happenin’?” and we’re like, “well you’re gonna kiss me!” Now I’d be like, what is...

PG: Why are people weirded out by that?

MO: Well, because they don’t think that ten year olds are interested in that kind of thing.

PG: I was at ten and all my friends were.

MO: None of the boys were, the girls were – the girls were like tiny little tarts, you know, we’re just, you know, nippin’ away at these poor guys. But we just had this weird kind of, almost – I, I read a lot of Famous Five books [the Famous Five is a popular series of British children’s novels similar in style to The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew]and stuff when I was a kid, so I loved all this, you know, it’s just let’s have a little adventure. But we’d come out of that, we’d go back into reality, back into homes where there was a lot of trouble, a lot of, like, the sorts of social problems you get with poverty, frankly. The area we lived in was one of the, if not the poorest region in the whole of Western Europe, and, I mean, really, really bad.

PG: I had no idea.

MO: Yeah, and it’s still is.

PG: And by that you mean West Belfast.

MO: Yeah, and it still is. It still is up there, it’s still one of the poorest areas in, I mean, that’s a big piece of land to be among the poorest of, so, most of our dads were unemployed –

PG: And you’re including Bulgaria and those other –

MO: The west, well, Western Europe, so –

PG: Oh, so, Western Europe, ok, ‘cos there’s some incredible poverty in Eastern Europe.

MO: Yeah, so, well, when we were kids of course it was still, they were still all communist, so they had a – it was an entirely different thing, so, but even compared to places like Spain, which coming out of the Franco regime had extraordinary poverty. Portugal: extraordinary poverty. Parts of the south of Italy: extraordinary poverty. So, even compared with some of those places, which really were dire, West Belfast was...

PG: Whenever I see a documentary on Belfast it’s – the two things that strike me is: the lack of greenery, which is ironic because it’s in Ireland, which is one of the lushest, greenest places on the planet.

MO: But, you know, it’s funny you should say that, because one of the weird things about growing up in a ghetto, which is what we grew up in, and it absolutely defines our childhood, which was that we didn’t move outside of like, one or two square mile radius. We didn’t go anywhere apart from when someone’s dad decided to take us away for the summer to a caravan [caravan is British English for a camping trailer] so, our –

PG: Because it was dangerous?

MO: Often, yeah, but often just because people didn’t have any money. You know, people just – you just didn’t go anywhere, and, so, that creates a mentality that is very defensive, but also offensive toward people that try to enter or come near you. But weirdly, we were in these ghettos and they were very urban, so any documentary about Northern Ireland will be about these areas because it’s where the intensity was, it’s where “The Troubles” were happening. It’s where the violence was. And yet, if I stood on the corner of, like, the road, like the main road that ran up the side of our council estate, the first thing I see is a mountain. I mean, just, like, a mountain! And it’s just this huge hulk of green. And, like, the idea of going up the mountain or going to the other side of it was preposterous. And it wasn’t until I was of an age where I had to go to the airport because I was going to London, and it turns out you have to go over the mountain to get to the airport, and I went, “wow”...

PG: I’ve never seen a shot of that in a single documentary.

MO: But it is possibly the single – apart from the docks, it’s possibly the most topographically significant thing. And also, when we were growing up, because we’d look at the top of the mountain, and of course the armed forces would be up there. They had their – they had little spy things up there to look down at us. So the mountain was associated with being scrutinized, with being watched, like we’d have helicopters all day and night with spotlights on us, and we were just used to these things, but because we were in this mentality of ghettoization, it’s very hard to look at the mountain as anything other than something troubling, because we’re being watched from it.

PG: That’s so fucked up.

MO: Yeah, and it’s really, really, really screwed up. And then, a mile in the other direction from, if I stood on that road looking up at the mountain, if I turned and just went the other way, I’d get to the university area of Belfast, so Queen’s University is like one of the top ten universities in Britain. I mean it’s a global player, an amazing place. And beside that is the botanical gardens, and you go in there and there’s like, there’s an amazing, you know, an amazing array of foliage and plants, and this beautiful, kind of, you know, I don’t know, it’s just – Elysian Fields. And I would go wandering up there ‘cos that told me that there was something beyond what I was living. And then our teachers would take us on day trips sometimes, you know, they’d hire a minibus and take us out, and then we’d see the green. Then we’d get out and we’d see the contrast between where we were everyday and what was beyond where we were. But unless we’d had an education system that allowed us to do that we wouldn’t’ve been able to see beyond our noses, and I – you know what you were saying there about if you keep the poor fighting each other then everyone else is easy? If you keep the poor locked into communities where they never get to meet other people how can you possibly see what the world has to offer?

PG: And how can your ideas change?

MO: How can your ideas change and how can you be open to new ideas? But, the fact that we live on, quite frankly, the greenest, lushest piece of land, weird as it is, that is imaginable, but don’t get to see it is –

PG: You know, I was thinking, the other day I posted something celebrating the Supreme Court decision legalizing marriage and, of course, you know, you get the people: “Blah, blah, blah,” talking about the constitution and how it wasn’t right, you know? To which I always say, “You’re either for equality or you’re not.”

MO: Yeah.

PG: But the people have these entrenched ideas about something or some group of people being all bad, or an act being all bad, or whatever. I just want to say to them: go make two friends with this group that you demonize and I bet your ideas will change.

MO: Well that’s interesting you say that because one of the things that I started doing from an early age was exactly that. So, at the bottom of my street is what was called a “peace wall” – ironic, right, because there’s nothing peaceful about this damn thing, it’s just literally dividing communities and often it was used as a platform to just shoot at each other from and stuff. But I wanted to get to know the people on the other side of that wall. I wondered why can’t I get to know my equivalent on the other side of that wall. So I started doing drama so that I could do plays and musicals and got involved with theaters that would deliberately get kids from both sides of the divide together, and we’d be doing plays together for, like, months at a time. There is no way once you’re in that situation that you see any differences, you only see what you have in common, but you have to get a chance to meet. When I got a bit older I joined a community relations group. So I was, sixteen, seventeen. That was fantastic too, so we were older teenagers. One of the things that was – really freaked the shit out of me was they themed weekends away. So, we’d go away for these weekends, next we’d talk, you know, sometimes you’d fancy someone, you know, sometimes there’d be a, you know – whatever, teenagers – but then we’d sit in these groups and talk about history. And there was a moment that I realized that none of the Protestants had been taught Irish history. None of them. All the Catholics had been taught Irish history since kindergarten. We knew the entire story. They were utterly unaware. Now, if you keep people in that level of ignorance, then what gives them the motivation to reach out? They’re even more cut off in a way then we were, because at least we had some context for what was happening. These guys had no context whatsoever. It was incredible. But then the other thing that happened was that as a girl growing up in that environment, in many ways you had it easier, strangely, because we weren’t being recruited all the time into paramilitary organizations. Unless your family was, like, part of the paramilitary networks, as a girl you could – you didn’t have to deal with these guys coming out and threatening to shoot you if you didn’t sign up. I –

PG: You just had to go to funerals.

MO: Yeah, right? And my school overlooked the IRA graveyards. So, when we were at school that’s what we looked out on from our classrooms.

PG: Wow.

MO: So, you know, we were – we had a constant reminder of that. But when I started doing the community relations stuff what I realized was that the boys, some of them had to back out because they were being threatened for being part of this community relations group. They were being threatened by local paramilitaries and being told that they’d be shot if they kept going. And these are guys from working class areas, you know, tough little fuckers, you know, really like hard men, like little gangsters, you know, who were trying to do something and it was totally cut off to them. And like my older brother kept saying to me, “You’re getting yourself into a lot of trouble here, you know, if you keep this up, you know, shit’s gonna hit the fan.”

PG: For you or for them?

MO: Well, for me, he was saying. But then, what he was also telling me was that it was for him too. So, if I kept being part of this, then by default he was associated with my actions. And all I was doing was hanging out with kids who were Protestant. Now, you gotta ask – you gotta ask: what kind of society tells its children that it will shoot them if they talk to each other? I mean, that’s what you’re talking about. It’s –

PG: Crazy.

MO: It’s absolutely crazy. And all, you know – and weirdly the first place I studied after Northern Ireland was in Charleston, in South Carolina.

PG: Really.

MO: At the College of Charleston. I was on a scholarship and, in fact, I emailed my professor when the events happened there last week because I had been on that campus, and, you know, I still have friends there, and we were talking about this because I remember turning up and Northern Ireland has no Black people. Well, it has a few now, but back then it was – we had a few Vietnamese immigrants, a few Chinese immigrants, and you did not see Black faces anywhere. But one of the weirdest things was I grew up next to the hospital and the Black people I knew were doctors because the hospital used to train doctors from Africa in how to stitch people up after shrapnel wounds or being shot. So my association with Black people was doctors. It was the completely different of what everybody likes to paint Black people as. Turn up in Charleston, suddenly have all of these, like, amazing Black friends and get into really deep discussions with them about segregation, about the history of the South, and interesting for us to connect because I came from a different kind of ghetto, but it was a segregated community and it was segregated often by wealth and power. We couldn’t see it by the look of someone’s face, we couldn’t tell by someone’s skin color where they belonged in the pecking order, but you could tell by where they lived. Fascinating to me, absolutely fascinating. Dig a bit deeper into the constructs that create segregation, and so I’ve always been fascinated by that ever since and then to watch what happened, you know, just incredible. I can’t disconnect from twenty five years ago when I was studying there and learning about that, learning about the Confederacy, learning about what it all meant, and even a quarter century later that that’s still an issue.

PG: You know, I’ve been thinking about twenty first century bigotry. Most people that are modern day bigots don’t think that they’re bigots because they think, “I support Black people voting, I think that, you know, segregation was wrong,” and I believe that they are just our version of the person in the sixties who was afraid of segregation, but didn’t think that they were a bigot because they thought, “Yes, slavery should have been ended.”

MO: But, it’s just so selective. I mean it’s like, it’s like you were saying earlier, but, you know, either you’re for equality or you’re not. It’s really, you know, it’s – it’s a complex issue, but it’s not that difficult to get your head around. It really isn’t.

PG: Are – you just ask yourself, “Are you treating that person the way you would like to be treated?”

MO: Well, you know, it’s one of the things that I suppose in the past few years I’ve – and I’m not an angry person. If I was gonna be angry I would’ve been a long time ago because the circumstances, but one of the things in the last few years, my work has been this kind of new wave of bigotry that has emerged in Britain, and it’s not a racial bigotry, it’s like a resurgence of class hatred, class bigotry, and almost like a, some kind of political, pseudo-philosophical war on the poor, and that really rankles with me because one of the things that happened after the Great Recession to Britain – it’s what my book is about – it’s the austerity policies that were put in place and the harm that it did to people who were already not very well off. But the thing that accompanied it, accompanied it, was incredibly toxic, because all the political rhetoric and the media rhetoric was painting people who were living in poverty as if they were some kind of social reprobate misfit to blame for their own circumstances. You know, to me the idea that a child going to school who happens to be from a poor family is to blame for those circumstances, I mean – that was me. That was not my fault that grew up where I grew up in poverty, so don’t expect me to sit back and be quiet while you try to tell a new generation of children that they are second class citizens. It’s absolutely extraordinary to me that in modern Britain that is the dominant political narrative. Incredible, and because that narrative –

PG: It’s here too, they’re, the really – the news outlets that make me sick are the ones that convince middle class people that poor people are the problem.

MO: Yeah.

PG: You know, they’ll show a poor person using a microwave and say this per – you know, look at him afford a microwave, why is this person on welfare? And I’m all for someone to have a degree of personal responsibility, but –

MO: But I think that they don’t seem to get – and this is like, this the most ridiculous thing about these arguments is that what they don’t get is the more you put people down, the more you tell them they’re worthless, the more they’re likely to believe that they’re worthless. It is actually very, very hard when you grow up in those conditions to convince yourself that you are as worthy as anyone else. Someone tells you you’re shit, you know, it’s easy to believe that you’re shit. And that’s not what you’re told when you come from a middle class background. You’re told that you can be president, you know, you’re told to be aspirational, you know, “reach for the stars, yay, yay, yay,” you know, whereas you’re a poor kid you’re kicked when you’re already down. And you know the statistics here on dropout levels for young people from poor backgrounds when they even make it to college because it’s so hard to make the adjustment into that world that’s culturally different. If you’re hammered enough from these so-called people who are successful it’s very hard to crawl your way out of that idea of who you are.

PG: So give me some, some more snapshots from childhood to paint a picture of –

MO: One of the things that is to me –

PG: You know what, do me a favor: reach behind you and close the door. We got, ah, some –

MO: Cleaners, I think.

PG: Some visitors or cleaners or something.

(Sound of door closing, then laughing)

PG: There – that was very nice. I think you might be able to turn pro, and –

MO: It was a door closing! It’s very dramatic. It was beautiful, I even did a little hand gesture to indicate –

PG: Nice, nice flourish at the end.

MO: Yeah, yeah, you know, I could be on a game show, you know, I could be the woman in the sequins dress just closin’ doors. Yeah, I’m sort of thinking, but – it all ties in really as opposed to these issues around poverty and inequality because they define who I am.

PG: And by the way, the book that Mary wrote that has – that won the award is called Austerity Bites, and it’s about those very topics. About the – once the recession hit the UK, the cuts to –

MO: Social services, everything. Social – any social provision began to be targeted including for disabled people. And –

PG: Well, aren’t you a little tired of the disabled sucking off us, Mary?

MO: Oh, yeah, yeah, you know, those lazy, feckless bastards, you know –

PG: With their great parking spaces –

MO: Yeah, oh my god, yeah. I’ve actually had people ask me that, you know, “Well, they can’t be that badly off if they have a car.”

PG: You’ve gotta be shitting me.

MO: Yeah.

PG: Wow.

MO: So why, why do they need our help if they can afford a car? There’s a point where you’re dumbstruck, you know, there is – there are points where you just go, “It doesn’t really matter what I say to this person, you know, because the fact that they’re saying that to me just speaks volumes.”

PG: Unfriend. Unfriend.

MO: Unfriend. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know what you do with those people, but you don’t spend too much time –

PG: So give me some snapshots.

MO: So I had – so for me, personally I think, my education was possibly the single most important factor in my childhood. So I – I had a grandmother who was, for want of a better word, a total asshole, and she told me once I started off my own back, being interested in reading, like basically eating books for breakfast, she told me that there was no way in hell that I was going to amount to anything, who did I think I was, I thought I was better than everybody else. And I’m like, what, because I can read? You know.

PG: Wow.

MO: Yeah, so there was a bit of me that just went, “No, nah, nah, nah, nah. Just to spite you I’m gonna kick ass,” you know. “Just to spite you.” It just so happened that I had these amazing teachers right from the get go, and – it just inspired me beyond belief. And, at the time in Northern Ireland we had basically what ended up being a segregated education system not just by religion, but by social class as well. So, if you were a kid from a working class background your chances of passing this qualifying exam to get you into the best schools were pretty slim, and I failed that exam at age eleven. Normally what happens is that you are then designated as person who would be a shop worker, or a receptionist, or a box – make boxes in a factory. All jobs that need to be done, but to be told that that’s all your fit for at a age eleven really rankled, and my teachers told me which school I should go to, which happened to be on the Falls Road, and was run by this extraordinary woman, a nun, who was in the Sisters of Charity, which were an order of nuns that were all about redressing poverty. They were out in the field, they weren’t sequestered, they weren’t cloistered, and her whole ethos was: A. if you’re a girl you can do anything, and B. if you were a girl who grew up in poverty you can do anything. And it didn’t matter what our background was. We arrived in that school, the first thing we were told is: “What do you want to be? What do you want to do with your life? We’re here to make it happen.” Utterly extraordinary to be part of something like that.

PG: What do you remember thinking or feeling the first time you heard that?

MO: Terrified! This woman was one scary lady.

PG: Really?

MO: Oh god, she wore – she wore those glasses that when the sun hit them they tinted and went slightly darker, so we all used to call her – we all used to think she was like a mafioso, you know. She would like sort of march around the place terrifying everybody. But terr – I mean she literally terrified everybody. When the IRA came to tell her to shut the school down because there were funerals going on she told them to sod off. You know, “My girls are not missing a day of school.” If there were riots on the street should would walk us down the road to make sure we got home, walk us back up again. You know, all kinds of stuff, but, you know, you’re a young girl and you’re thinking this woman is awesome. Right? Scary as hell, but awesome. But, how – you know, terr – if you asked anybody who when to my school what they thought of her the first thing they’d say is, “We were terrified.” But the second thing they’d say is that she told us something that most kids in poverty never get told: that with the right support, a good education system, we can, you know, we can break out of this. And, so we had like, the school had the best record for employment in the high – one of the highest poverty areas in Europe. Something like 80% employment leaving school. The rest of us went to university. The idea that you could – you could do all kinds of things wasn’t out of our remit. We had people who went on to be actors, doctors, lawyers, you know – that was not happening in the other schools in our area. As hard as they tried that wasn’t happening. So for me that is the most defining thing, because what she refused to give into was what she saw as the, I suppose, being – as us being penalized for where we were born, and being told that we were less than, and she wasn’t gonna have any of it, frankly. And that was an amazing thing to be a part of. And, that’s why I say when, you can live in the hardest of circumstances but every now and again someone does something that just blows you away.

PG: Did you have any champions within your family? People who championed you and your intellect?

MO: It was kind of hard, because – they just thought I was a freak. I mean they weren’t wrong in that regard. But, but this is – I was sort of like, weird, and, like I was nerdy, but I was still a tough little street kid too, so, I mean – if you asked my childhood friends now they would tell you what I was like, because I’d come home from school, I’d do my homework, I’d read a couple of books, and then I’d go out and hang around on the street corner, and steal these boys and make them kiss me, and, you know – and just get into all kinds of trouble, and, you know, start drinking beer at like twelve, and, you know. And it was –

PG: You have a lot of energy. I mean that’s a full day.

MO: It’s a really full day, I tell you. But I was as like, I was like, I don’t know – I was like sort of street kid/nerd if there is such a thing, you know. And, so, it was difficult because most of my brothers and sisters were younger than me, and I spent a lot of my time looking after them as well, because of difficulties at home. So I did that kind of side of things too: did the shopping for the family, made sure all the food was on the table, all of that kind of thing. So I had those responsibilities at home. I had these re –

PG: And how many kids?

MO: Seven. And I had these really great friends who were, like, they’re still my friends. We were together since we were like, ankle-high, you know. Wonderful people. So I always had them, they always supported me. My older brother – there was one point where, I think I was thirteen, and he went and punched one of my boyfriends because he said he was distracting me too much from my schoolwork. And, just like – just went up and punched him in the street. And, so then, I kneed him in the nuts, and said, “Look, how stupid do you think I am,” you know, “just because I’ve got a boyfriend doesn’t mean I’m not gonna do my shit, right? And now I don’t need you protecting me.” You know, it’s like – that’s when I realized what feminism was, you know. It’s like – it turns out you can knee blokes in the nuts, that’s brilliant! So he was constantly trying to – you know, make sure I didn’t fall off that path that I’d put myself on.

PG: But you couldn’t see it at the time, you just...

MO: Oh, I could see it clear as day. I knew he was being protective. But he was my older brother and he was being a dick, so, you know, what do you do? And, but he, but even he didn’t quite understand why I had to do what I had to do, and so, like, I’d be sitting in the kitchen writing an essay and frettin’ about it, and then I – my dad came in and go like, “why don’t you just not do it if it’s causing you that much stress, just don’t bother.” I’m like, “You haven’t a clue, have you?” You know, my parents were semi-literate as well, so they didn’t – they didn’t read. I mean my mum read Mills & Boon and I’m just like, “Jesus, that’s terrible, what do you read that shit for?” But –

PG: What did she read?

MO: Mills & Boon, you know those romance novel things, there’s always some hairy-chested medallion-wearing suave dude on a Mediterranean yacht that comes in and scoops this housewife away, that kind of story, you know. So I’m like, yeah, whatever floats your boat if that’s what you have to do to deal with all this shit fine by me. But I’d be like really, earnestly carrying on with stuff, and then at fourteen I decided to stop drinking because it was getting in the way, you know. Like ‘cos at fourteen that’s what you do. Well, like –

PG: I’ve had a hard life.

MO: I’ve had a hard life, my friend. And so – me and my friends were doing that weekend drinking thing and stuff and then I had to knuckle down and get on with some shit, but other than that no one in the family really kind of understood what was happening. Now when it came time for me to be doing my A-Levels, which are the equivalent of the final exams here in the U.S.

PG: To get into to university?

MO: To get into university, and I had an offer from Cambridge, which was an incredible thing on so many levels because if I went I’d be the first person from my school ever to go to either Oxford or Cambridge in its history. And you bear in mind what I was telling you about my principal and telling us we could be anything, it was a really big deal, and when I told people that this is what was going to happen, my dad stopped talking to me, he didn’t speak to me for six months.

PG: Why?

MO: Because I was supposed to only leave the house if I was on his arm, walking up the aisle and getting married, that was –

PG: Oh my god.

MO: That’s what was supposed to happen. And my mum threatened to kill herself if I left ‘cos she said that she couldn’t cope if I – ‘cos I did all the stuff at home in terms of looking after younger kids and all of that, managing household finances and things and she said, well – she had tried to kill herself a few times, this – it’s not like I could take it as an idle threat. And she’d been institutionalized a few times, so this wasn’t like some random threat, this was something that I understood very clearly as someone who’d patched her up after different attempts and my friends and my boyfriend at the time said you can’t let this happen. This is like – if you walk away from this, you know, you will absolutely never forgive yourself, and – so I went to my teachers, I went to the head teacher and said, “Look, this is what I’m facing.” And it’s quite funny, two of the nuns went marching down, marched into the house basically. In the Catholic community at that time, even though my mum was atheist, it’s still kind of, you know, scary when the nuns come. And they had the whole habits and everything. They looked like, you know, pretty fierce pterodactyl-ly type figures. So they swooped in and said, “Under no circumstances do you tell this child you’re going to do this. ‘Cos you know what? You’re not gonna kill yourself. You’re not. You know you’re not.” And they’re just like, “So, just let her live her life.” And, of course, my mom’s like, “Oh, yes sister, I think she misinterpreted me. I don’t think she understood what I was tryin’ to say.” And they’re like, “No, she understood what you were tryin’ to say.” And, you know, it turns out it was an idle threat, you know, there were lots of things wrapped up in it like obviously she didn’t think she’d be able to cope, and this was her only way of communicating that to me. But they basically said, “No way, bitch. This is not going to happen.” But it still didn’t make it easy to leave, you know.

PG: And so where did you go?

MO: Well, I went to Charleston first on that scholarship and then straight to Cambridge after that.

PG: What did you think your first day in Cambridge?

MO: Holy shit. That’s literally what I thought. Well, it was weird because I turned up and when I originally applied, I mean there was no internet at the time, so you couldn’t just do a search and find out what people thought of this place. I had no idea. I knew no one had ever been. Even set foot on the land of Cambridge you know, had no idea. So my – one of the teachers and I looked through the brochure and decided, “Ok, so where do you want to go?” Well, I don’t want a big college ‘cos I think they’ll be too intimidating for me. I love history so let’s find an old one. So we picked an old one that didn’t have – ‘cos the collegiate system in Cambridge like twenty nine colleges make up the university, but you live in a college, it’s a cultural thing. We didn’t know this. “So that picture looks nice, let’s pick that,” right? It was all male and I was going to be in the first year of women in four hundred years at this joint.

PG: What?!

MO: Yes. So I went from an all female –

PG: Those are some sweet odds, Mary!

MO: Oh –

PG: You didn’t have to pull the boys in to make out –

MO: Oh, don’t get me started, right? I didn’t have to pull them into the bushes anymore. But, it was – so I turned up. It was estab – you know how you were talking about everything starts with Henry VIII? Well, he established this college, right? He established this college. And, I get there, and I realize there are ten men for every woman. A lot of nerds. So, some of them are staying in their room the whole time, which is is fine. But, A. first year women in its history. B. it was the poshest college – even other Cambridge colleges mocked it for being posh.

PG: And which college was it?

MO: “Maudlin,” right? It’s spelled Magdalene, which I thought it was pronounced “Mag-da-lene” when I first got there and was pretty quickly corrected for my plebian, you know, lack of knowledge about the place. It was the poshest, it was full of these big, burly rugby players. I think in my first week I punched one of them and I kneed one of them in the bollocks. [‘Bollocks’ is British slang for testicles.] Because they came up, and, you know, tried to, thought that like, “oh, yeah, yeah, I could easily woo this woman,” and I was like “fuck off,” you know. So I got a bit of a reputation as a hard nut, which is hilarious because in Belfast I was like little quiet girl, you know, no one would have had me down as a hard nut. But to all these posh English guys I was like little boxer-scrapper woman, you know. It was funny.

PG: The street urchin from Northern Ireland.

MO: I was, I was like, I was like Rocky or something, you know what I mean, just turning up and all these people were – like you had to wear like a gown to dinner –

PG: What?

MO: Yeah, you couldn’t wear jeans to dine. Dinner was by candlelight. I mean it was like – it was Harry Potter. If you could imagine a dinner scene in Harry Potter that was my college. And it was the only college that still had dinner by candlelight. That’s how far back it was. But, the contrast between that and home was – I tell ya, it was – there is just –

PG: You must have thought you were on another planet.

MO: Now, I did. It was like – I was – that’s how I explain it to people because it wasn’t just like, it’s not even like going to a foreign country, it’s like on the moon, it’s like I have no idea about any of this. So I’ll give an example. You know this idea of how you have like fifty sets of cutlery at dinner time and you panic because no one’s taught you how to use them, right?

PG: That you start from the outside and move your way in?

MO: So it was bloody obvious to anyone sittin’ beside me that I didn’t know what was going on and, like some people who became a good friend of mine was sittin’ next to me a said, “Just work your way in.” And I’m like, “Oh, thank you,” because he made no big deal about it. And it was great. The funny thing was we got to the third course and – which was a sorbet and it was this tiny little dish and I was sittin’ thinking “It’s not much of a dessert, is it?” I mean Jesus, it’s like one tiny scoop of sorbet. Or “sorbit” as I called it at the time. And so I ate it and I’m thinking, “Okay, that’s it,” and so I said to this guy, “That was like a really crappy dessert.” And he’s like, “That’s not your dessert that’s a palate cleanser.” I’m like “What do you mean?” He’s like, “Well you’ve just had a fish course, now you’re clearing your palate for the meat course.” I’m like, “How many of these are there?” and he’s “Oh, there’s another five after that,” and I’m like, “Jesus Christ.” I had all the bread on the table because I thought all these portions are really small. So, I was just eating all the bread because I was hungry. I didn’t know there were all these courses to go through. So it was things like that that were just mystifying to me. And then once you’ve done them once, you’ve done them once, you never make the same mistake again. But I had moments of mortification like that all the way through.

PG: Give me a couple more. These are so fantastic.

MO: Just like words that people would say that – however well read I was my – you know that statistic that says if you’re a kid that grows up in poverty your vocabulary is like thousands of words short by the age of seven compared to someone who doesn’t grow up in that background. Even with my book eating I make stupid mistakes like pronounce words wrong because I’d never heard them said. I’d read them, but I’d never heard them said and so I’d turn up at like, so I was studying politics and I’d turn up at a supervision ‘cos at Cambridge you get one on one teaching, which is like, incredible. So it’s just you and this extraordinarily intelligent person. And I said things like “head-JEW-mony” for hegemony, just – I was pronouncing everything wrong and I didn’t realize until I was in a lecture and in the lecture someone would say it and I was just, “My god. Jesus Christ,” you know? I’m just shooting off all these signals that I don’t know jack. But the weird thing was – I keep saying – I realize I keep saying “the weird thing,” but it was fucking weird. But I got to the end of the first year and again, I had no idea where I was in the pecking order. I didn’t know what I was doing was any good. I didn’t know whether the leap I’d made was a leap too far there. I really was convinced that I was going to be kicked out. That I was gonna fail because it’s a really intense academic experience and I worked my butt off, right? I played sport, I did plays, I drank, I did all the stuff you’re supposed to do at university. All of it. And when there’s ten men for every woman, why not? But, I got to the exams in June and had a total meltdown. I’m like, “What am I doing here? I shouldn’t be here. I don’t belong here. Why’d I even think of coming here,” and one of my friends found me walking around the garden like talking to myself. Just going – this is like, okay – this is it, I’m a fraud. I’m a total fake. So kick me out now. Don’t even have to sit the exams. This is literally what I was doing. He he was shaking me going, “Will you catch yourself!” Like, “Jesus Christ,” you know, and I’m like, “You don’t understand, do you? You don’t -” and he’s just like – so he took me, got me a pint of Guinness, sat me down, and said “You’re gonna kick ass.” I still didn’t believe him. But I kicked ass. Like I got the highest mark in the university in Politics in my year, and I’m like, even my supervisor wrote to me and said “This is incredible.” And then the next year, I said, so does this mean I can like not have to be so intense? So I set up a dance company. I asked him how many essays I could get away with writing without being kicked out. Amazing how your mind changes.

PG: How few, you mean?

MO: Yeah, how many essays can I write and still get through the second year. ‘Cos I didn’t have exams at the end of the second year. And he said “Okay, so you know you won’t get the highest mark again, you know you won’t replicate that if you don’t do what you did,” and I said, “I’m okay with that. I want to set up a dance company.” And I did. And I thought when else am I going to have the chance to do this? And I got a bunch of people just wrote and choreographed and floundered about the place like an agent.

PG: Where’d, where did that come from, the desire to start up a dance company?

MO: Well all the drama I had done in school and the community work and I’d been in every musical known to man, like Oliver, The King and I, I’d been in all of them jumping about like a little squirt and I loved dance, you know, just always, and I – but no I want to choreograph, I just, sorry – wrote the production, auditioned people, you know, just did this whole thing based on Dante’s Inferno, corralled all my friends into doing things like selling tickets, and putting up posters, and, and just – and I was still doing plays as well, and I was doing a play with a couple of Old Etonians [Old Etonians are alumni of Eton, a prestigious boarding school where several British prime ministers and members of the royal family were educated], you know these really posh guys who (affects an exaggerated upper class English accent) “spoke like this and O’Hah-rah!” you know, called me by my second name [‘Second name’ is British English for last name] and everything. And, I said I’m going to live this experience, I am gonna have this full experience, and I’m really glad I did, because there was a bit of me that had this enormous chip on my shoulder about where I’d come from, I didn’t have the insouciance that these guys had, you know, they felt they belonged here. This was – their whole life was about being here. To me it was the most ridiculous thing that ever happened. And once I realized that I could hold my own academically, that I could do that, now I can relax, ‘cos I had a guy who came one day, who came – who weirdly with my friend Richard who had helped me with the cutlery situation, and we’re walking through the courtyard, and as if I wasn’t there, this guy turned to Richard and said, “So, I don’t really understand why she’s here.” As if I wasn’t standing there. And he said, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Well, it’s not like anyone from her family has been here, it’s not like her parents have been here, so I don’t understand why she’s here.” And Richard looked at him and he said, “’Cos she fucking earned it.” And then the two of us just wandered off and left him standing there. And six months later I find the same guy up a tree drunk off his head just like, I dunno, talking nonsense, and he fell out of the tree and, just at my feet, and I thought, this say it all. This is like, you know, “you dickhead.” But, of course, he would have gone on to make a load of money in the city.

PG: I’m sure, I’m sure. Is your dance company still around?

MO: Oh, god no, I only did it at uni. But it was great, it was great.

PG: So what was the focus of study at your college?

MO: Oh, all the colleges do all different subjects.

PG: Oh, ok.

MO: So, it’s a weird thing where you do – you’re part of a college but you’re also part of a faculty. So we had a mixture of medics, lawyers, classics, anthropology...

PG: You mean you studied all of those things.

MO: The entire spectrum was studied at the college, but different people were doing different subjects, so three of us were doing Politics. In my year, I think there were maybe twelve doing law, five or six doing medicine. Engineers...

PG: So you didn’t get your degree in journalism.

MO: No, I got my degree in Social and Political Science. And then after I went to work for The Guardian I actually worked for The Guardian on the commercial side of the company for a while, and the editorial side headhunted me from the commercial side. The editor asked me if I wanted to write for the paper instead of bringing money in for it, and they sent me to the University of Sheffield to do my journalism...exams.

PG: That’s fantastic. Were there moments when you were studying political history at Cambridge where they talked about Northern Ireland and you thought, well this isn’t exactly right?

MO: Yeah, well I still get that. I mean, I’ve had that in, like around people who are like really great journalists who don’t really get it.

PG: What are the common myths or misreported things?

MO: Well, one of the things are the things that don’t get reported, so people don’t know is that people still get shot and still get beaten, they don’t realize –

PG: Even though there’s a peace accord for –

MO: That’s right.

PG: Ten plus years.

MO: So, for, like coming up to twenty years there’s been a peace agreement, but you don’t eliminate those things overnight. The poverty is still, I mean, excruciating for a lot of people. The areas that are the poorest are the ones that have the worst of the troubles. They’re also the areas that were policed by the paramilitaries, so for a long time you wouldn’t call the police if something happened to you, you’d call the paramilitaries and that’s who sorted it out. So you still have those sectarian – and you’ll see them sometimes on the news when there’s riots or whatever. But that goes on – all year long there are incidents and difficulties, and that includes some people being shot, it includes attacks on the police force, etc. etc. So that kind of stuff still carries own. So people don’t necessarily know that because it doesn’t get reported in the national media. Loads of things I’ve had said to me along the lines of, well, “the IRA never hurt their own people.”

PG: Oh, even I know that’s bullshit.

MO: Right, but I’ve had perfectly educated intelligent people say that to me. And I’m like, “No. No no no no no. That is certainly not the case.” And, I mean, I could, I could, like repeat so many examples of where that happened in my life with people that I knew who were killed by the IRA and were part of the Catholic community, or who were attacked by the IRA, etc. I mean, it’s extraordinary to me that people don’t realize it, but I’m always having to remind myself that what I know, I can’t assume that other people even have an inkling of it. And, I’m always ready to help people learn a bit about it when they ask those questions. But I’m still – when it’s a – especially when it’s journalists who ask me, I’m like, “No, come on.” I mean you haven’t even got the excuse of going to a library to research it. I mean a couple of Google clicks and you’ll find out virtually anything that you need to know. And there’s no excuse for ignorance in this day and age, there just isn’t. And you can find this stuff out if you look, and you don’t have to look hard.

PG: Let’s talk about your emotional life. You know you grew up in this environment. You had the poverty, you had the violence around you, you had a mom who sounds not really emotionally equipped to deal with life, a dad who had a very certainly small view of womens’ place in the world. What are the issues that you struggle with? Are you able to get in touch with your feelings, you know? The reason I ask is when I meet people who are great thinkers, like yourself, people who are intellectual – Mary just made a face. I forgot I was complementing an Irish Catholic, I should know to never do that. The thing that they struggle with is being in touch with their emotional life because often issues just get processed intellectually and they bypass what one is feeling. Are you able to feel your feelings and describe them and process them and talk with other people about them?

MO: Yeah, I think, I think so, I mean, something happened actually here in LA last fall where I was at a movie. I was at a movie with my husband and it was – I can’t remember the name of it, the Brad Pitt one, where the Second World War where they’re in the tank, I can’t remember the name of it. And actually, I’ve never had a reaction like this, really, but I had to get up and run out of the cinema. Because the noises of the shooting brought something back that I had never thought about since, and I was hyperventilating, and had to run out and get some fresh air. I have never, ever, ever had that experience. There was something in the sound that those bullets were making that just triggered something.

PG: Was it a specific memory it triggered?

MO: No, it was a feeling. It was, just, unadulterated fear and panic and helplessness. And I know of, I know my memories and I know the things that happened and I – I mean I’ve written about them, so I know what it was like to be a child hiding underneath the sofa while people were shooting outside the house, you know, I stood in a kitchen while someone came and put a gun to my mother’s head and told her they’d blow it off, and I was eleven years old and standing and witnessing that. Now all of these things I know and all things things I’ve one way or another coped with and dealt with over the years, but something in that sound sent me some place I’ve never been, other than in some primal way at some point that I can’t even begin to deconstruct. But I was talking to one of my very close childhood friends recently. Actually her twenty year old son died a few months ago of a heroin overdose and she said to me, you know, she moved to Germany at the same time I moved to England because we both wanted to, you know, get out. And she said the reason I brought my kids up in a different country was to protect them from the stuff that we had to face, from that misery from the violence, from the poverty, and here I am with my twenty year old son dead. And she and I have the kind of relationship where, if we’re in the same room, we don’t even have to explain what we’re thinking and feeling. We have always had that connection. I’ve always had that connection with one of my younger sisters as well, where there is no need for words, and we’re Irish, we can talk, right? We have – we can fucking speak.

PG: What is it about the Irish and the love of language, both talking and writing –

MO: And the singing, and the writing, and – it is, and it’s the same – it’s musical as well. And there’s something weird, the more I’m away from the country the more I realize how lyrical in the way we speak is. And even the Northern Irish who sound kind of harsh and scary compared to the southern Irish we sound like we’re going to beat your bollocks in at any minute, but even then there’s a lyrical quality to it, but there’s just that weird connection where we talk all the time, not just as girls, but I used to talk with – I had a lot of male friends growing up, like a lot of male friends, and sometimes we’d just sit on walls and talk about everything that was happening: the pressures they were under, the family issues, about shitty schools, about whatever was going on. And we would just talk and connect. And we built an incredible strength from that, I mean, I am so eternally grateful for the people that I had in my life as a child and as a young adult because it absolutely created a foundation that we didn’t have in our wider society or in our families for a lot of us. We found that connection together and we’re still there for each other, and even over the years when we got the calls, the inevitable calls about who’s dead – ‘cos I’m forty five years of age, I tell ya, I’ve lost more through being shot or, you know, blown up or tortured than anyone wants to have in their life.

PG: How many people would you...?

MO: I couldn’t even count. But even, even just looking at the boys I grew up with, you know. In my immediate street at least ten of them were dead by the time we were thirty five. And that’s just in roughly the same street. And I remember them sitting on a wall and we all had dreams. So those of us that made it to feel like those of us that got through – there is an incredible strength in that and I can’t, I can’t even articulate it I suppose. If I needed to offload it on something around these issues or – I could just call Michelle and there’d be no need for anything to be explained. And that goes way, way deep. Way deep. But I think I find it hard to unpick the differences between the bits of it that were to do with the poverty and the bits of it that were to do with The Troubles. ‘Cos they’re interlinked. But there’s definitely a strain of it that is to do with your place in society and being told that you are not worth something. And the thing that I have, the greatest problem I have coming to terms with is when people say to me, “But look at what you’ve done. You’ve done all these things. Shouldn’t you just feel great about it?” And I’m like, “Well, I’m never going to be satisfied.” I mean I suppose any ambitious person is never satisfied otherwise what’s the point? But, I feel like I have to constantly proof myself to myself. Over and over and over again.

PG: What are the greatest hits of negative self talk?

MO: Oh god, I mean, I think it’s the classics, you know, there’s the classics that everyone goes through and I – I probably done them all, you know: “I’m worthless. Who am I to think I could do this?” You know, “I don’t belong here. Why would anyone love me?” You know, it’s all the classics. There’s nothing unusual about, I think, how I would deal with these things. I think everybody who’s ever felt insecure or out of place would have had exactly the same thoughts.

PG: Have there been any pieces of your childhood that you have really gotten to a, into a quiet kind of space and really felt and mourned with tears what either happened or hadn’t got to happen?

MO: Oh god yeah, loads and loads. But I think probably the thing that I carry the most is the people who didn’t make it. Absolutely. And I don’t just mean the people who ended up, you know, being shot or whatever. I mean the people who ended up drinking themselves to death, the people who were so emotionally wrecked from what happened to them that they just couldn’t find the strength wherever it might have come to get through. And I – all those lives destroyed, that I find very difficult to process because I just, I just feel it was such a waste. Such a waste of potential, such a – none of these young people deserved to have that life anymore than the kids anywhere in the world today living in misery deserved to have it happen to them. And I feel that loss all the time. I feel that loss.

PG: How do you feel your relationship with your parents and having to be a parent yourself to your siblings – how do you feel that’s affected you, if at all? I don’t know how it could not.

MO: Yeah, yeah. I don’t think that –

PG: And your mother’s instability.

MO: I don’t think that there’s anyway that it wouldn’t affect you. I like to say that I got lucky and I was without a maternal instinct, so I didn’t have to make one of those judgments about do I have children? Do I not? I just knew I didn’t want kids. I imagine if I was the sort of woman who that would have been even harder for me because I would have been constantly worried about whether I was repeating mistakes, whether I was capable of being a good mother, etc. I’ve never had to think about that. It’s just, you know, the culture tells you you are supposed to have these feelings, but I’ve not had them. But, I’ve got a lot of children in my life.

PG: Nieces and nephews.

MO: Yeah, gazillions of them and godchildren up the wazoo, you know, like everywhere, and they’re expensive. But, I’ve never had to think too hard about that. But, I in many ways also feel like I did my motherin’. I think one of the hardest things was leaving my youngest brother to go to university ‘cos he was only seven. And I knew I was leaving him in a very difficult place. And whilst I went back at the end of every term, I still knew – I still felt like I had let him down terribly. And, like I’d go home and he’d show me report cards and things because he wanted to show me what he was doing, but for a long time my parents didn’t even send him to school so he ended up not getting the education he was supposed to get and – that he has done what he has done with his life is incredible to me. It’s just, you know, he’s a caretaker in a college and he’s got two young kids, and his wife died suddenly a few months ago, and watching how he’s had to deal with that. So weirdly in the past few months I’ve found myself back in that role of taking care of them. As a grown man I’m back in that position, which I’m kind of grateful for in the sense that I can be there for him, I can do this, I can help him through this, but I felt terrible about leaving him behind.

PG: Talk about your mom’s suicide attempts and what you remember thinking or feeling and how you’ve come to terms with what you had to see and feel.

MO: It was – I used to get told that – my name at home was Maureen, not Mary, one of those weird twists of Irish families that –

PG: Morning?

MO: Maureen.

PG: Oh, “Moor-reen.”

MO: “Moor-reen,” as you guys would say, “Moor-reen!” And so people would say, “Oh Maureen will sort that out, she’s the smart one.” So the assumption was that because I was kind of intellectually driven and curious that that must mean I’m emotionally equipped to sort through the detritus of all of this, so it was sort of delegated to me. And I took that responsibility quite seriously in that, if there was a fight in the house, if there was violence in the house, if my mom was going off the rails, then I was the one designated to sort it out. It didn’t matter whether I was nine or nineteen. I was supposed to be the one sorting it out. I mean, that’s just wrong. You know, when you look back on it that is just plain wrong. A nine year old should not be bandaging up her mother’s wrists. I also knew enough to know she was cutting herself the wrong way. So I knew that if she’s done it in a different way it would have been fatal. So I was aware there were issues here that she didn’t want to go all the way. I’d often have to go around the house finding her stash of vodka bottles, so they were always in the toilet cistern. So, you know, again, classics, you know, if someone is an alcoholic – everyone hides their booze in the same place so, it’s like, you don’t have to be a genius to figure this stuff out. It’s under the towels, it’s in the cistern, it’s under the mattress. And so I’d go around collecting these things and throwing them out and then she’d go berserk, you know, ‘cos she couldn’t, you know – she’d go berserk. And my dad was teetotal. He hasn’t even tasted alcohol so he has no clue what it’s like to have the slightest high. He doesn’t know what, he doesn’t know what a buzz is. He hasn’t a clue. So for him alcohol is only a disease, is only like an evil. So how do you deal with these two living in the same house, you know, so he’d beat the living shit out of her. She’d have another drink. Blah, blah, blah. And you know what it’s like with these things, they’re cyclical. So, she’d end up being institutionalized, then she’d have a dry period, she’d be almost like a normal human being, and then off the rails again.

PG: I get the feeling as you talk about, you know, patching your mom’s arms up and all that stuff that, that it was set against the backdrop of such chaos and sadness and violence to begin with that it really couldn’t have been – the volume couldn’t have been that loud on it like it was just one of another, just another piece of chaos in the big pie.

MO: Yeah, I suppose you’d think that, except the idea of home as a sanctuary. The idea of home being the one place in a storm that if you go there you’ll be okay. So in many ways that was amplified. In many ways that was worse than things going on outside. Because for all the unpredictability of that, all the strangeness of it, all the danger, the one place I should have felt okay and secure there were all these other things happening. And – I mean fortunately for us because my dad didn’t drink, and he – whilst he had his own issues, violence being one of them, was there. We knew he’d be there when we got home from school. My mom would just vanish, for weeks sometimes. Like we wouldn’t have a clue where she was. You know, I’d just sit staring a the window at night waiting to see if she’d turn the corner. And if your mom goes missing in an environment like that, it’s scary, we just didn’t know where she was. But we knew that he’d be there. And we knew that social services weren’t taking us away as long as he was there, and that was something, which is why – why school was so important in my life. Because it was the stable place. It was my sanctuary. I didn’t have it at home. And I think, for friends –

PG: And it sounds like where you discovered yourself, where you discovered who you really are and that gave you a way to thrive.

MO: I was allowed to, and this was about you – what you want from life, and not what other people are asking for you, and not the random stuff that people are throwing in your way. So weirdly, the home stuff took on a greater significance in that environment I think, and you know what it’s like a teenager, right? You’re like all over the show. So, like rage against the machine or what when you’re fourteen, fifteen in that environment, you know. Just like, I mean, god and you hate your parents in a normal situation, you’re just like whoaaa!

PG: So what were some of the primary emotions you would feel when your mom would make an attempt or she would go missing?

MO: Well, you would take it personally wouldn’t you, because if your mother leaves you feel abandoned and –

PG: Would you be sad? Would you be angry? Would you be –

MO: Well, I would often go into management mode first because I saw my job as making sure the younger kids didn’t get frightened, and making sure that they felt sure that there was someone around making sure that they were gonna get dressed for school in the morning and that kind of stuff.

PG: So you didn’t really allow yourself to feel.

MO: I did on my own. But my first reaction was very much, okay I’m not the important thing here, these guys are.

PG: Paint a picture for me of when you did then have some time on your own process. Paint a picture of that for me.

MO: Well, I think, it’s just – and again some of it is not no different from what normal teenagers would experience, except it was less imagined, you know. But I think any young person that has lived in a house with a parent who’s an alcoholic or an addict or has mental health problems will understand those sorts of feelings and what you do with them, where you put them, like whatever the wider circumstances. And I don’t think it gets enough attention, you know, how kids and young people feel in those circumstances because you’re at the mercy of someone’s illness all the time and this is the person who’s supposed to take care of you. So you get angry as hell. You get, really, really, really like –

PG: So was that your primary emotion around these things?

MO: Yes, on a really gut level. You are furious, you know. But at the same time I felt deeply, deeply sorry for her because I knew that she was out of control and I knew that she didn’t choose to live that way, I mean who chooses to live that way?

PG: You could see that she was sick.

MO: Yeah, I could see that she was troubled, I could see that just her existence was extremely difficult and like, brothers and sisters and other people, I’d try to explain this to them and say we have to take care of her, we have to try and get her through it and I was just – they thought I was mad because I tried to understand her. They just, like, wrote her off entirely, and I couldn’t really do that but I’ve had to do it as an adult, you know. We haven’t spoken for ten years because it got to the point where I can’t fix you, I can’t deal with you. If you’ve never admitted to your problems, which she never has, then she’s never got the right kind of help because she refuses to believe she has a problem, then there’s a biddy that grows up eventually that goes I can either carry this with me for the rest of my existence or I cannot and I chose not to.

PG: Sounds like healthy, healthy decision with somebody that refuses to –

MO: Seek help in any way.

PG: Seek help – yeah, or even admit they have a problem.

MO: Yeah, it’s, it’s a real – you know, that takes some doing to go that many years and cause so much chaos and still not, like, face up to your demons as it were, you know, you know? You know, sometimes I wish I had like a video camera and just videoed her the whole time going “Now you tell me you don’t have a problem,” you know. But I think you just – I think as a, as a young adult and a young woman I find I still carried guilt, I still carried responsibility, ‘cos in my formative years that’s what everything was about and I, I literally reached a point where I have to make a mature decision here, you know, I’m a grown person, I have my own life to live and – and that’s okay. Turns out it’s okay. I can do that. Now would they call that disassociation, call it what you want.

PG: I don’t think so, I think that’s a healthy boundary.

MO: But – yeah. ‘Cos when I was younger I couldn’t do it, but now I’m, yeah.

PG: Better than the insanity of enabling that person and hoping their gonna change and then resenting them for not seeing the light.

MO: One of the interesting things is because in my working life I write about this issues. So I write about addictions and mental health and having witnessed so many things first hand it does give me a level of insight, but also because I spent so much of my time interviewing people with lived experience as well as experts. The whole spectrum of people and you know, if I can’t learn something from that shame on me, and one of the things that I’ve learned is that I have it within my power to do things for myself and it’s not an overly complicated thing, it’s just: I can do that, it’s all right. I’m not being a bad daughter or a neglectful person, you know, there’s just only so much you can do.

PG: Is it hard for you to ask for help when you need it?

MO: Oh, yeah. God, yeah. I’m terrible. I’m like really, really bad at it.

PG: When is the last time you remember asking for help and what was it about?

MO: Oh, god you know. I ask all the time for like small stuff.

PG: No, I’m talking about like –

MO: I don’t know it was probably, probably when my brother’s wife died. Because I just felt that I didn’t really know what I could do that was best for him, and so I turned to the one person who, if I do need help I always turn to and it’s one of my younger sisters, my sister Lisa. Who is like a dynamo on every level. She’s got five kids of her own, all of who are amazing and wonderful and cool. But she’s the person to who I can say “I can’t deal with this, I can’t do this.” Like my husband, we’ve been together fifteen years. He knows me pretty well and, but even then he has to tell me to just ask for help, you know. A little – you know, well he just says I’m stubborn. He’ll go, “You’re so stubborn, just ask,” you know, “what’s the worst that can happen?” And I’m like I know, but for me I have to be able to stand on my own two feet. I have to be independent. Everything is about self sufficiency. I have programmed myself that way through the years. I never want to be at the mercy of something I can’t control. I never want to be that way.

PG: Yet, all of us –

MO: Of course we are, logically –

PG: Are –

MO: Logically, we’re –

PG: You can’t get through life without having those moments.

MO: You can’t get through life without being shunted from pillar to post, so you can imagine I’m like a spinnin’ top when things happen, I’m like, okay, okay. But the other thing I do have – I am incredibly good in a crisis, weirdly, so any crisis, I’m your gal. I can step up. I go into a zone. I can sort shit out pretty quickly. The logical part of my brain will click in when everyone else is screaming.

PG: My – I have that same thing. Things slow down for me when, like when the earthquake happened twenty years ago, I was like immediately, okay, let’s secure food; let’s make sure that the gas is turned off; we have water; call the family back home; let them know we’re okay; where are we going to sleep tonight? One of the first things I said to my wife was, “We have that pasta primavera in the refrigerator. If we keep the door closed it will stay cold for a long time.”

MO: But that’s exactly – that’s exactly how my head works ‘cos I will be in any kind of crisis situation just – I’ll be the person going: “Okay, I’ll assume a leadership role automatically. I’ll delegate. I’ll – .” You know, that’s just – it’s just who I am and I – and it’s – I might have a breakdown two weeks later or something, but I’ll get your ass through the immediate problem.

PG: I did. I had a physical breakdown where my body, like two weeks later I had rashes and – oh, it was horrible, because I just held it all in.

MO: Yeah, yeah, I’ve had that, but – you know. In the moment, no problem.

PG: Sure! Our seed’s strong. Well, Mary thank you so much for coming. I just really had a great time talking to you and I know the listeners are going to love you and love hearing this. So thank you so much and thank you for what you do.

MO: Well, it’s been a pleasure and it’s been great talking to you. Well, talking to you the past six months on different things, and so thank you so much.

PG: Yeah, and if people want to get a hold of you or read any of your stuff – your book is called Austerity Bites.

MO: It’s out in paperback in the U.S. So it’s on Amazon and the var – you know, any of the online sites you’ll be able to get it, and there’s a website for the book: austeritybitesuk.com. And you can find out more about me and my work and links to the journalism, etc. all on that.

PG: Okay. Thanks, Mary.

MO: Thank you very much.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Before I take it out with some surveys I wanted to remind you guys there’s a couple of different ways to support this podcast if you feel so inclined. You can support us financially by going to our homepage. The website is mentalpod.com, and you can make a one-time PayPal donation there or become a recurring monthly donor, which is greatly, greatly appreciated. God bless those of you who are monthly donors. It really helps. You can also, if you’re going to shop at Amazon, do it through the search portal on our homepage and we’ll get a couple nickels from Amazon, doesn’t cost you anything. You can also support us non-financially by going to iTunes and writing something nice about us, or by spreading the word through social media about the podcast. All those things help and it really adds up.

Enough of my yakking, let’s get to the surveys. We’ve got a gigantic stack. I don’t think – I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get through all of these, but I found them all to be compelling for one reason or another, so let’s get into it. This is a Shame and Secrets survey filled out by – and by the way, Ivy is about ten feet from me and her breath smells like it is right in my face. That is – and I’m – got a little green tea, maybe that’ll...battle some of the stink.

This is a Shame and Secrets survey filled out by a woman who calls herself Ugly Little Girl, so you know she’s brimming with confidence. She’s straight, she’s in her thirties, raised in a slightly dysfunctional environment, never been sexually abused, been emotionally abused. She writes, “I was about twelve, came home from school and sat at the table. Talked to my stay at home dad about my day. We got into an argument about god knows what. My memories are hazy but I have an opinion. His opinion was different. He ridicules my opinion. Makes me feel small. Laughs at me. This makes me feel angry. So I start pushing his buttons and we go back and forth until he is furious. His face contorts and his mouth does that thing I will never forget. It’s some cross between a snarl and a sneer. Then he’s after me chasing me through the house. If he catches me he’ll hit so I run in my room, barely beating him to my door. My heart is pounding and I’m screaming, crying. I slam my bedroom door in his face and hit the lock just as he starts turning the handle. He’s shaking the door knob, threatening to beat down the door. Banging on the door, screaming at me. No way in hell am I opening that door. I run to the side of my bed, cowering beneath my desk – shaking, crying – so afraid the attacker is at my door and maybe today he’ll beat down the door and get me. I hate him. I hate my dad. It’s my fault. I hate myself. I’m a bad girl with a shitty backtalk mouth and I made him do this. I pushed him to this. Why didn’t I just keep my damn mouth shut? Why does he hate me? I hate me. I do this every single day for years. It stops when I’m fourteen or fifteen and I stop engaging him. I come home from school and go to my room and don’t come out until my mom comes home. There are lots of other stories where my dad should have been my protector and was not. I’m not sure if he was trying to toughen me up by letting me fight my own battles or if he just couldn’t ‘see’ me.”

Any positive experience with your abuser? “I love my dad and I know that he loves me. He was Mr. Mom in the eighties when that was still weird. He didn’t have the emotional tools to be a stay at home parent and I think he was battling his own mental health demons including depression. I later found out that he has self medicated with pot for most of his life. He was devoted to his family and to my mother. We lived in a rural part of the country and he supported my 4-H projects and took us caving and hiking, and to the lake, and to baseball practice. It was confusing that my worst nightmare, the attacker at the door jiggling the locked door knob was also supposed to be my protector.”

Darkest thoughts: “After I had a baby I got what must have been post-partum depression. I would fantasize about cutting us all to pieces with a kitchen knife. When my husband came home from work he’d find our bloody, dismembered bodies all over the house. Mercifully these thoughts would pass, but I was so shocked and appalled by those thoughts that I’d never tell. There must be thousands of women and children that are in danger everyday but no one will tell because of the potential consequences. The first time it happened after having my first child I called my husband at work and told him how overwhelmed I felt and that I was having scary thoughts. His only reaction was, ‘don’t hurt the baby.’ That’s when I knew I was to keep my crazy to myself.”

Darkest secrets: “I lost control with my kids several times when they were little. I spanked, not in that ‘it hurts me more than it hurts you’ way, but in the ‘it definitely hurts you more than it hurts me’ way. I could see stars and feel my ears ringing and I would smack their butts until my rage had passed. I never left bruises, and it was only on the butt, but I was so ashamed that I’d become exactly who I’d sworn I’d never be as a parent: my father. I’m so, so ashamed, and would give anything to go back to those moments and swoop my children away from that insane woman who is hurting and scaring them. This probably happened ten to twelve times over a six year period, but I would threaten to ‘give spankings’ daily. The last time I laid a hand on one my children was three years ago. My most challenging child was mouthing off for the thousandth time that day and I cuffed him upside the head. It actually wasn’t ‘in a moment of rage’ and was actually an afterthought that, unlike spankings past, wasn’t even meant to hurt him. But I caught him off guard and he lost his balance. As he turned to catch himself he tripped over his feet and smacked his head hard into a wooden door frame and he went down. I can see all of this in ultra slow motion. My heart stopped. He was quiet for a moment, then he screamed and cried – thank god he was conscious – and immediately developed a huge goose egg above his eye right at the hairline. I had never hurt any of my kids in this way. I knew butt spankings, which had for the most part ended years ago. I was almost exclusively a threatener at this point, but not life threatening. This felt completely different and was so horrifying and scary. I cried and apologized to him over and over, but I will never forget the look of hurt, fear and betrayal in his eyes. I was now completely my father. My thoughtless actions could have hurt or killed my child, and I could have easily been that monster you see on the news with the kid in the ICU with brain swelling. I could just read the comments section now: ‘who would hurt a child? I hope she gets raped in prison everyday.’ At least someone else would hate me as much as I hate myself. In the next few days I was terrified that someone would ask him about his very obvious injury. I told him to tell the truth that he hit his head on the door. I told him that he could tell the whole story if he wanted to, that he didn’t have to lie to anyone and I deserved any consequences that came of it. I don’t know who asked him what. I couldn’t bear to ask, but DCFS (Department of Children and Family Services) never came knocking. I told my husband the whole story. Watched the look of disgust cross his face. I guess I finally hurt the baby. As I said this was three years ago, and as of that day I have never laid a hand on any of my kids or threatened to spank or in any other way hurt them. They are all pre-teen and teens now and we have a peaceful home. I will never ever forgive myself for any of this, most especially my son’s head injury and I imagine they all will carry the scars I left for the rest of their lives. We’ve talked about these things as a family, and I’ve apologized so many times. If I’ve done one tiny thing better than my father it’s that. My father has never acknowledged his mistakes let alone apologized.

You know, as I read that I think that is so fantastic that you’ve apologized, and that you’ve recognized, and you need to forgive yourself. You need to forgive yourself. We’re all human. We all do things that we regret. And you sound like a really well meaning mom that was overwhelmed and wasn’t raised with the tools, you know. And I would imagine too, when if you’re